I don’t necessarily want to explain myself for fear of someone labeling me with yet another mental illness, but I’ll clarify myself here since I think it’ll help to get it out and since no one reads this anyway.
Most of us have an internal monologue or at least a train of thought. I have two. They frequently compete for the position of running my brain and it’s difficult to keep my behavior consistent because it could be either mind making my brain act. That’s best case scenario. Too often I have both minds monologuing simultaneously.
Stories with timelines I can follow always seem like the best way for me to clarify my experiences, so I’ll give that a go now.
Things have been brewing inside me for months now and they finally came to a head Thursday night. Not that anything that happened Thursday was bad or wrong, but that the emotions and thoughts of the summer came to a head and I suddenly had real clarity at the end of it all.
Thursday was a good day for me; I was able to be social with a few people with ease and my body wasn’t in overwhelming pain. That was the calm before the storm. That evening I was sitting on the couch watching anything when the waves began crashing in on me. My body was twitching and flailing. One internal monologue was all nonsense and gibberish and completely freaking out while the more reasonable monologue was trying to make me get help. The thoughts moving too fast to understand and the emotional highs and lows were taking over my body. I was fighting everything I had to hold myself reasonably still and to think. My reasonable mind kept popping up to breath and shout over the turmoil of my other mind and the only three words it could collect were “and rapid cycling.” It just kept shouting over everything when it could, telling me what the problem was so that I could keep going with a solution.
Without forming words but fully understanding the concept, my rational mind conveyed to me not only that I could push through alone until help comes because I always push through but also that I should still reach out and try to get help immediately. And I tried. I steadied my hands to hold my phone and type in the three words I could gather to the only two people I thought both physically available to me and emotionally available to me. I was acting under the assumption that they both know me and this sickness well enough to know that the first few hours of a bipolar rapid cycling episode is dangerous for me. When it happens it helps to have someone sitting quietly next to me to let me know I’m not alone in the world and to keep me from attempting suicide. After I got that message out, the rational monologue went under and I was left in chaos.
The help I needed never came. The whys don’t matter. Honestly, it was wrong of me to place expectations on others. It was selfish of me to forget that they have their own lives to manage and my shit is just over the top. And just like they should put their needs above mine, I should also put my needs before anyone else’s.
You know how in job interviews they ask for your greatest weakness and you’re supposed to come up with something that is actually a positive? One of my big weaknesses is that I sincerely care about the people around me. I always repress what I’m going through both to be a calm presence that doesn’t freak people out and also so that I can respond to their needs. I need to stop doing that. It IS a weakness. Why should I be attentive to the people around me at my expense? Why should I always be available to help others when I know they’re not available to me? Why should I be open and honest with myself when they don’t even want the information I’m sharing and they’re definitely not sharing themselves?
So going forward I’m going to talk less and to act more in my self interest.
And that is a glimpse at how I function and why I’m changing some things for myself.
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