Mental Floss

It was three years ago today that my world truly changed. Around the beginning of January of 2005, I had gone through some very unusual periods of moodiness; things that were way beyond anything I’d ever experienced, or at least never really noticed before if they had been there. I went from being the jovial, helpful call center employee people were used to falling apart so badly in the middle of a phone call that I had to go home, and then started going through extremely short-lived periods of crippling depression, followed by intense rage or massive giddiness and spending. I went through the company’s Employee Assistance Program, had gone to a counselor, and got referred to a psychiatrist somewhere in Marietta, and I set up an appointment.
The days leading up to that appointment are a blur, but I do remember getting in the car and going down to Marietta, which was a rather lengthy drive. I went in, got put through the usual array of probing questions and tests, and at the end of the whole ordeal, I received the diagnosis that would change my life: I was bipolar. At that moment, I wasn’t sure what to think. All I had heard were the stories from the news about bipolar people doing crazy things, and I was overwhelmed with a sense of panic at the thought of the daunting medication instructions being laid out in front of me. At the same time, it made sense, given the recent events, so knowing it wasn’t just simply losing my marbles was a relief. Either way, it did change my life in so many ways.
I struggled with several unsuccessful medication trials, each one bringing with it a new round of putrid side effects, usually knocking me flat on my ass was among them, yet the emotional turmoil failed to end. Things got so bad that I wound up hospitalized three times in that year, luckily in one of the better possible facilities near my apartment. I was in for eleven days surrounding Memorial Day, then eight days surrounding Independence Day and my 24th Birthday, and then my roughest one of all was being in for eleven days around Labor Day after I had gone through a rough period of self-mutilation.
Even since then, it’s not been an easy ride for me. There’ve been many a time I’ve wanted to give up and not have to deal with it anymore, and just die. I’ve just been very fortunate in the respect that I’ve managed to stumble upon some truly awesome friends over the course of the past couple years of my disability. I owe a lot to all of you, I really do. To the people I’ve known in real life, to the Loathers and AE players, THANK YOU. ALL OF YOU. You’ve all made a difference in some way, and I hope even if all I’ve done is made you laugh or smile once or twice, that I’ve made a difference in your lives as well. There’s just too many of you to name in one place, but know that I do appreciate your being my friend and putting up with my weirdness, even if I don’t say it enough.
I’ve survived three years with something many have succumbed to in less time. Part of it is through my being a stubborn old bat, but I owe at least part of it to those who have been by my side for part of, or all of, it. I wouldn’t be here today without you!
And so today, I raise a glass not only in honour of those who’ve lost the fight with the demons of the disorder, but also in honour of those who have been there for me, or for anyone else with bipolar disorder. Our friends are few and far between, and we need to thank you all somehow.

<3

Note: The following is a bit of a venting exercise for me while attempting to write a real complain to Greyhound about my hellacious trip South. It was easier if I wrote what I REALLY wanted to say, then made a somewhat professional-sounding letter later. The following is the…shall we say “raw” footage? This is posted for sheer amusement value and not actually being sent to Greyhound.

To: Greyhound Cattle Carting Lines, Inc. Dallas, Texas
Attn: Who am I kidding? This is going to wind up as someone in your office’s toilet paper!
From: Someone Who Was Stupid Enough To Pay You for a Trip to Tennessee

To Whom It May Concern: (Though I doubt any of you are actually going to read this, much less be concerned.)

I am ripping you a new asshole writing you this letter because I am both simultaneously appalled and amazed by your gross stupidity incompetence in handling the volume of holiday travelers this year. (And also somehow reminded of a previous Greyhound trip where the bus blew a tire in Bristol and we were stranded for several hours while someone brought a new one. Ever hear of a SPARE? I see that you now have spares in your buses…did someone hit you with the clue bat finally?)

To say you are idiots would be an insult to idiots everywhere. You are notorious for overselling your routes, and given your handling of all of the Southbound passengers at Port Authority, signs indicated you knew you had a rather large demand on your hands. Why else would you simply line everyone heading south up and count them off by the busload onto a fleet of waiting and constantly arriving empty buses? By my reckoning, you had to have had at least 10 buses heading to Richmond without passengers discharging along the way. 10 full buses times 50+ people = at least 500 descending on Richmond from NY simultaneously. That doesn’t include anyone from any other points of origin, nor does it include anyone who has arrived earlier and not been able to be crammed into an outbound bus. BASIC MATH SKILLS. BASIC LAWS OF PHYSICS. What goes in, must come out. If you knew enough to run that many buses into Richmond, COMMON SENSE would’ve told you to have enough buses coming out of Richmond as well, plus allowing enough staff and crowd control to maintain some semblance of order.

Obviously, you folks were absent the day the Common Sense Fairy came around. By my reckoning, there appeared to be no less than 1,500 people and possibly double that crammed into that building. There was no semblance of order to the chaos whatsoever, lines stretched from one end of the building to the other, and Greyhound staff was nowhere to be found. Somehow I don’t think the Fire Department would be too happy to see that kind of crowd in that building for starters, and haven’t you people ever heard of crowd control? For starters, nobody knew what the hell line they were standing in. There were no barriers, no staff members to handle the confusion, only a gaggle of confused and thoroughly pissed off passengers. Somehow, what was described as a 1:05 layover on my ticket turned into 3+ hours of discomfort and chaos. Once we managed to find our respective lines, we began the tedious process of figuring out where the hell the END of the line was and staking out our spots to rot on the hard floor for THREE hours. Then the fun began.

