Warning!
This raw post was taken from a journal entry during a depressive episode in 2016. I didn’t edit out the excruciating feelings. Please talk to your healthcare provider prior to reading it if you think it will impact you negatively.
I’m invisible, unseen.
I walk into a room, crack jokes, laugh. I ask people how they are, and they tell me. I listen; most don’t ask after me. Do they care? Or do they forget themselves in the face of being heard, of looking into kind eyes with an earnest posture? I don’t fault them. I do it, too. I am asked, then I go on about my latest problem and don’t ask in return.
Today? I need kind eyes, an earnest posture, and an ear. I don’t need just to be listened to. I need to be seen. I need someone to feel my pain, feel where I’m coming from. I’m lost. I feel abandoned and unloved. I feel mired in self-pity. But I don’t feel pitiful. I don’t feel my life is wasted and useless. I can see the facts outside me: loving, concerned husband, daughter, son, mother, friends. But I can fool them all. They can look in my eyes and not see. I stay quiet, making them feel awkward, like I’d rather be doing something else to be alone again.
I want to sit in a mental hospital on a single bed with starched, white sheets and stare at the white walls for days, for as long as it takes. How can I say how I feel? I’m not me. I’m not the real me but the me I’ve listened to for months. I cry constantly, feel as though my best friend died, and keep looking for her. I feel deserted by everyone. I don’t know why. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed but me.
How can I explain this Eyeore in my head, the poison that I have listened to for months, day after day? I fight it. I talk to myself in my mind. Don’t listen to her. She’s only saying that because the chemicals in your mind aren’t working right. That’s not me. I don’t like self-pity, neediness, vulnerability, asking for help. It feels like a weakness. My depressed self switches tact. It tells me that people don’t see me anymore; even when I scream for help, nothing. One day, amongst friends, I create a plan, a plan to disappear so I can kill myself in peace, and no one will know I’m dead. I’ll just be missing.
I’m not religious. But I do believe in prayer. When I’m not depressed, and I pray, I feel a presence, a calm seeps into me. Peace comes no matter what happens if I open my heart and pray. I am free and clean on the inside. Terrible highs and lows always happen during medicine changes. Since we decreased my Lithium, I am depressed–wildly, madly, depressed. I am so sad, crying all the time. I cry that my kids don’t love me and will not be proud of me no matter what I do. I cry that my husband made a big mistake marrying me because I have nothing to offer. I cry that I’m hurting the women I try so hard to help. I cry because it’s Wednesday. It used to be my favorite day, Hump Day, but now it’s miserable.
I put people in categories: those who would miss me for a long time, those who would miss me a bunch at first but, after a few weeks or months, would feel a little sad if they thought of me, and those who like drama and beating their chests, but do not know me at all. I’ve said it many times before. I’m not that important. People don’t care about me or what I do unless it’s shocking or attracts attention. I’ve nothing earth-shattering to report. I’ve wanted to do some earth-shattering things and failed miserably. I used to think God had some plan for me. I knew the plan a week ago, but today, it feels like nonsense, make-believe.
I’ve returned from sitting in a room with many people. Some of whom have watched me sit in that room for years. I asked several people how they were and listened with my earnest posture. I must be doing it wrong. I’m not trying hard enough. No one can see how bad off I am. No one feels it but me. I pray, pray that the earth opens up and swallows me whole. Pray that God can hear me. Pray, “Drive. Please drive. Change me. Please change me. Save me from spiritual self-destruction.” I feel no peace, no calm. Nothing. God is carrying me, but I can’t feel his arms. No warmth. Nothing.
I was out with my daughter and a friend. We left the building, walking and joking. The whole time, I was thinking, “I wish I were dead. I wish I would stop existing, vanish.”
I can’t describe the anguish of feeling invisible. I didn’t say I am; it’s just how I feel. It doesn’t matter, though, whether I am or I feel I am; it’s excruciating.
Did I mention I’m bipolar? Did I mention I’m going off Lithium? Did I say how that feels?
I’m going off Lithium. I have no ability to remember. I’m going off it because I can no longer think correctly. I haven’t been able to work.
