I stutter. This isn't right, I'm relatively well spoken. I try again, the words are stuck, caught on the edge of my tongue. I get told to take a blue pill. My legs are trembling, my hands are constantly running through my hair. Who is this man at the end of my table, I look back down at the wood and then look to my right.
All I remember is I screamed at my family, I think it was my Mum, Dad and Grandma.
The wood is familiar, I just stare at it some more like its the only thing in the world that really knows how I feel. just an object, motionless, locked in place for people to just walk around and lean on.
It's that fucking man again, who is he? did I just take a pill he gave me? What if this was the man from the garden, he told them where I was. Let's rip into him, I'm angry, I have a colourful pallet of words to paint a foul picture with, lets pull him to pieces and put him in his place with his tie preferably around his neck.
I still can't speak, I'm like a skipping vinyl, vinyl, vinyl, vinyl.
I choose to not speak at all. This frustrates me even more, why did they take my voice away from me?
Strangely this super power hearing that I had acquired decided to turn against me. The clock ticks, the man speaks, the dog walks around in the back room, the cars drive past my house. The hardest part about the world happening around me was it all sounded the same level to me.
So not only could I not speak but everything was washing over me like a flood, all consuming.
Larazopram became a stable part of my diet just like your multi vitamins you take in the morning, "Don't let him take this for more than two weeks, it's highly addictive, you don't want a suicidal pill popping super hero junkie in your house do you!"
I take it for a little under four months.
This was the little blue pill I'd taken, this was not the man in black from the garden, this was a man from a mental hospital. The only reason I wasn't hospitalised was lack of space, or I head to York to be locked up. I tell them if I'm put in a room where I can't have shoe laces I would go out of my way to kill myself on their watch, I'm pretty sure this is one of many times I see my family cry over the next few weeks.
The speeding bullet train of thoughts, emotion and static all come to a strange halt, I'm melting like an ice cream in the sun, I start to slip in my chair a little more. They make me give them all of my medication and they decide it's best to turn up at my house everyday with the medication I should take as they're rather alarmed by the 3 boxes of medication I had in my room, I don't know where they'd come from.
They put me on Venlafaxine which I'm still on to this day which had slowly gone from 150mg to 250mg this is a different anti depressant an SNRI instead of an SSRI kind of like anti depressant plus or a newer better model dealing with things differently in the brain.
I'm also put on Risperidone as he's worried I might be schizophrenic.
I also have Zopiclone which is the sleeping tablet that didn't work, when they upped it and mixed it with all those drugs listed above apparently I turned into a dead weight and looked like I was on a high.
I wake up in the morning feeling like I'd been hit by a train, one of the side effects of Risperidone is muscle and joint pains and my god was that pain apparent. I remember being forced to take them as I didn't want to because of how much I hurt.
My stutter doesn't get any better, I trip over every word I try and say when the person appears in the morning with a little white box, I do remember being obsessed with putting them in order, straight and regimented, probably because that was the only thing I had control of in my life.
One day I remember being 'good' because it was cake day Friday, I scream at the man that can't give me medication now, call him a cunt and go to my room.
My behaviour became more irrational over time, every day my dad would take me to get a mocha in the morning from costa and I had to hold his hand because I'd like to try and run in front of cars.
I play Dragon Age, My Dad buys me my preorders of Super Smash Bro's U and Pokemon Sapphire as I'm not working and have no money. I can only manage 3 hours and then the haunting feeling comes back over me and I panic, time for Mr Blue Pill.
I try and break all of my fingers, I try and pull all my hair out, I try to break both my arms, I lay on the sofa screaming because I just don't understand anything and I'm under a quilt, I've now decided I'd have some ticks to add to the acute hearing and stutter, My brothers spend that visit crying as it's the first time they see me. That's when they realise my illness is very real and true as they've fully realised it's potential.
I can't tell you any dates or when and what order these all happened, this is just how it came out in text, It's stitched together pretty well I think. This covered November 6th till around 26th December 2014, I know this because I posted a blog on that day about Smash Brothers. I have changed it though since it's first golden publishing. Don't know what that looked like!
The next nine months is spent in recovery worried I'm going to relapse at any point, I'm the sun, I'm well into my life at this point, I'm 25. Everybody's waiting for the Red Giant event to happen where I start to just consume everything close to me and destroy it, I'm not burning as bright as before and everything has a shitty filter to it. My facial expression is dead, I'm not eating, I spend most of the day in my pyjamas, If I leave my house It's to see some medical person and my clothes are over my pjs.
Dead eyed and gaunt, pasty white and sickly looking, white sunken black sockets where those judgmental eyes scan this fuck pit of a world for some way out. When I get told "Isn't Bipolar just having a bad day, get over it" I wish I could put them in that version of my life and see what they think, Just remember kids, no bandage, no problem.
The man I meet next hands me that title on a piece of paper, I notice the fact that it also claims I'd had amnesia for the past 6 weeks as I couldn't recall a thing that had just happened, I still thought it was October and we were well into January now, when I say I start to remember things it means I have a better idea of time and the way things are pieced together.
Bipolar Disorder Type II.
The title, finally. Nine years later and that title is on a piece of paper, that doctor that saw me 9 years ago should have listened to the ant that fully understood the world, the alarmed doctor that I fucked with had reason to be alarmed, the woman that told me I was having a bad day even though I filled in her stupid form could go play with a rock in the centre of a motorway, all of them wrong, every moment I lost control, every aspect of my life I changed because I was more informed than the qualified person in front of was all for this moment.
What's worse is that to get the appointment with this Psychiatrist I had to nearly kill myself on multiple occasions just to get the attention and acceptance in their books to get looked at, its not to say that I didn't have times after where I locked myself in the bathroom staring at a pair of scissors and a razor with the intentions to visit the worm infested box in the ground. Luckily I was with my Dad and within 30 seconds he'd realised I'd been too long and sorted things out but those 'Kill yourself' voices never seemed to go away.
I'm in that office with my Mum for I don't know how long but when he sits down with my Mum she asks "Is he Bipolar", "Oh NO DOUBT" this man reply's.
"It's as clear as day."
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Peace and love.
Caleb, FI5H5TICK5 and every name inbetween.
