Friday, December 16, 2011

Life full of mania with a dash of humor and a slice of normality (those are the secret ingredients) Vol 3 Issue 49

So last night I was hanging out with Dave Chappelle’s neighbor (name-dropperville, population me) and we started to get into my BMD. I’ve noticed that my friends are becoming more and more comfortable in talking to me about my mania and what have you. I think it’s really cool because I think it not only helps them understand BMD a little better but it’s good medicine for me (I admit it, I like talking about myself). So Dave’s neighbor and I got into how the mania affects me and I describe it like this:

“It’s like I go to bed fine and the next morning I wake up and it feels like I’m rolling my balls off on ecstasy, tripping my face off on acid, all while at the same time my mind races like I’ve done enough cocaine to physically and mentally impair a donkey. Yeah things can get interesting.”

One of the first things Dave’s neighbor said to me was he thought bipolar was when I’d go from happy to angry like a mood swing. I literally laughed out loud when he said this (and then kind of felt like a dick about laughing). The main reason I find this humorous is because I wished my BMD would simply take me from happy to angry, that all this could simply be described as a “mood swing”. Life would be a hell of a lot simpler that way.

When I was recovering from episode uno back in late 2008 I would spend countless nights searching for answers. At this point I had spent the previous 8 months in a drug induced zombie state of depression and was now looking for help. I would sit up at night surf the world wide web searching for some sort of reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that someone out there understood what I was going through. What I had experienced during my manic episode was far from a “mood swing” but yet that’s the only thing I read about when others described BMD.

I get it too. I understand that the symptoms of my mania do resemble “mood swings”. I know that the chemicals in the brain (like serotonin and dopamine) that affect moods and even swings in those moods are also the same chemicals that directly affect my BMD peeps. I even saw a special on the Science channel (nerd alert, nerd alert) that described how the areas of the brain that are active during my manic episodes directly correlate to mood and the like. So I more than get why the comparisons are made between mood swings and BMD, but it doesn’t mean I agree with it.

During the nights of searching online it almost at times would have a negative effect on me. Instead of finding the comfort of knowing I wasn’t alone in my madness I actually began to feel more isolated. See what I went through was far from a mood swing, everyone has mood swings (my ex seemed to have them more than others) but I was psychotic not angry. I just think we can do better than the description “mood swings” for BMD because it’s really not accurate (at least for me).

Look a kite is pretty cool and those Chinese really got one right on this one (not so much so with Communism though). They use aeronautical engineering to create lift under the kite so that it can fly. Hell they’ve even figured it out so much that you can navigate these wings in flight and have them dance in the air. It’s pretty cool how the same principles used with a kite match out with modern day flight, those physics haven’t changed. But to me it’s similar to comparing my BMD to mood swings; just because a kite can fly doesn’t mean I call it a jet.

Since many of my manic experiences involve music I’ve decided to add random music videos to the blog for my enjoyment and your inconvenience. Enjoy!



Coming Correct,
d01roK

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