Leave me my safe spaces, please...

The strange thing about being in the public eye... to a small extent is how often people read things you write that give no hint of the depressive side of the illness and assume you are "normal" again. What these people are ignorant of is that with BMD there is a conscious daily monitoring of mood scales and charting them on that -5 to + 5 scale and somewhere inside this scale is the range people call normal.

The other assumption is that if you are not dwelling in the depths of despair and writing about it, you can't be there when in actual fact the last thing you could find energy for at the -5 end is any time to string cohesive (or even non co-hesive) thoughts together as 'writing'. You are merely surviving of trying to disappear into the arms of Morpheus at every possible moment of that protracted period of illness. There is no today, tomorrow, later there is only this seemingly timeless 'now' that will never pass. One an only write this when you are rising out of the depth, and beginning to develop a degree of objectivity about the situation. The writing is innavriably about the past.

At the +5 end of the illness there is no time to write nor if there were would the writing be coherent or logical. Mania is also living in the now but with that added belief that there is a tomorrow and it will only be bigger, brighter and better. You thoughts race, you cannot type as fast as the thoughts occur and why would you? You can't sit still let alone 'capture' these moments of non-energetic motion.

Ah then there is the phase trying to reach that balance point, shall we say zero, instead of normalcy which is such a relative term. This is the point for me at least where I have pushed myself beyond what was a logical degree of pressure, attempting to overcome and surmount every obstacle thrown in my path, on all fronts. professional, personal, domestic and environmental. Words associated with mania and grandiosity are often attached to this phase.

My biggest problem is, like many manics I cannot and do not recognise this state in myself. To me I am not having grandiose plans and levels of attainment, I am simply pushing through to prove to somebody, usually myself that I can conquer everything the world throws at me, and not only conquer it do it bloody well. Just to prove to the world that those of us with mental illness can function at a very high level of productivity and intelligence. I carry the pressure of all BMD patients at this time. And that is grandiosity and delusion. It has been a very hard lesson to learn over the last few years.

Every time I begin a new job or work project I push myself ridiculously hard, and I even have enough self-insight tio know why. I will never be good enough for me... no matter how amny pieces of paper are framed on mhy walls, no matter how many times colleagues tell me how 'intelligent' I am. No-body gets it. I am not good enough for me.

And if you add to this a certain number of years being called lazy, work-shy (whilst plodding through studies as I cannot read fast and always feel stupid), unstable, irrational, over-emotional, irresponsible... those negative labels begin to take hold, especially if they are spoken with venon by people you live with, family or significant others. This is the damage thoughtless and ill-conceived words of criticism can have over a protracted period of time... on ANYBODY not just someone who is mentally ill.

These are the feelings of worthlessness that drive 'normal' people to plummet into unipolarity and hospitalisation. My gift is that I have bi-polarity and at times the excitement of riding the mania does allow me to produce good and valuable work... but not in toxic or negative environments. It's as if I am hyper-sensitive to dynamics between people and inside work places. I lose perpective on my own mental wellness states and lose complete capability for rational thought.

When something turns pearshape, my subconscous is screaming "get out... leave before it is too late", yet my bigger fear is returning home to condemnation and articulated words about "typical failure" or "incompetence". This being torn in both directions is what I have lived with for the last six years at least.

Yet, I know that by ignoring my inner self-awareness, mania will lead to the inevitable melt down, and then EVERYBODY around you has no time for the healing process. Apart from the medical teams and professionals who know the battle. I have just had one of he harshest 'talkings to' from my trusted General Practitioner who did not hold back. Knowing I had a virtually immediate appointment with my psychiatrist and knowing me better than I know myself... he told me stop pretending to myself that I am well or superwoman who could do it all... or not so much in those words but you get my drift.

He put in words what is actually my biggest fear, that I may be ill and not able to function under the levels of stress required in some jobs. For me that meant EVER AGAIN... yet as my Psychiatrist indicated, this was catastrophising and thus not a sensible framing of the future... again I am advised to live for the now and heal.

So off I go back to my PhD finding great solace and pleasure in writing and alone-ness and begin to chronicle this journey on the www. I am under the possibly mistaken belief that this blog will find readers who are in need of what I have to say about my experiences with BMD...

Yet what happens my ex-employers perceive the sudden onset of tranquility as a sign that I can function as a professional employee... even though I am an EX-employee, as they have a deadline and my melt-down did not help them, thus now that I seem better... can I just hunt through my computer files and find material I didn't provide them.

