I keep feeling things and feeling all panicky and scared and overwhelmed, and then realizing that the feeling that is scaring me is just happiness. It's been so long since I felt it that I don't know how to cope with feeling happy. Fucksakes, brain.
On the plus side: I'm able to feel happy again. Just sitting in my room reading a book and listening to music and eating frosties I can *enjoy it*, can feel happy being alive and doing things, and it doesn't feel empty and pointless and just passing time until I can die.
Noting this down so that next time I drop and I can't remember when I last felt happy I have a record of this: I am happy. I'm not saying everything is fine and dandy and fixed or that I know everything will be okay, but right now I have hope and I am happy and I can enjoy things, and I want to live. At least for now, I want to stay alive and see what happens.
My chest is tight and painful just thinking this stuff, it's terrifying. Being happy and having hope is terrifying.
I started feeling like maybe I was happy sometimes last week, I think, there was a day when I went to the library in the morning with D and then K came round and we hung out in the afternoon and talked about lots of stuff and then I wandered along the beach and talked lots with L and I realized I was enjoying myself, with all of them. I'd started the day feeling not so great, and was feeling a bit shut-in and crazy and anxious but relaxed over the course of the library tour and got better pretty much as the day went on. At the end of the day I stopped and looked back and felt this sense of... achievement, maybe? Kind of a sense of wonder too. I'd had a good day. All day. I'd spent time with my friends and enjoyed it. I was scared to acknowledge it as happiness - it's hard to explain exactly why. Partly I wasn't even sure if it was, weird though that sounds. Emotions can be bizarrely hard to identify sometimes. More so when they're ones you aren't used to having. Partly I was scared that if I acknowledged it it might go away. I was sort of scared I could be wrong, that I might label it as happiness when it wasn't, it was just hypomania or just not-depression, and it felt weirdly important that when I identified myself as feeling happiness it was definitely real. I needed to be sure, or it wouldn't count. Part of what's made it so hard to hang on when my mood's dropped of late is that I haven't been able to remember being happy, not really. I've been able to enjoy sex and sometimes food and music/dancing, but pretty much nothing else, and they're the closest I've come to actual happiness, and because they're such small defined things, just moments, they didn't really feel like they counted, they weren't enough, they didn't reach all the way down. They were very limited happinesses. They were very important, and without them I don't think I'd have made it through, but they still weren't enough to count as proper happiness, just happy being alive kind of happiness, happiness that wasn't directly stimulated by some kind of physical/sensory input, and only present as long as that stimulus continued.
Since then, on and off, I've felt... happy, I think. More and more often.
I'm not sure whether I'm still up or if this is just what being happy is like. I *think* I'm probably still a little up, but I'm not sure.
My opinion of myself has risen massively, I feel intelligent again, and talented, and capable of achieving things, and I feel... there's no non-up-myself way to say this, but kind of better than a lot of people. In my defence, most people are really stupid :P It's very hard to know from my point of view whether this is hypomania-induced inflation of ego, or if it's just the depression lifting and allowing me to see and acknowledge my own strengths again. Either way, right now I feel like I'm a pretty awesome person, and if I could get past the bloody crazies and the pain and fatigue limiting me I could do pretty much anything I set my mind to. Which does sound pretty arrogant, but then a lot of people have told me before that I *am* fucking intelligent and talented and could do pretty much anything I set my mind to, so... *shrugs*
I'm not tapping and twitching, and my brain doesn't feel fizzy. I *am* however thinking a lot, words and thoughts and ideas are flowing very freely. It's so wonderful to be able to think again. The depression makes me so stupid, and the bad hypomania makes it impossible to concentrate and focus, I get bits and pieces of thoughts but the next one takes over before the first one can finish, and I'll forget where I started, and everything is scattered. I can feel like I'm having fantastically important ideas and thoughts, that I'm seeing things more clearly, and my ideas are profound, but I can't pin any of them down long enough to examine them. I'm not like that right now, I can follow a thought through to its conclusion most of the time. My brain feels very alive and active and fertile.
