Dreamer Easy

I'm reading a saddening but helpful book from 2005, Bipolar Disorder: Your Questions Answered, by Neil Hunt. It's meant for GPs but has plenty of info relevant to patients. It's sad because having an incurable, sometimes fatal illness is sad, and also because so many people (and their families, friends, and doctors) have struggled with this one. I have never forgotten a pamphlet which said "most people with mental illness suffer very much".

Anywho, it's a good refresher on both depression and hypomania (I have Bipolar II Disorder, where you don't get full-blown mania, thank goodness). For example: "... it is unusual to find a depressed patient who is sleeping well." Having trouble getting to sleep, waking frequently during the night, and what I call the "early morning wake-up call", where you wake up at ridiculous o'clock but can't get back to sleep - all too familiar, and compounded in my case by sleep apnoea and medication side-effects. (About a week ago I got so fed up with not sleeping that I reduced my recently increased dose of Epilim back down to 500 mg. Instant and almost total cure - though I'm having to take a little Xanax to get my sleep schedule nailed down again.)

"Depression tends to be the problem that dogs manic depressives in the long term... mild but persistent low mood is the commonest mood state that patients experience, so that on average bipolars can find themselves in a recognisably depressed mood state for a third of the time." This is what my shrink calls "sitting low". I believe my mood stabiliser, Epilim, prevents me from reaching my previous hypomanic highs, which I'd come to accept as a normal part of my life after decades; but I may be wrong about that, and it would be dangerous to stop the Epilim while I'm still taking an antidepressant, as multiple awful episodes of uncontrolled hypomania made all too clear.

Most recently we added Allegron to kill the depression that resulted from the hypomania that resulted from jetlag, but once it had done its job, I came back off it: my liver lacks the enzyme to break it down, so it was building up and up in my blood, making me tireder and tireder, giving me an incredibly dry mouth, and making me have odd, existential thoughts (it can provoke schizophrenia-like symptoms in some people). I'm having a DNA test to check the enzyme thing; I suspect it could explain my history of incapacitating sedation on various antidepressants.

Hunt describes a trap I've let myself fall into: doing nothing but work. "Many people who are depressed have brought their range of activities down to the bare minimum - 'just the grind' - and have stopped doing the things that brought pleasure to their lives." In my case that's reading books and watching movies for no purpose other than enjoyment. (I just read Christopher Isherwood's roman a clef Lions and Shadows for no reason other than that I enjoy his writing, and enjoyed the living hell out of it.) Getting my ass published overseas has become the consuming purpose of my life. It keeps me going when nothing else does, but as this last week showed, it can be a miserable 'grind' when I'm too exhausted or burned-out to attend to it. I need a better balance.

The book also mentions SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder - depression in winter, mania in spring. I think there may be a little of this in the mix: I associate the change of the seasons, spring and autumn both, with feeling "high". Though I no longer see God when I see bougainvilleas, which is a shame.

Fair bit more of the book still to go.

Remember what I was just saying about how this episode of hypomania, and indeed the recent years of my life, have lacked religious feelings? After a badly disrupted night's sleep (I have a cold), and the first in a week without Saphris, I just glanced at a page, saw this Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, and felt my generator sparking:


It's a sundisc, with rays of light coming down. I know the image from complex diagrams like this one:



The sun god, travelling in his sky-ship, sends down rays of energy that revivify the dead.

I feel like I want to nurture that image. Which would mean nurturing not just positive and sacred feeling, but potentially an elevated mood. Uh oh. How do I stay happy and busy, up but not too far up?

(For those of you who are curious: the black disc in the ship is the sun, with the goddess Maat, representing cosmic order, sitting in the front. Beneath that is the hieroglyph for "sky", with the sun-god's falcon head poking down, emanating what look (to me) like hours of the day and night and general beams of light onto a mummy, which is protected at head and foot by the goddesses Isis (left) and Nephthys. The sun and his rays are also protected by goddesses, in this case Nekhbet (the vulture) and Wadjet (the cobra). This is an image of the dead person safely tucked away in the netherworld, given eternal life by the creator god, and participating in the creator's activities. All is as it should be. The picture comes from the book Egyptian Religious Texts and Representations by Alexandre Piankoff and was redrawn from a funerary papyrus in the Louvre.)

ETA: Aw yiss, this is what I'm talking about. (The rays are turning into multicoloured flowers.)



(The stela of Lady Taperet, also at the Louvre.)

I really shouldn’t be posting when I’m hypomanic, but I can’t be the only 미친 여자 out there who has had an episode triggered by a Kpop song. I once turned up at a doctor’s appointment exploding out of my skin after listening to FT Island’s Hit The Sands on the bus. This afternoon it was VIXX and Hyde. I was abruptly so absurdly high that I had a little trouble functioning in the supermarket.

I’ll be OK: this is just the cumulative effect of jetlag, anxiety, PMS, and, above all disrupted sleep. But I realised there was another factor at work as well - which inevitably led to an explosion of thoughts, which I’ll try to get down here.

Now, VIXX’s MVs are sometimes at odds with the lyrics of their songs. For example, the six-voiced protagonist of 저주인형 (VOODOO DOLL) threatens his ex’s faithless lovers - “Open the doors of hell / sinners who made her cry / (you will) cry tears of blood”, but the band themselves portray those sinners. In Hyde, the narrator (once again a single character shared between six bodies and voices) puts up a tormented struggle, verbally and physically, against his own aggression - but at the end, those big, black wings come bursting out, and he displays them without shame to the faceless girl, who holds him, wings and all, in her heart.

It’s tempting to smile or even laugh at the melodrama of it all, but adolescent feelings are real and overwhelming, and what’s more, teenage boys are surely both the most alluring and the most dangerous - literally - things in the lives of most heterosexual teenage girls. Songs and MVs like this (and fan fiction, too) must be a place where young women can safely work through some of their complicated feelings about young men.

More importantly, they may be a place where girls can work through their own negative feelings, especially feelings of aggression, which we are taught to swallow, not show. The boyfriend of VOODOO DOLL is willing to endure his lover’s anger, without ending the relationship: “Sing the curse song of / tell me the fury hidden inside you / my body is an offering to you / I’ll devote myself to your happiness” (and the one in Chained Up (사슬) is willing to be the recipient of dark sexual fantasies). The protagonist of Hyde protests over and over that he is not a bad person, but ultimately he admits and owns the “other person inside me who is not me” (as we see in LR’s Beautiful Liar, he can control :), and that person is accepted and loved.

You can be a bad person, and survive! Even a kimchi-molesting pervert like me. XD No wonder my mood jumped through the ceiling in the space of three minutes and twenty-one seconds.

To conclude, I wanted to mention the line in Hyde I was thinking about the other day. It’s this: 겁을 먹어버린 그 눈빛 이러지마. You’ll see it translated around the Web as “Don’t give me those scared eyes”, but (disclaimer: my Korean sucks)  the adjective 먹어버린 is “eaten completely”, so it might be better rendered “Don’t give me that fear-devoured glance”. Wow!