by turnaround » Wed Jul 29, 2015 12:00 am
My job drives my moods upwards (irritable, angry, stressy, culminating in euphoria for a very few days) and then into a tailspin (deep paranoia, exhaustion, enormous delusions of guilt, followed by suicidal depression). That lasts 6-8 weeks before I return to normality and have a sense of having being "purified" and reborn by having come through an episode. Crazy interpretation, isn't it? Then I go back to work.
The Nazis perverted the phrase "Work makes you free". This is such a shame because work really does make us free. Materially, socially and psychologically, work enriches us enormously. I struggle through my working life because it is doing me good to be there. I may live with high anxiety and stress and my moods are going to be swinging like a drunken pendulum anyway so I may as well get paid while I'm doing it. Besides, I'm too stubborn to accept that I'm working in the wrong department. I will leave one day but on my own terms and nobody - and nothing - else's.
I've noticed a change in my mental outlook recently too that I hope will be of some use. I'm consciously taking a step back during busy days and saying "This is the way things are. Not bad, not good, things just are how they are". It's only a half joke when I tell people that I am working on my Zen. This is what is commonly called mindfulness - trying to stay awake to a single moment I find myself in and not being distracted by events a minute or an hour in the future or the past. Distractibility is a sign of elevated or falling mood with me (and very possibly a depakote side-effect). So if I can cultivate mindfulness, I'd like to think I can make my workload more bearable and my career more successful.
CJ
Meds: Depakote, quetiapine
Diagnosis: Bipolar II
"Fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy night"