I go down 75mg at a time. I have an excellent doctor who is extremely well-educated, intuitive, caring, and sharp. I never asked, but I’m pretty sure she’s not bipolar. She tells me to go down 75mg. After a week, go down another 75mg. I go down 75mg. The first week I felt like the Lithium in my brain was a plant with those really thin roots that spread and grow and intersect and infect the earth so that when you try to pull up a plant the size of your hand, the roots pull up enough dirt in one tug to fill a large bucket. That’s what my brain feels like. As though something was in my brain, rooted that deeply, and it is now being pulled out. In my imagination, I can see it. In my mind, I can feel it. I can feel the tissue tearing and bleeding inside with the pain of it. I can’t think or work. I can barely interact, so I spend the first week with headphones on, not talking, because my brain is on fire. By the second week, my emotions are out of whack. I feel enraged. I drive to get a head rush and put my life and other people’s lives in danger, to feel my hands shake and my heart pound from the close calls. And the voice inside my head that usually says, “Now, that was stupid,” is a whisper from another time, a time of calm and sanity. I can’t go down 75 a week. I go down 75 every six weeks and wonder if I’ll live through going down another 300mg. The next day I decided, “Forget it!” I’m not going down one more milligram for a year. I cannot take it. I’ve been afraid to go to a mental hospital my whole life. Now, I want to go. Sign me up.
Until that moment, I didn’t realize I could stop the process. I thought I had to do it because my doctor said so. Since that day, I control the speed with which my medicine is reduced.
I can’t remember anymore how many weeks or months it’s been. My medicines have been upped and upped and then upped again. And still, I cry because I said I wanted to die, and no one calls to ask after me. I cry because if they did, I wouldn’t pick up. I cry that I can’t think and understand now that someday I will have to go on disability because I won’t be able to work. I’ll have early onset dementia from bipolar at 50. I wish no one had told me I was bipolar. I’d rather be eccentric or sad. Now I’m crazy.
I’m completely hopeless. Chances are my medicines will be ironed out eventually. But this is already the third or fourth or fifth time that I had a great combination of medicines, and it had to be completely and radically changed because of side effects, or it stopped working. I can’t go through this over and over and over again. I can’t pretend anymore. I’m too tired. I can’t go to work and joke and laugh with you while I wonder how to kill myself so no one will know. Now, I’m thinking undetectable poison. Something. Anything. I don’t want to be a crushing burden to everyone. I don’t want my husband or my kids to have to spend money to hospitalize me or watch over me forever. I want to be useful. I’m useless. I want to care and help. I just want it to be over, finished, the end.
I don’t believe people care. They ask after me out of obligation. I can hear them. I listen with my ears, my eyes, my heart. They ask because they should. They give me a trite solution. I can feel them cringing over the phone, “Ew, she’s not over that yet? Ick.” I want to be over it. I know I’ve been over it before. But now my brain is a wagon wheel stuck in a huge rut that’s halfway up the wheel. The only way to get it out is to stop the wagon and physically lift it. Set it on rutless ground. How can I do that with my brain? How do I pull myself up by my bootstraps when I wear strapless boots?
I have two options: I can kill myself, or I can wait and take different medicines. Depressingly, in the future, probably multiple times, I’ll be back in this place, going off medicine and suffering from it. I fear I will feel this way again and again. The idea of repeating this problem over and over fills me with dread.
Postscript: Yet, somehow, I survived that medicine change and depression. Somehow, I was rebalanced, and the sun shone on my face again.
During the following years, through trial and error, I found a way to reduce and sometimes alleviate these symptoms. The fact is I will have to discontinue medicines that no longer serve me. The key I’ve found is to reduce by no more than 10% per week. If I start having severe side effects, I reduce the amount I taper even lower or go back up for a few weeks. It takes much longer to finish the tapering process but with fewer side effects. I’ve been discontinuing Seroquel for two years. I started at 100 milligrams per day and am down to 25 milligrams per week. My sanity is intact, with no suicide plan. Hallelujah!