Blindly keep going

I was supposed to be married by now and all I am is ill.

At some point I became aware that not only my shoe size is quite unique. I mean, my feet are huge and massive just enough for me to take ages to find the right shoes and I can cry all over the shoes I will never get to wear due to it. It is just so freakin' impossible to put someone in my shoes.

It's hard to notice when you become manic. You can notice it in the middle of everything, if you know this weird thing happens to you at all.

You are just living the dream. It's your time. You feel like you are in control of everything. See, that's the thing. Your mania is in control of you and it replaces your conscious mind imprinting into your brain the belief that you are in control. Honestly, at that time everything is about you, even if you don't notice it. Everything else disappears from the picture, everyone else does. Things that matter to you most of the time do not matter. Things that you would be against at all times when sane, suddenly feel like amazing ideas to try.

After each of the episodes you sit down broken somewhere inside, after fucking up something new in yourself, in your surroundings. It can be your views but it can also be your relationships. And I was supposed to be married by now.

Only this week had I realised some of the mess around me this summer, causing the most painful break up ever, was partly manic. At that time I had no way at all to know it was manic. I swear I believed the first time I became manic was at the very end of the summer, all that partying, staying up late, searching for one night stands which I thought I would never do and which I dislike. I could solemnly swear.

But I opened a random page of my calendar this week and it triggered something inside, making me rethink my year.

April 3. Got engaged.

Those were the times. I had a band, I had so many plans, I was ready to move to my beloved city and study. I was ready to create the union between two people so strong you don't see every day and grow together. And all I have today is dealing, still dealing with the hardest of the years I've ever had in my entire life, trying not to fail my studies, moods changing whenever they want to and to whatever they want. I've got pain clouding the things I still have. I study what I've always wanted and I live where I always wanted to. But sometimes the pain and the tiredness of going through everything all over and over again just takes the fucking top and you crash. 

And I am supposed to be studying now, this very moment, but there's something around me tying my fingers to the keyboard as if I could not do anything else before I finish this. Partly, because I don't even feel awake. My moods are awake. My brain seems to be utterly dead, there's a void I cannot pass through and thus I cannot study. I take it to be a hard stage of getting up and hoping I get to the point where I study today later on, 'cause, honestly, I have shitloads to do.

You know, I still miss those people. The ones that were with me till me middle of the summer. I know how tired they became. I became tired of me, I am pretty sure I get the feeling. At some point they told me it's all okay, they are with me not only because I need them but because they are my friends. And then slowly all of it has disappeared. These days people keep asking me whether I grieve leaving Vilnius. And honestly - I don't. That is the last thing I grieve. I always answer so. and that is so because above everything else what I've got in Vilnius and what will always stay there is the greviance against the connections I've lost. I've lost the lights of my life and I don't know how to take them back, I've tried so hard and it has failed so many times. And then the last one of the lights had disappeared from the picture this Autumn, I felt somewhat relieved. I was heartbroken. I was torn apart. But I was half glad. It reminded me, that here you go, it's over. It was over so long ago yet you naively failed to see that truth. 

It made me realize I need to cut those non existing ties. With all those people. With the entire fucking community of them, and believe me - that is amazingly difficult to understand. I've never seen so many amazing and inspiring people in one place. All revolving around the band which was supposed not to recover ever again and I am glad they did but it also pointed out to me that I will never be a part of it again.

And so I cut it and I try to keep that promise to myself. But I remember sometimes and it hurts as hell, the fire of hell biting the whole body of mine.  

I think I'm crashing down. Why, they ask, what's the reason, what makes you sad. Well, everything does. But that's not the point. You see, to bipolar, or at least to me, it comes in an opposite order. I firstly crash and only then, triggered by the mood, thoughts come.

I'd say it's 'cause the week was tough but it was relatively easy. I even managed to go to most of my lectures and that is an achievement already. And the word achievement is quite an understatement in itself. It is like managing to win the race against the death in the labyrinth of Minos. 

I swear I thought that Thursday eve I just wanted to go out. To socialize a bit. It was few weeks since I quit drinking and thus I promised myself one drink. And while most of us know that one drink concept almost never works out I was taking it very seriously. Which is where I should have caught myself but I didn't.

The depression is always clear. If you feel down, then you're depressed, congratulations. It is technically even easier to deal with. You have things prepared beforehand. You have steps listed. Trying to get up at the same time. Going to the lectures even if you don't feel like it. Doing some sports. Watching funny videos.

Now when the mania comes it's all fucked. It does not come in a clear order to me. I'm a rapid cycling bipolar. Everything is a mess. I might feel depressed one moment and think the phase is coming. Okay, it's coming, I need to prepare. For example, I need to go out, not to be alone and meet someone. And thus I went out to socialize. But it was manic, and it took me way too long to get it.

Being manic it's like being the black ball in billiards. Yeah, it's solid, like half other solid coloured balls in game. But if you hit it first, it does not matter, as long as there were other balls available. It's different. It imprints false beliefs in your mind. It imprints false happiness. 

It makes it hard to force yourself to go to sleep. You might even be tired at times. But you still feel like there is so much to do, so much to finish. So many things you can finally score at. If you are at home and you have a ms word file open in front of you, you can write short stories. God, I can finally get why bipolar people so often quit their drugs and slide into mania. It certainly boosts creativity. It certainly helps out when you are stuck. You can write or draw or whatever you do as if the inspiration had never ran away, not even once, not for a second.

