Highs & Crashes

Just coming up to my 55 birthday in a couple of days & still inventorying the past a bit I think…. no stress…… keeping the peace…..💜

I’m kind of accounting for why my Bipolar diagnosis took so long here in a way. I’m piecing together some of the highs and the crashes I had in my twenties and thirties whilst ‘not knowing’ what they were. (I first said out loud that I had Bipolar in my teens…..you forget…….I forgot, brain damage makes you forget a lot of things, Drs were endlessly disinterested in me because I did not take the meds they offered) I knew what the low was, of course, when I had depression that was really self explanatory & required huge huge effort to dig myself out of the psychological, as well as the physical & brain chemistry aspects of that.

But often the highs just felt like really flying on all levels & being super well & super sexual, taking on more & more things with a weird peripheral awareness that it was unsustainable in some way that I could not see, that was out of my view. 

For example when I was with my boyfriend who was 17 yrs older than me, 1994 through 1999, I had at least one serious high that resulted in a crash that laid me down with, what seemed to be chronic exhaustion for 18 months solid. My brain didn’t work properly for the first year of that as I remember. But describing cognitive changes from the inside to others is really terribly hard. That low was particularly interesting because it was not just depression primarily, although that was there intermittently, it had this complete physical exhaustion element that was most prominent.

A lot of my crashes throughout this time were kind of engineered by binge drinking. I could drink 8 pints of dry blackthorn cider on a bad day on an empty stomach…… if anyone gave me spirits I’d try & kill myself with it, or so it seemed. I basically had no self control once I’d had one drink.

I think my drinking was the natural impulse to blow up the intrinsically painful over blown nervous system circuitry & physical strain of the high. Also, now I know I was struggling with BPD as well. So the weird paranoid stuff, losing time (disassociation), confusion, emotional dysregulation on a daily basis really. So fucking stressful. Relentless, like being on a sandy beach with the sea pulling the floor away all the time as you try and stand there, only you don’t know why it’s happening or why other people (unbeknownst to you standing on much better ground) are able to stand perfectly well all around you. In fact those others would sometime point & mock that I wasn’t able to stand steadily, that my floor kept going away. That I wasn’t doing something right somehow, so it always my own fault. Ho, ho, ho.

(The general statistics on alcohol, the damage alcohol does, the only reason it’s legal is because it causes brain damage & that helps the powers that be keep us compliant which they need) 

TBC