I don’t know what started first.
Mild hypomania or melancholia. I’d always been an introverted, shy person who kept to myself and a bubbly, full-of-energy person who always had a million projects going on. Very early on, though, at the age of 12 or 13, I realized something in me was wrong. I would isolate myself from my friends for long periods and dwell on things. Melancholia, or the early stages of depression, constantly followed me around. My first depressive episode happened when I was in Montreal in 2008. I had moved there to pursue my undergraduate studies and had already been there for two years. I had just broken up with my long-distance boyfriend, and the weight, combined with the pressure of six senior courses and graduation just around the corner, slapped me in the face. One day, as I walked to class, I felt my legs growing weak and my breathing shallowly. In an instant, I was out of breath, crying, and feeling like the world was about to crash and burn around me. I was having my first panic attack. I immediately went to the clinic, was diagnosed with severe depression, and was handed a prescription for Celexa. They might have recommended therapy, but with my busy schedule, it felt impossible. The rest of the semester was hell. I struggled to maintain my grades but managed to just graduate. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane back to Beirut with a three-month supply of Celexa. Once my mother found out, she went out of her mind. She has never been too keen on medicine and when therapy could help me out of my pit. So I weaned myself off them and started my journey to find a therapist. I was lucky that my first therapist was one of my best. In a few weeks, he helped me understand the concepts of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We went through some CBT tools, and he managed to lift me up high enough so I could find a job. I was starting to get better. The episode was just that, an episode. A year later, I was thriving at my job, building my skills, and having the time of my life. I started taking on a couple of freelance projects. I worked day and night with boundless energy and very few hours of sleep. I was confident, I felt beautiful, I felt smart, I felt fearless and invincible. I was hypomanic. But I didn’t know it. I wouldn’t know it until ten years after I’d been diagnosed. During that time, something happened at work. I was being left out of specific projects to redirect my energy toward others. Meanwhile, I felt exhausted. I had worked myself to the bone and couldn’t understand what was happening at work anymore. I started slipping into a depression again. Eventually, I quit my job and took some time off to recuperate. I was isolating myself, trying desperately to understand what was happening to me. In the next ten years, that cycle would happen almost every year. I’d get super psyched by new projects, take on more than I could handle, and eventually crash and burn and slip into depression. Once in 2013, when I was hypomanic, my mother sent me to a psychiatrist. He gave me the usual test to figure out where I stood on the bipolarity scale, and I faked my answers because I wanted to appear in control and normal. He told me I was cyclothymic and that I should monitor it closely. I was deliriously hypomanic and so proud that I’d fooled him into classifying me as normal. What the hell was I afraid of? It took a massive psychosis in October 2018, and a competent psychiatrist finally diagnosed me with bipolar type 1. You can read more about this one in the previous blog posts. It was a traumatic period for me, one I am still revisiting often in therapy. It was also a turning point for me. It helped me make sense of the last ten years and embrace the diagnosis with open arms. Finally, I knew what was wrong with me. Finally, two kindred souls knew precisely what to do to help me improve and become stable. It took a combination of several things for me to reach stability. A solid regimen of medication that I take religiously twice a day; the best medical team composed of the brilliant minds of my psychiatrist and therapist; more mindfulness than can be recommended; countless books and blogs about bipolarity; the love and support of my family and close friends; and so much more that I’ll hopefully be blogging about in the next few weeks and months.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI was born in 1986 in Lebanon. I'm still trying to find my passion in life and in the meantime I'm learning to navigate my bipolarity and redefining stability. Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|