The lyrics 'I get knocked down but I get up again' from the song Tubthumbing by Chumbawamba came to mind after I watched back a video I recorded in 2017 when I was struggling. At that time, my psychiatrist said, 'I'm doing my best to keep you alive right now'.
It was rough. Rapid cycling from mania then crashing into depression. I was unable to drive, unable to prepare a basic meal, unable to work at all. Now I can drive when I am up to it on quieter roads, can work around 8 hours per week, can usually prepare basic meals.
0 Comments
I throw myself with great passion into projects but inevitably get burnt out. My mental health advocacy as Bipolar Courage is no exception. I have actually been burnt out with it for a long time. This is my last blog post for Bipolar Courage. (Update: I wrote a few more blog posts (there was still some stuff to process) and done now.)
My first blog post for Bipolar Courage was in 2019, expressing what a depressive episode felt like. Starting a blog was an attempt to distract me from that, when I had setbacks with working on my first novel, Pet Purpose: Your Unspoken Voice. Then I moved onto vlogging. Technically, my first advocacy vlogs were back in 2017, under a different channel, since deleted. Some of that footage, when I was off meds, is in a playlist on Bipolar Courage. Over the past few years, I have been on a journey of processing trauma. Finally, I am seeing a trauma psychologist, and she agrees that I have been finding ways to process trauma on my own.
I am a very sensitive person and I can feel very intense emotions. So intense that I would 'shut down' all the emotion and the trauma would be locked inside, still there - frozen and stuck. It has been a process like in waves, to get unstuck. Sometimes there would be intense waves of intense emotion, like I expressed in the scribble below today. Scribbling messy words helped discharge intense emotions like anger. One thing that is a common theme when talking to other people with bipolar disorder and PTSD is loss. Loss of a spouse, career, income, house, children, friends, dignity. I lost all of those. I am still processing the devastating loss after a pre-diagnosed bipolar mania episode. The sun went down on me in Australia. Most painful of all for me was that I had no choice but to leave my son in Australia and return to my birth country of New Zealand.
|
Xanthe WyseI am no longer blogging or vlogging as a mental health and disability advocate. The politics of it is too toxic for me. Archives
May 2023
Categories
All
|