A Bipolar Body.

My bipolar body is mine, and my experience won’t match that of others. But bipolar disorder is a physical experience as well as a mental and emotional one, and the medications dissolving in that body leave their own calling cards. One of my greatest frustrations with BSD is my inability to distinguish symptoms of the disease from side effects of the medication.

I’ve almost always been pretty thin. My Irish Dance legs were too muscular for me to really be slender. A few years ago, I got to the point of accepting that I would never really be thin below the waist. But lithium and probably Abilify (along with a pretty serious case of self-medicating with Dr. Pepper, I’m guessing) have, in the last two years or so, bestowed 40 pounds upon me. It’s shocking. It’s a shock every day. I apologize to Josh; I don’t look like the creative writing major wearing size 3 LEI jeans. He always finds something kind to say. So far, diet changes and exercise don’t seem to be helping.

I blame another problem on Abilify because—well, the timing seems right, and my psychiatrist thought it was likely. But it could be something else. A mania doorbell ring perhaps. My whole body nearly screams with burning tension. It feels lie fire ants in my bone marrow. I can’t reach them. I stretch compulsively, constantly, trying to escape it. But another medication, benztropine, almost completely took all that away. Thank God. Something that really works! But I’m not crazy about having to stack medications to cure side effects.

When mania is coming on, manifesting itself quickly, I feel burning and shuddering in my arms and legs. The light changes, becomes more fluorescent. Things look different—did they change the wallpaper? I move more—more tapping, more gestures, more looking around. My eyes seem to bounce. I sit forward, ready. Thoughts come stacked 3, 4, 5 deep. When I try to address them, they unravel and speed away. I want to talk. I need to talk. I trip over words. I use the wrong words. I lose ideas, unsure if they were brilliance or crap. I don’t have to sleep as much.

The beginning of mania, or hypomania, can be so empowering. But mania intensifies. Visions engulf me, usually terrible tragedies that my brain thinks it must work though in simulation. How would I get my family out of a burning car? The images don’t stop until I’ve figured out what to do. My brain seems to be shredding itself. Something compulsive like shopping can numb me a little, for a while. Only sleep seems to help me in the moment. I think my brain uses my sleep to heal, layer by layer of frozen or torched consciousness.

I used to experience something like temporary partial paralysis. I call it the Tin Man. I lose the ability to move, even to turn my head, rearrange my limbs, ask for help. People close to me have noticed. Luckily, this hasn’t happen for a long time.

Even in important situations like a meeting about my son, sometimes, my body and a lot of my mind just check out. It’s like the frustration of a computer restarting because of updates you know nothing about. My mind is stressed, so the body takes over and turns the volume way down.

I’m clumsy. I trip. I walk into walls and corners. I get dizzy. I have trouble with physical multi-tasking like walking and talking at once. A few months ago, I fell hard outside Dean and Deluca.

When I was on a high dose of lithium, I threw up almost every night. Even now that I’ve been on a lower dose for about 2 years, I still randomly throw up about once a month. Why does the body want to get rid of the medicine? The disease is smart, smarter than I am sometimes.

Depression makes me feel sluggish in every way. The part of myself that wants to go live, to do what I love, is in a dungeon, and I can barely hear her. Tin Man happens sometimes. I feel that I’m worthless, that I don’t belong, that I’m all wrong for my family and everything else. Thoughts float by, some about self-harm, splicing images between ordinary thoughts. Sometimes, I get scared. My face is vacant. Josh calls it the thousand-mile stare. The depressed bipolar body could sleep for days. It’s trying so hard to get better. But it’s like lying on my back in a swamp. Even if I get up and get out, I’ll still have to remember who I am and find my way back home.

I take 6 different medications to be stable. They don’t save me from everything, and they sometimes make me exhausted or make me throw up, but I know I have to stay committed to them.  I have to do all I can for the body and the brain.