This from the woman who many friends knows does a complete hard drive reformatting EVERY time I come out of a crisis situtaion to give myself a metaphorical blank slate from which to begin life again... new day new life. I trash everything... reformatting all hard drives... I am now expected to find the old stuff (from where?) and get it to them asap as they paid out my holiday leave and sickness benefits so surely I must still be an employee open for contact.... Well no I am still very unwell and in the re-establishment of my health.

I am/was so unwell I couldn't even go on holiday relying so heavily on medical treatment at the moment.. . so i find the nearest place I can have a mental holiday (all less than 5 kms) from where I live but because I am seeking out places of beauty... I must be well and on holidays... When will I ever be strong enought to say... hey I like you guys personally but professionally FUCK off you are killing me (almost-literally).

Do not pollute my safe spaces with past toxicity... not from work, not from University, not from home... leave me heal.

Always more to learn

My silence over the last month continues to be explained by the write up phase of my PhD. This phase is desolation. Even my GP said the other day that 'PhD's are enough to drive sane people insane, imagine the stress you are under'. How interesting, when one lives with stress as a daily partner it becomes normalised. That doesn't mean it is any less debilitating but just a part of the mental torment to control and 'get through' in one's normal routine. Turning is desperation to people whose words can describe the things I find hard to encapsulate adequately in my creative writing, and the things that sound cliched in my academic writing, I find that every time I open their books new things jump out at me.

It's as if... I feel even more inadequate> How could I have survived with this condition this long and not seen or understood the obvious things being spoken about. For example throughout my life I have had suicidal ideations and indeed taken a perverse pleasure in them. It was as if my safety was thinking about suicide rather than acting upon it. I was not and am not alone. Apparently this is the very stuff of suicide ideation, a form of wish fulfilment that promises and imagined respite from the unbearable pain. Yet to act upon it is vengeful. It is to purposely hurt others... along the lines of Spike Milligan's "I told you I was ill"...a sort of see, you wouldn't believe how real this was, now you can feel guilty.

To have that much anger seems counter to the despair and enervation that is upon one when suicide ideations occur. Why have I not been able to see it before reading famed entertainment industry attorney Terri Cheney's book, Manic: A memoir. Or another, Darkness Visible by the late author William Styron.

I have felt comfortable re-reading Kay Redfield Jamieson's 1993 Touched with Fire as an academic search for knowledge, and previously her memoir, An Unquiet Mind. It is as if these people are publically successful and safe to speak about their depressions and manias that make me stop and reflect on what I am actually doing in my own PhD. Is my lack of public profile good or bad? Does it mean that what I have to say will be less valued? Can there ever be an 'everyone' voice of the disease BMD, when it is so idiosyncratic in its shifts, phases, cycles and even within the polarities themselves, let alone the individual differences in reactions to and success with medications and pharmacological interventions.

So in the academic sense what can be my contribution to new knowledge as demanded of a PhD? What can I say that these highly skilled and intelligent wordsmiths and successful professional people have not said?

Maybe it is simply to let people share a glimpse inside the world of madness, and that it is not unrelenting and there are times of absolute psychological normality. We are not all the same. I am not my illness.

It has been a revelation to me that the sexual promiscuity that can accompany mania is less about feeling desirable and sexually powerful and is more about a desperate need for human connection... the need to feel connected with someone. Communication being the goal however when the libido is freed from normal rational constraint, it becomes the equivalent of 'beer goggles'.... sex becomes confused with connection.

is that what my PhD is about and also this blog... my need to connect as I am alone in life and have no partner to be strong for me throughout the ups and downs?

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." Howards End 1910 by E.M Forster.

Like Rita in educating Rita, it finally makes sense to me too.

Happiness in Emerald City

I could never live here but each time I set foot on Sydney soil I feel liberated and transported into a fantasy world. One should never blog drunk, but tonight I am breaking this rule. I am "merry" and high on the whole sensuality of this City. It may be grey and winter, and already I am sick of the smart arse comments about 'Melbourne weather' but Sydney has a special place in my heart. It is gauche, her people parochial to the extreme, but the City has a charm that delights both Aussies and overseas visitors alike.

Sydney is more than the picture postcard vistas, despite me using a shot from the harbour looking back over Bennelong Point. For me it is the MOMA shop, the Opera House playhouse theatre, The Warf and the STC, Belvoir Street and Company B, the Cross and her seedy in your face night life, and the quiet of the Tea Rooms in Darling Harbour. Add to this the intensity of the hawkers in Chinatown, the tackiness of Paddy's Market (pticularly its one tram), and the stately buildings fronting the Domain. Above all I love that the Unis are all so central (UTS, Sydney University and Uni of NSW). It feels like an intellectual capital city.

