Here’s a new one for you readers out there. I’ve been experiencing rapid cycling mixed states. How’s that for bizarre world eh?  Let’s just say that life has been, um, interesting. My husband doesn’t know what the hell is going on and most of the time I don’t either. I can deal with one or the other but both at the same time? Even I can’t analyze this brew of Pandora’s psychedelic box.

I’ve tried all the tricks in my magical mystical med cocktail box and nothing seems to crystallize this mess into stabilization.  I’m mystified. I’m stumped. I’m frustrated and down right perplexed and bordering on the angry side of emotion.  My next psychiatrist appointment isn’t for almost a month. Since I moved to a new state (no pun intended), I have to go to a new psychiatrist and that of course means I’m treated as a new patient, which means I have to do the 30-day-wait-you-are-a-new-patient thing. Supposedly this guy is one of the best. Well he is going to have to be one of the best to figure out what the heck is going on with me right now.

So once again, I get to regale a new psychiatrist (hereon referred to as Pdoc) which the tale of Storm’s psychiatric ordeal from birth to the present. It’s beginning to sound like a monologue from a bad B movie or something. I mumble it out loud like a kid forced to recall a bad poem in a literature class. It’s just that I’ve had to do it so many times; it bores even me, let alone a new Pdoc. Of course he’s more than likely heard many tales worse than mine and of course he no doubt gets paid a handsome sum to listen to our weepy tales, yet I still dread the recitation of my own yet again.

I’m not certain I can stand myself until this next appointment. I’m beginning to drive myself crazy. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to jump right out of my own skin! Other times I feel like, ok, it’s time to go check myself into the local psych ward at the nearest hospital. But then I think, why? I’m not dangerous to myself or to anyone else so why should I be hospitalized???  Just because I want to scream as loud as I can for the next 8 hours or that I feel my skin splitting open and my soul flowing out the openings, nah, that’s not reason enough to be hospitalized.

I know these feelings will pass. They always do. But it certainly is unnerving while they are present and with me.  Nothing makes me feel better while “they” are here. No words will comfort me. No arms are strong enough to hug “them” away. I isolate to protect others away from me and me from them. Not because I am dangerous because I’m not. I just don’t feel like explaining “them”. Those damn feelings. There really isn’t any coherent way to explain to a nonbipolars about those feelings. They just don’t make any sense. Hell, even when I read what I write about them, it doesn’t make sense to me, but then again, it does. It’s so perplexing. Sense but no sense. That’s bipolar disorder in a nutshell. It makes sense but it doesn’t make sense.

I’m happy with everything in my life yet part of me, the bipolar me is so damn unhappy and sad and empty that I want to weep for days and days. I want to moan and groan and writhe with agony over the pain and angst that my internal organs are feeling as my mind endlessly tortures them and my brain minute to minute. Pain that never goes away. Pain that isn’t felt in the normal way. A pain that is much worse than that. This is an invisible and an unfelt pain. It’s almost like it is a “no pain” pain.

It’s unending.  Follows me everywhere I go. Knows my name too. Seldom leaves my side yet does offer relief from time to time when some hypomania sets in. It’s as though the hypomania tells the “no pain pain” to get lost because my brain is ready to fly high and has no time for the “no pain pain”. Interesting concept. Apparently the hypomania is more powerful and holds a higher position in my brain than the “no pain pain”.  Perhaps there is more order to this disorder than I first imagined. Then again, perhaps not.