Can I tell you a secret?
Do you promise that you will not tell?
I don’t want to be stable!
Depression has been following me around for a while now, following, lurking and scurrying behind me like a sewer rat, waiting until my defences are weakened, my fortress is deserted, my brain is finally depleted of something called……… hope – so that its black mass can engage in armed combat with my mind or should that be more ‘out and out warfare’, though this is mixed in with a hefty dose of stability that has been slowly arriving from somewhere in the distance. Stability achieved in the traditional sense I suppose, through a drug regime, enough sleep, a good diet, communication with appropriate people and so forth. I suppose I should be relieved, happy even?
Well I’m not!
I miss hypo-mania and more importantly, I need my mind back please?
Stability – I used to want it, I even thought it was the state that I would most like to be in, the more desirable state even, far more supreme than being manic or depressed and even though I am still not fond of depression, I have begun to hanker after hypo-mania, like a long lost friend, my partner in crime and whilst I wander around in a more balanced state, full of drugs that are apparently working their wonders on my brain chemistry and sleep that is sustaining my moods and all ‘the good brain food’ that I am throwing down my neck, I am unhappy, desperately so at times.
If we look at mood on a continuum, five being stable, ten being manic and zero being thoroughly depressed, then I want to be a seven;
Permanently.
I spend time thinking about this magical number every day, waking up lamenting my slow brain, my dysfunctional brain that has become idle and leaden and sluggish – inactive! Ideas and thoughts, those beautiful and bountiful things that were once my friends, now non-existent in my once faithful grey matter and unlike the rapid and streamless amount of energy and activity that used to pour through my consciousness daily, now just a place that is grey, endless, a nebulous shape of nothingness that is ill defined and incomplete and I wonder – I wonder what if?
The medication dulls my mind, I can feel it each evening, as I dutifully take my pills and wait for the effects to set in. I am supposed to take them twice a day, a dose in the morning and a dose at night but going around in a comatose state is not productive to trying to live any sort of life, well not one when you want to be awake for a small part of it. So I swallow the pills at night, all of them and then I lie down, knowing that shortly my mind will begin to short circuit – I almost feel like a robot, a robot who has had his circuitry or wiring blown – everything feeling slightly disordered and confused until suddenly someone pulls the metaphorical plug and my mind coughs and splutters until finally coming to a halt, at which point everything goes black and I cease to be in the world – I am obsolete, until the next day.
Stability, for me holds no allure these days. Oh I have better days and sometimes I feel more fired up than others but it is never enough – I don’t want a day here and a day there, I want the magic and intoxication of slow burning hypo-mania, one that takes a few weeks to build and then plays out for a month or six weeks at a time, that is before it turns into mania, before it becomes a psychotic and delusional state, before it devours everything in its path, like a rampaging tornado.
So it is that the next day and the next day pass, in dull monotony and my longing for hypo mania grows more and more powerful, the knowing, longing, the dreadful yearning, its seductiveness and attraction captivating my mind and the memory, those glorious sweet memories, ever present, ever visible, calling to me, beckoning to me. Can I have it again?
Each night it is becoming harder to convince myself that taking the medication is the right thing to do; after all I am one days meds and one night asleep away from hypo mania at any given moment. So close I can smell it, feel it, taste it, I only have to cross over to the other side, just once, just this night and I will be alive again, it will be like a love affair, reacquainted after a time apart, at first trepidation and unknowing and awkwardness but very soon – we will begin to fly, the passion and energy will pulsate through our veins, through every part of our being until our bodies can no longer stay still, the urgency ever more potent as we move eternally, trying to keep up, running faster and faster, ideas and thoughts will come, thicker and faster, our synapses snapping in beautiful ceaseless unison, nothing is impossible as the world swings on its axis and the love and the laughter, the sublime ecstasy, the euphoria, the good times will never end. We will be in control, we will steer the ship and achieve our hearts content, our powers yet to be discovered, yet to be given free rein, will take on the world, we will be Masters of the Universe!
Did I get slightly carried away there?
Sorry.
Will I taste the delights of Hypomania again? Who knows? Can I wait?
No!
