My Bipolar Rollercoaster

So I've finally made the classic Bipolar mistake...

 I went off my medications thinking I didn't need them anymore, but in reality I was just in an elevated/manic phase. 

 I've been seeing a new therapist who I really like and I'm going to see a new psychiatrist this week and have decided to get back on medication.

 The last time I sought out professional help, the decision wasn't entirely mine. The ultimatum was literally put to me to get help or get divorced and get out of the house, and I agreed. While my personal and domestic situation was definitely a factor this time, my decision to once again attempt professional help was entirely mine, and mine alone.

 After 2 psychiatrists, 3 therapists and one hospital stay, I've learned a lot about my moods and how they cycle, I've finally been able to categorize my moods and I'm hoping this will enable my psychiatrist and therapist to better treat me this time around by making my therapy sessions more productive and by giving me the right medications in the right doseages.
 

My Bipolar 1 mood swings follow a very specific cycle with four stages, which I've titled as follows.

1. DEPRESSED/LOW

  2. MANIC/ELEVATED

  3. MANIC/IRRITATED

              4.  RAPID (cycling of all three)

This represents a typical cycle for me. Each cycle lasts about several months, I typically go thru about 2 each year.

The first three stages take about several months to go thru. Then I go thru this "rapid" stage where I go thru the whole cycle in a week or even a day. Over and over again for several weeks until finally, utterly exhausted physically and mentally I enter a depression and start all over again. 

I've gone thru this ever since I was a teenager. I cannot control when they start or stop or how severe the different states manifest and how fast they change. Although drugs (illegal, legal, prescribed or not) mask, minimize, or lessen the severity and duration of the cycles, it never goes away and I suspect it never will. 

Here are some of the highlights of my various mood stages.   

Depressed/Low    

* Lasts several days to several weeks
* Suicidal thoughts and actions
* no sleep, no energy, no appetite
* Total avoidance of social situation, family and friends
* Panic attacts, anxiety, dread, paranoia, racing thoughts
* Completely unable to function, I'm constantly loosing jobs in this stage.

MANIC/ELEVATED 

* Lasts several weeks to several months
* "God Mode" I feel bulletproof, invincible
* Overly Spiritual
*Hypersexual
* The ADD-Like Symptoms: Completely overfocus on subjects or completely unfocused with racing thoughts, ideas and speech (motormouth)
* Seemingly limitless energy on hardly any sleep.

* My "creative periods"
* usually when I meet people and enter relationships
* Delusional/Irrational/Manic Behavior & Thoughts
 
     - Quitting my job to blog full time or write a book proposal believing I will become a famous writer.
 
     - Opening a credit card in my wife's name so I can take 
       phlebotomy classess I'll never finish. 
 
     - Missing important meetings at work and risking getting fired to go on mental health days, reading at the library or meditating in my car
 
      - selling all my musical equipment to buy tickets to a Roger   Waters concert that I can't afford anyways, then walking around downtown phoenix for 7 hours looking for the band so I can ask them for free tickets.
 
       - Those are just some of the ones that I'm comfortable 
         discussing here.

MANIC/IRRITATED

* Can last several weeks to several months
* Extreme Irritability
* Agumentative, unreasonable, ill-tempered
*decreasing, energy, focus and thinking
*The OCD-Like Symptoms: An almost phobic fear of loosing control causes me to seek comfort in predictability, order, routine, and I lose my shit when the routines are broken or when I feel I am not in control of my environment.    
* Paranoia

 - my bosses phone rings, it obviously must be someone calling to complain about me. I don't even want to be within earshot of the call, I gotta get outta here, I make up an excuse, hours later I'm online turning in resumes over a phone call and now afraid to go back to work

  - I send a message to my wife, she doesn't answer, is she mad at me? she must be mad at me? very mad. Maybe she's gonna throw me out? I get outta work and go pack. Maybe she's so mad she's gonna have me arrested on some bs charge, or worse maybe have me killed. I should leave work now. Go to my folks. No wait, that's the first place she'll look. Hour's later I left work on some bs excuse and am at a Kinkos and have spent all my money on computer time so I can anonymously google how to change my identity and fake my death. All because my wife wouldn't return a text message. Prob because she was in a meeting.

                     
                                  RAPID PHASE

 

* Signals the end of a stage
* can last up to several weeks
* I go all the previous stages in the course of a week, or even a day, then go thru it all over again, and again.  

*  Usually about the time I have a huge blow up at home.
* Utterly exhausted since by this time I've usually taken a huge amount of verbal abuse over my behavior. I'm left embarrassed, humiliated, guilt-ridden, powerless and hopeless.  I lapse into depression and the cycle starts again.

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I wanted to share this to educate people, who may be bi polar or may be living with someone who is bipolar.