But if you are out, all the opportunities are open. All the drugs for a person who would "never do". Who has to wake up next morning - if he or she went to sleep at all, and realize that they did the drugs they would still never do. That they didn't want to. That their conscious mind was locked somewhere. It wasn't consensual. It was rape.

They can wake up after foreplay or a one timer with another person and realize that is not what they do. That is not how they want to be perceived. It keeps destroying the image of a fluent human being they once used to be.

But at the time everything is so vivid. You are so focused, so concentrated. You are the person everybody wants to be around. You are cool. You are the party man. You are the girl kissing random people. It's a Hollywood movie with partying scenes. You are the artist in the group of party-ers. At that moment you are the elite. All the wounds inside you go away. Probably, cause the whole inside of you goes away, too. It's a void, it's an empty place. It's a sheet of paper falsely pretending that at any moment you are starting anew. And it's a lie, which you can only process when the hypes go away. And the higher you go, the longer it takes. And the higher you fly, the lower you crash. 

And, the crash being painful by itself, remembering all the pains in your life, you have something new you've fucked up for yourself after each episode. I just cannot stop thinking, if only I had realized I was manic this summer... I could still be there, in the realm of actually living most of my dreams and going through my illness less alone than I feel now. I could have screwed up way less. I could have lost way less. I know it's not something you can get a refund or a replacement for. I know there's no butterfly effect on this Earth that could help me. I know nothing is to change now, there is no force on this Earth that could make this happen. But I crash and I keep overwinding the same. I even have new things open to me. But I keep overwinding the same in my mind, the things I will never get closure for. And that's why it's so bothering. I wish I could have realized it at least a week earlier, a month earlier, few months earlier. So it would not go so hard on me now. But it ain't happening either.

let me go
let me go
let me fucking go
you fucking illness

What is happening though is constant adjustment of medication, increasing dosages. What's happening is mood swings, making me decide to take a year off while my bipolar stabilizes and then contradicting myself. What is happening is me typing this half crying when I was so cheerful two days ago. 

You have these things, you have these moods and in between, when everything is mixed. You stop even trying to discern which is you and which is your illness. You give up at some point, at least for a while. You know it happens to you, and that's it. You find it too hard to explain to your roommates how hard can it be for you to wash dishes. You wish they would understand. You would give up a lot for that. You wish you had money to live alone or have your room, every second, more than before, realizing you are in some way "special", negatively speaking. Realizing you have special needs of yours, and all the pressure and inability to run away to your room and slam the door when you need to is just additional stress. And there is no illness on this earth which that additional stress would impact positively.

Sometimes it is too difficult to wash dishes. Sometimes you go out and party the hell outta yourself. And that's exactly why they won't understand. Because look, you can go out and party, now wash your fucking dishes. But it had passed away, every passing phase is like going through another funeral, and everything is terrible with or without a reason and all they care about is washing your dishes. And you want to cry. You want to be left alone. So you somehow manage to wash your dishes half crying. You try not to break completely, 'cause you don't live alone and you cannot let yourself such a luxury. But it does indeed happen from time to time that you even give up on that and put your pillow above your head and fall asleep crying, 'cause there's no out.

And sometimes you just want out. You want out of everything. On other times you want to go out. You cannot say no to things. Everything is attractive. Everything is open to you. All these new experiences. All these vivid places. Nothing is a thing, no one is a person, everything is just a live vivid picture of impressions. The world is made up of impressions, you are not sure where the wall of the building ends and another begins, and why the heck would you even know that at all. That wall probably does not end at all, everything is one and, well, that one is you. If only one could realize that  at the time, that it's not about everything, it is just about them. They are at the center. But you are so present this moment it blows you away. You are so present nothing exists, not even your own beliefs as to where things stand. 

After the party ends, you are left alone to face what you did this time. evaluating how wrong it was and thinking of how not to do it again. And that's the biggest issue of all with mania. There are'nt many steps to take. It becomes relatively easier if you notice it coming at the right moment, before it takes over you. Then what you do is you do not encourage it. You try to still go to sleep. Not to go out a lot. Not to overwork yourself. But if you fail at that step, there's no going back. You go out, you do things, you are manic, and you acting on it triggers that mania to become a higher one and so on. It's an endless river, something going in circles till you crash. 

I was supposed to be married by now but all I am is ill.

Well, not all I am. But sometimes it seems so. Sometimes there's not much more to grab onto. So you hold on to your illness. That is why it's so hard to distinguish which is you. Technically it comes and goes away and you have mixed phases. But at some point, in some way, it is ever so present. You can spend hours over-explaining to yourself every step you do blaming it to your illness. There are no borders. You know you are half right but you know you are half wrong also. You know, that that you still exists somewhere, it still takes over the illness at points. It reaches the surface of water every now and then. It inspires yourself and it inspires others. You know, that somewhere deep inside the ocean,  becoming paler and paler, slowly drowning, there is that you which used to be present before, all of the time. But then you realize how long has it taken for the illness to develop. And then you don't know anymore. Even those awesome teenage years where you were living the dream. Where everything was so stunning. You don't know anymore if it really was you. You don't know anymore whether something is what it claims to be at all. It leaves you doubting everything, doubting reality as philosophers do. It's just that in philosophy one can know where does he or she stand, and where do their minds. And I do not, but I still blindly keep going.