Some cavalier individuals took it upon themselves to attempt to make their way to the front of the line, despite the fact that most of us had been there for hours already. People started screaming, yelling, and getting ugly for lack of a better word. Several of us were threatened by these line jumpers. Somehow I seemed a pushover to some vertically challenged little douche bag bitch. Granted, I clearly had about a foot and a hundred pounds or more on this little bigmouth, but she saw fit to get up into my face, or as close to it as she could come, and threaten physical violence against me. As much as I would’ve loved to snap her in half or toss her in a pot like the little shrimp that she was, I wasn’t about to get involved in something in a city where I didn’t go to school with half of the police force or have a valid PBA card. I laughed in her face at the time, yet this severely bothered me. I am a diagnosed bi-polar who is prone enough to paranoid features and panic attacks, and did not need any sort of emotional mindfuck from trying to go visit my mother for Christmas.

And where was security or the police during all of this? They were clearly more concerned with investigating the contents of their colons, seeing as they disappeared the general vicinity the bathrooms, never to return.

Needless to say, you win the award for Piss Poor Prior Planning. You have thoroughly pissed me off to the point I refused to use my return trip ticket and suffer the same fate. I far preferred to waste even more money to rent a car and drive myself back than to suffer the paranoia and emotional trauma from that debacle again. By all that’s holy, we should all be suing your asses for gross negligence. And you’d best be offering me a refund on the unused portion of my ticket at the very least, otherwise you will be hearing from an attorney to the tune of the cost of the entire ticket, the cost of the rental car plus gas and tolls, legal fees, and damages for the shrink bills it’s going to take to forget that experience.

The words “You Suck” don’t even BEGIN to cover the contempt I feel for you assholes right now. I think I’ll hand my dollars to Amtrak next time I need to travel.

Thanks for fucking me up even more. Even the airlines have more common sense than you folks.

I’d love to thank you all for the rash of offers you’ve spammed into my blog comment moderation queue since the inception of this blog, however I do not require any services regarding a mortgage, seeing as I live in an apartment, nor do I have any interest in any car loans, seeing as my credit is a negative number and I don’t even make enough to pay my bills. While I do need medication, I do not need your pathetic “discounts”, especially since some of the meds I take are probably controlled substances, which means they can’t be shipped, and I especially have no interest whatsoever in Viagra, seeing as I’m #1: female and #2: I have a rather healthy sex life, thanks to my manias. I also have no interest whatsoever in online poker, since the only card game I care for lately is Egyptian Rat Screw.
And a special thanks to the asstards among you who have the balls to write bullshit comments like “nice blog i really like it”. Number one, you couldn’t give less of a damn about my blog. You just want to spread your worthless ads in any way possible. Your lack of punctuation and capitalization is blaringly obvious, and further shows that you don’t care. As if you’re going to sweet talk me into allowing your comments through because you feign interest in my blog, which I sincerely doubt that any of you wankers even read. You must waste an awful lot of time on this, especially since I’ve got all of my comments moderated, and I require registration before posting. By the way, I have your IP addresses. You have been warned. Cease and desist, or your ISP will be hearing from me. And don’t worry if they don’t speak English, because I probably speak their language.

I feel like hell. There’s no other good way to describe how I’m feeling right now other than that. I just feel like curling up into a teary-eyed ball and staying there until this subsides. I keep crying for no good reason other than I feel like it, and I just want to toss all of my pills into the lake and be done with it. I hurt all over. My breasts hurt, my back hurts, my teeth hurt, my soul hurts. I feel so completely empty inside. I know I need help but I have no way to get it. I could sit here in the dark forever waiting for my white knight to come rescue me and know it’ll never happen.

Every day I wake up seems to be another day that I must fight the war for my sanity, and it’s definitely not an easy battle. I feel like a tightrope walker, balancing precariously between sanity and the abyss, wondering what will happen if I ever cross that line again. I still have the wonderful scars that serve as reminders of the last times I went over the edge, and I’m sure everyone else takes a look at them and wonders what cat I had an argument with. If only they knew.

Okay, so I haven’t updated in quite a while again, but there’s been a LOT going on. We moved from Georgia to Pennsylvania, and lots of crud has happened between now and then. Needless to say, computer access has been spotty at best, but I’ll catch up eventually. Not like many people actually read this, but I can dream, no?

Ugh…I am just so manic right now. I’ve been going back and forth between several IMs and chatrooms and forums, flitting around, chatting my brains out, mainly because my “diarrhea of the mouth” would annoy the piss out of Joe. He’s tired and wants to go to bed, but I feel like I could run the freakin’ marathon right now. I’m not really full-blown manic (yet), more of a hypomanic state. I’m not out spending money and bouncing around like a fiend like I was the other day. Between this and the panic attack, I’m starting to wonder if this is still a lag from the p-doc messing with my dosage of Lexapro, or if this stuff really isn’t working as well as I thought it was. If that’s the case, I’m really screwed, because there isn’t much left in the way of medications left to try. Anything that requires a blood draw is completely out of the question - I am SO not a pin cushion!

Yes, world. I gave in and got a REAL blog. No more stupid LiveJournal for me! (Okay, so I’m still keeping my LJ, but you see how often I actually UPDATE it…) Anyways, if you’ve found this for the first time, Welcome! and if you’ve read this before and for some odd reason decided to come back, Welcome Back! I can’t promise much from this blog, but at least for now it’s a new toy, and I’ll probably play with it a bit too much. If it’s broken, let me know. Not that I know how to fix this thing yet…