Mental Health Mondays: Letter to My Bipolar

Photo by Needpix

 

To my Bipolar, (also known as Manic Depression);

I HATE you!!!

Actually, that's not true:

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE being MANIC!!!

It's a high: I feel like I can do ANYTHING!!!

It's like being the Tasmanian Devil.  I'm running in circles and I'm bouncing off walls.  My mind is racing, I'm talking at top speed and am even more comprehendible than normal.

BUT...

Isaac Newton said that "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." He also said, "What goes up must come down."

For me, depression is much worse and occurs much more often than mania.  I think a lot of this is due to how Cerebral Palsy effects my body.  It zaps my energy and exhausts me.  Most of my life is lived in slow motion and it feels like I'm constantly chasing after something that I will never, never be able to catch.

In addition to depression, I also struggle with other emotions and have emotional outbursts;

This leads to shame and guilt;

Which leads to hearing my inner voices;

Leading to self-harm;

Leading, leading, leading down the rabbit hole.

Until SMACK

You hit rock bottom and once you climb back out of the rabbit hole...

The cycle starts all over again.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE

LEAVE ME ALONE!!!

Mental Health Mondays - Self Harms

 

*Disclaimer-I am NOT talking about suicide here.- Disclaimer*

Self-harm is a hard subject to talk about.  People naturally think; Why would anyone  to hurt themselves.  I think it may be easier to accept a person taking their own life than to know someone who physically hurt themselves.

All I can do is speak for myself.  

For me it wasn't really about physically hurting myself, it was more of a psychological release.   I get all these pent up negative that keep building up in side of me.  I didn't want to physically hurt others, so hurting myself was the only logical solution.

I think it started out with the biting..  It was the easiest thing to do when I was little.  I never bit myself hard enough to cause pain,  It a cry out of frustration.  Biting myself was easy.  The a close proximity of my arm to my mouth allowed me to bite myself, often without anyone even noticing. 

Hitting myself was, is, a 2 ply reaction.  The is the natural, in the moment, state of hitting the side of the head with close fists.  This wast more obvious and was used when I wanted people to see my frustrations.

Then there was the there was the head banging.  I would literally bang my head against the wall.  I  mostly did this one in private. I believed, and I wish I could say this belief was only when I was little, that if brain damage caused the CP and all its problem , then maybe it I caused more brain damage would reverse it...(Yeah, didn't think one out clearly.).

My latest vice is pulling my hair out.  This goes from simply my hair gently pulling my hair one strand at a time to ripping out fistfuls of hair.  .  This too can be done in a minuscule way so no one knows you doing it.  If I keep my hair put up, I'm less likely to pull it

So, that's the ugly, uglier and ugliest of self harm.