My libido is... um. Up. But I've just started my period and that often has this effect on me as well. And there's nothing wrong with a healthy sex drive.
The most basic test I established last year was 'do I want to get my nipple pierced?' - for some reason every time I was hypomanic I would become obsessed with the idea of getting my nipple pierced, to the point of once deciding I had to do it RIGHT NOW, going all round town and being unable to find somewhere that was open, so going to a pharmacy and getting a sharps kit (the kind intended for drug addicts) and trying to pierce it myself with the syringe, after numbing it with ice and difflam (anaesthetic spray for sore throats). I couldn't numb it enough to stop the pain, and I'd calmed down somewhat by the time I'd done all this so I ended up abandoning it without doing any significant damage in the end, luckily. Normally it would just be a thought in my head running in the background, I could be doing anything, and my brain would just keep coming back to this idea of the sensation of my right nipple having a bar through it, or the sensation of a needle going through it (it wasn't a realistic sensation, it wasn't horrifically painful like actually shoving a needle through my nipple would be, it was an imagined lessened pain that was really appealing). When I wasn't hypomanic then I felt relatively unfussed about the idea of having my nipple pierced - not exactly opposed to it, but didn't really care much about it, and felt like the potential problems wouldn't be worth the advantages - I don't have a great track record with piercings.
Anyway, going by that measure, yes I'm up, but not by lots. It's not an intrusive thought that keeps coming into my head, but it's a really appealing idea, and now that I've thought about it I've got that imagined sensation of a bar through it in my head and it's really appealing and kind of a turn on. The imagined pain of piercing is appealing too, although not as insistently as it has before, and I'm still very much aware it wouldn't be pleasant in real life.
Fluid - I've been trying to think of the right word to describe the sensation in my brain right now, and I think that's it. My mind feels very fluid right now. Flowing and liquid and fluid. You know how pleasing it can feel being underwater, the way you move, that gentle resistance from the water and yet how easily you can slide through it, and it moves with you, and how weightless you are, and the water holds you without smothering you. How freeing it feels. My mind feels like that right now.
I should probably admit that I'm also sitting here typing this, and before that was singing and recording myself singing and looking for backing tracks to sing along to and record and post online, when I should be tidying and cleaning before my flat inspection tomorrow. It feels like I have plenty of time and I'll easily be able to get everything finished and I'm enjoying myself right now and I don't want to go do boring things. I'm enjoying myself and I want to carry on enjoying myself.
Looking at this head on I can see that this is probably unwise, I know my pain will interfere and I will only be able to work for short periods at a time, and that I will get tired and sleepy, so if I delay too long I won't be able to get it all done tonight. I just don't want to take that into account, I feel like it'll be fine, I'll be able to push through it, but I know from experience that it doesn't work that way. My mind keeps slipping away from that knowledge though, keeps putting it off anyway, wants to do fun things, feels like it'll be fiiiiiiiine. I don't want to medicalise regular old procrastination, but this *does* fit my thought patterns when I'm up very well. I procrastinate all the time, but when I'm up I'm always convinced that I can totally do it later, I'm not putting it off and trying to ignore the fact that I won't be able to get it finished in time, I'm convinced that I *will* be able to do it, I feel completely capable and able to achieve anything. I feel powerful and in control.
Anyway, this post has gotten a tad long, when it was really just going to be essentially 'hey, I feel happy. And I keep panicking because I feel happy. Weird.', so I should probably end it. And I really should get on with tidying and cleaning :/ Although I think I'm probably just going to go read or write something else as soon as I publish this. I really need more self control. For all I've identified my thoughts and assumptions and the fallacies therein, I still feel on a gut level that it'll be fine and I'll totally be able to do it in a little while and enjoying myself right now feels more important.
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