 Sure everyone goes thru hi's and lo's, but in my case, they are absurdly high and earth shatteringly low. They are predictable and those around me who know me well can see them coming, but even still I cannot control them.   

 Being off medications, I at least feel happy in a manic elevated state but its extremely hard for those around me to keep up with me mentally and physically.  Through sheer willpower I can delay/postpone a mood but ultimately I will give in and I am unable to control the duration or severity of a particular mood swing. It's like playing Russian roulette. Eventually you will gamble and loose.  
 
 I'm optimistic about the new psychiatrist I'm going to see and I'm hopeful we can find a medication/medications that will help me and still allow me to live an active life where I can keep my job and be somewhat physically active and not some drugged up zombie, sitting at home watching tv, eating cereal, and sleeping 15 hours a day, and getting yelled at by my wife because she's out working all day and I'm not doing shit. 
 
That's not my idea of mental health and that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid in a medication this time around.



HERE IS A LINK TO AN ARTICLE ON ABOUT.COM THAT DISCUSSES HOW TO SPOT A MANIC EPISODE IN YOUR LOVED ONE.




 

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The Three Archetypes of Guitar Players

Carl Jung had 4 archetypes, or stages of life. Here they are summarized:

1. The  Athlete: the stage where we are preoccupied with how our body looks. This is the stage where we tell ourselveses, "'I am how good I look, how strong I am, how fast I can run, etc...

2. The Warrior: the stage where we seek to earn, accumulate and conquer the word. The stage where we ask, "what's in it for me?"

3. The Statesman:  the stage where we realize we are not what we accumulate and thus ask the question, "how can I serve others"

4. The Spirit:  The last stage where we ultimately realize that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and not human beings having a spiritual experience.

Jung said everybody goes thru these stages. Not everybody will spend the same amount of time on each stage. Not everybody will go thru each stage in the same order, and people can change back and forth between stages, but these stages are present as we go thru life. 

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I'm proposing my three archetypes of guitar playing: The Guitar Player, The Musician, and The Artist. 

THE GUITAR PLAYER

Guitar PLAYERS, are simply your everyday amateur guitar enthusiasts. Guitar Players for the most part rarely leave the safe confines of the bedroom, though emerging occasionally to jam with friends, play at Guitar Center or the occasional party, or college campus quad.

Every great artist or musician first starts off as a guitar player. Guitar players won't usually be found in bands, and by "band" I mean a band that has graduated from the bedroom, garage, party stage and is an actual working, gigging band .

Guitar Players come in many ages and many different levels of proficiency. Many guitar players strive to become "musicians" or artists, while some are content to remain guitar players their entire lives. 

THE MUSICIAN

 The Musician is a working guitar player. They may not be rock stars, the level of pay on the musician level can vary greatly but all musicians share the following points in common. 

* They play in public

* They're make a living or are trying to make a living playing

   music.

* They self-promote their projects 

 

The Musician varies from the street performer busking on Fisherman's Wharf, or the Las Vegas Strip, the shitty Van Halen cover band you saw playing in a casino last weekend or  any number of people probably on your Facebook friends list who is constantly, plugging, and self promoting shows, and self made albums. 

Some musicians have conquered their local or regional circuit and may have a small but loyal following that allows them to make a modest living, while some may be playing in dive bars for beer money,  some may be playing on the street corner literally trying to survive

While the Guitar Player may or may not ever want to perform publicly, the Musician NEEDS to be in front of people.

THE ARTIST

   While The Musician and The Artist can both play original music, what separates them is this:

The Artist unlike the musician is not motivated by money or fame in order to create.

   The Musician can become successful enough to where he no longer needs to create in order to pay the bills or reach a certain level of fame. Now he is an Artist and creates because he chooses to. Now he creates because there is something inside him he has to get out and whether it ever sells a single copy is irrelevant. 

 You don't have to be famous to be an artist either. It seems rare these days but some are born artists and become musicians from day 1 with no concern about money whatsoever and seek only to create for the sake of creating. 

 In the last few years I became frustrated over the fact that I was a guitar player "borderline" musician but was not an artist. As a kid I just sort of naturally expected that once I picked up the guitar and learned my first few chords that the floodgates would instantly open and original music and songs would just flow naturally and effortlessly. But they didn't and I beat myself up about that for a long time, and made myself feel bad because I had this stupid notion that it is MANDATORY that every guitarist MUST create original music.

But thats bullshit.

I'm a descent guitar player with the potential to be a good musician, but I am not an Artist. I don't create anything original, and frankly I don't really have a bold artistic vision that I need to share with the world.  But I've only in the last year that I finally accepted that, and believe that

 it's ok to JUST PLAY GUITAR.

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