I’ve already talked a bit about my Vienna trip in 2016 but there’s so much more I’d like to say about it. I’ve not travelled hardly anywhere in my adult life due to mental ill health & mental ill health related poverty to put it bluntly.
I’d had a absolutely classic untreated Bipolar 1 ‘high’ lasting 8/9 months through 2015 (I was undiagnosed)& the dawning awareness of the severity of what was happening & that I was dealing with Bipolar 1 really hit me nearly at the end of that in December 2015 with the horrifying realisation that, if this was the high, excruciating & disorientating that it was….then there inevitably had to be a crash to a low coming at some point.
I was terrified that I’d need hospitalisation to manage the physical pain from the chaotic high speed that my nervous system & brain had achieved & I did not know what to expect as I had never sustained such a long, dramatic high, there had been mostly hypomania in the past to the best of my knowledge, so I’d been more a Bipolar 2 throughout my 20’s & 30’s with excessively long deep depressions. It is known that left untreated it can progress types like that.
I’ve long been mainstream medicine sceptical & them fucking me up badly at this totally vulnerable moment seemed a real possibility. I knew without a shadow of a doubt what I was dealing with now & in my mental mayhem I struggled to concentrate & research what happens when you crash but really there was little information or other people’s personal experience in the same completely unmedicated state that I was in.
I was wolfing down nervous system sedative herbs & amino acids to minimal success as my nervous system was way out of control at this late stage. I think my physical body’s reserves of……..I don’t know what, chi or wtv, I’m sure the loss of all the nutrients that my nervous system was burning like a forest fire was having an big impact too.
I remember some of the crash, it happened over a couple of days in January 2016. It was like the pain in my nervous system, the intense muscular tension & my spiralling brain chaos merged into a plateau made of pain soup & there was a sudden, shuddering collision with a large immovable object that didn’t actually exist. Just like a wall & then you slide to the bottom in a heap, concussed.
My mind was literally like soup, nothing externally made any sense, i couldn’t name objects, I couldn’t complete a statement in my head whist retaining knowledge of how the sentence started, it was completely terrifying. I thought I was probably brain damaged for life now. I couldn’t really move physically except very slowly. I could get to the loo, Lily brought me food but she knew I wanted to see if I could recover on my own. She says I looked very poorly & depressed & was very confused. She had a new job & she was struggling with that & her own things.
Then the hot flushes started. I’d been on a low dose 3% natural progesterone cream for years to manage peri menopause symptoms but it was completely impotent in the battle with my new depleted nervous system. There is an overlap between the endocrine system & the nervous system & women with Bipolar/BPD generally have an abysmal time with pms, pregnancy, menopause stuff.
I’d had a bad time with early onset peri menopause at 42 in 2009 but I’d thought I’d got off with a difficult 3 years but this was epic. I was having hot flushes that really hurt approximately every 10/15 mins but also I had this horrible electrical sensation around my eyes that moved around & made it even harder to focus to talk to other people. Then there was the dyesthesia, which is the nearest word I could find to describe my ‘skin thing’. This was a painful prickly heat thing that was permanently fluctuating up my arms and torso from uncomfortable to fucking painful. It was a bit like being on fire sometimes. I didn’t know what it was & neither did any doctor or mental health professional I described it to. I also suddenly developed intense permanent changeable tones of Tinnitus which was completely new & very depressing in its own right.
All those symptoms arrived with the crash. It’s like the nervous system exhaustion from the high took my Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPA Axis) down with it. Tinnitus has been found to be caused by synapses failing to make their usual connections, it’s literally the sound of brain damage. If I can find the article re: that I will link it, it was fascinating & helped me so much.
I was in a weird blackscape void mostly made of pain.
Gradually over a few days I started slowly regaining physical function & my overriding realisation was that I seriously needed to avoid a depression that matched that high else I’d be dead. My 9 month depressions of my undiagnosed 20’s & 30’s where utterly gruelling & treacherous territory that I would resist returning to with everything I could muster.
I got Dr appoints & CMHT support slowly happened later over the year but right then I needed to do something drastic to prevent depression.
The only person I felt could go any way to save me from a serious depression was Beethoven - I’d been intensively learning his piano sonatas prior to the high so he was very near me in my regrouping psyche. I had pictures of him & my beloved Schubert all over my music room wall, like they were waiting for me to get back to them. To my surprise, I could still read music & doing this became pain relief & time out from the disorganisation & confusion in my head.
I found a website listing all the Beethoven memorable sites in & around Vienna & applied it to my google map on my phone. I’d received some compensation for something so I last-minute booked a flight to be there the eve of my 49 birthday & an air bnb right in the heart of Vienna. Birthdays have often been especially challenging to my lonely confused prediagnosis self & I intended to feel loved or at least in love.
It was really incredibly intrepid & brave of me. I couldn’t navigate the train ticket machine I needed to get into the town until someone helped me. My physical symptoms where relentless but I consoled myself with the fact it was going to be really cold in Vienna in February & that might be good for my hot flushes. Also endless walking the streets distracted by beautiful architecture would have anti-depressant powers. It was so cold, you had to move & moving is so good for brain health.
I arrived after dark 18th Feb & made my way across the town in a taxi utterly charmed & distracted, which I guess was the whole point of this trip.
I will do a part 2 to this hopefully as it was such an important time in my life. A real turning point on every level.
The suffering he endured my LvB, the loneliness, the depression, the rages & feeling misunderstood, the tinnitus, the deafness, the unrequited loves, the relentless physical afflictions he suffered since his late 20’s, he was my soulmate on that trip & he was there for me at every corner & every stop on my Beethoven itinerary & Schubert joined us & we hung out & it worked to keep me here. His endless relentless creative triumph over his suffering insisted that I have strength & though I have nothing like his gifts to bestow on the world, he gave me permission to stay & play, to live through his music, like finding footsteps in woods when you are lost.
And beloved Schubert. I stood outside the house/museum where he had his short illness & died so young & I couldn’t face going inside, I could feel him, his pain & his illness from the street, or so it felt as well as my love & admiration for him. He goes through me, his music goes through me like nature at it’s absolute purist perfection. They are my spirit animals those two, I guess.
Second part later, perhaps.