The hotel rooms is exactly the same as elsewhere, clean, neat unoffensive ultra-modrn lines, ubiquitous abstract art and 'tasteful' bathroom cosmetics and fluffy white towels. I think I was born for at least four star environments and room service.... this is my version of doing it on a budget. As one ages, a certain amount of comfort is necessary (heated pools, fitness and business centres and 24 hour room service). But I really hate the fact that now the bar fridge is computerised so there is no chance of guiltily devouring a chocolate bar as the munchies hit and replacing it with a Safeway special. How much do I crave that chocolate? I admit I would prefer Belgium to Cadbury's with palm oil, but there is something about that fridge with its temptation and feeling of transgression.

Ah transgression, that is the magic of being away from home. I am suddenly free. Free to do what I like, when I like and no explanations to anyone and NO GUILT. I am 'me' unencumbered and living for the moment.

The sensible me says I should attend all Conference sessions and take copious notes yet the practical me says that I am only here for the networking. It's not cheap but I think it is a good investment. Also Conferences bring out the liberated youth in all participants, away from all 'normal' constraints and responsibilities. You get to meet people at their most honest, raw and open. I adore these moments. I guess I live for these moments of liberation. How many Conferences can I justify each year? And how do I justify to myself my need to get in early and just experience being here, in the moment, before the actual dates of the talk-fest? Why do I have to? Why do I feel guilty?

This is exactly what I need to feel re-charged and motivated after a period of self-doubt and uncertaincy. Here I can be manic without people judging me and fearing for my well being. I can live my life in colour at last. I need this. I will return home ready to tackle the hard stuff. I will have been 'me' for a few days without fearing people's judgement or treading carefully because they fear that I am 'mad'. I can just be. I love being away from home.

Mondayitis...or mania?

Am I the only person who looks on the beginning of a new week with dread? Yet, again after a seemingly stable week and quiet weekend attending to domestic duties and my own headspace (reading papers, watching my beloved Magpies play AFL football, one chick flick movie in the evening when alone in the house), I do not want to rise from bed and greet the new day.

Today I have begun with a leisurely lie-in which I justified by reading a hard back on Wikinomics. Yep, it is interesting in a dry academic way but it was not really a priority task. Next procrastination was my own and my son's washing (yep, he could do it himself after TAFE) but why waste all these sunny daylight hours? Then on to that wonderfully riveting household duty bathroom cleaning. Yep, even that appears better than sitting at the keyboard embarking on my final write up of my PhD.

Oh, look lunchtime. Now I MUST prepare yoghurt, hummus and vegetarian lasagne for dinner.

Next the email sort through and on to this blog.

Funny how the hours are rapidly dwindling and I have achieved NOTHING of substance.

If I stop and reflect, and am honest with myself I really do know why I feel this way each Monday.

By the end of June the Exegesis must be completed so that means only three more weeks to go. I have the material I need. I have all the reading completed, to read more is just going to make it all less 'controllale". I have written the Preface structural summary and main points. I have drafted the Chapter structural layout with thesis argument and hypothesis development through to outcomes.

So why won't I write it?

I have been trying very hard to distance myself from my candidature and look towards life after the PhD, knwoing it is common for people to face a void. For me I fear that void. My self-perception for so many years now has been that I am a PhD candidate and trainee academic.

When the Exegesis is done and dusted the Artefact remains, and I have never been comfortable identifying as a writer. I am not. I am simply a writing craftsperson on a journey of discovery, playing with the 'real writing', a novel.

And I am scared.

I am scared I cannot do it, no matterhow much research and analysis I have done into the process and practice of professional authors.

The big question remains do I have that ability to commune with the Muse? To reach out and grasp that very essence of creation?

Also to do this, mobilise my creative desires and abilities, how safe am I going to be?

Now I have worked my way down to the crux of the matter.

Do I really want to embark on that marvellous, addictive manic phase I need to be generative and productive?

Having spent so many weeks trying to consolidate my wellness routines, and stabilise my moods, am I ready to (or willing to) put it all 'on the line' just to achieve at my highest level of creativity?

It's what I have grieved for that beautific state for over twenty-one years.
I have been atempting to control it via medication ever since I accepted the need to be medicated for life. It had to be fought for my role as mother, but what about now?

Surely, as an author, I must go there.
I cannot see how to do it without mania. Is it any wonder, I put it off.

I just wish my supervisor could realise how much I am thinking of sacrificing for this last foray into my artistic self.

I am scared.

Come, hold my hand Calliope.