It's as clear as day

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."

Come show some love

My Twitter is @winslowbateman
My Instagram is www.instagram.com/fi5h5tick5/
also I have Twitch www.twitch.tv/fi5h5tick5/profile

Peace and love.

Caleb, FI5H5TICK5 and every name inbetween.

A half painted portrait of a glass half full.

Hey kids, lets do something fun today. Lets learn about me, a 27 year old failure that's destined for a life of nothing, with the imagination to be something and the promotional skills of that football team you haven't heard of, exactly, that made no sense, why? because you haven't heard of them and that's the point I'm getting to.

I can't sell myself, maybe like that, but probably not because I'm getting fat in old age. I convinced someone far to beautiful and clever to marry me, so much so when I proposed I told her I was miserable but the only person I wanted to be miserable with was her. Charmer right! Get in line.

So why this post? Because every so often I realise I'm a wasted talent, and how do I know that? because I tend to know more about games than the people working in the games stores. I consume so much media in the subject it frustrates me that I have no way of sharing it with anyone. I talk at my partner, 'At' being the key word in that small sentence.

So for probably the fourth or fifth time in my life I had a 'Fuck it' moment and decided to try all over again. Now I've suffered a lot in the past two years, I'm incredibly open about the subject matter because I don't let my illness define me, until it defines me and I become a living nightmare, but after that experience and years of being told to express myself I wrote a blog, It was terrible, badly spelt and I can't even remember what it was about, but after all that I'd done it.

Seems as this is a relaunch like Marvel Now or DC Rebirth I'll fill you in with the fact I'm Bipolar. Don't know what that is? Google it. It's awful. I love it.

Step one done, It had been read, when I logged in the next day not just once but actually 100 times in total, that blew my already blown up mind.

My anxiety of expressing myself had disappeared as I'd taken a step, a baby step but an incredibly theraputic one, an incredibly brave one. It helped me so much over an awful period in my life where I felt lost and helpless, an outlet for an incredibly frustrated, outspoken and anxious person. I stuck too it for months, I kept at it for months, every day, every other day, every week, once a month, now.

Now in that time i'd had some experiences with different things, all hugely positive but then the defining illness came and fucked me hard and forgot the lube. I was writing for an American website, a start up. I covered news and reviews for games, I adored it. I stopped.

Twitch, oh man was it addictive! I got to be myself on camera and people loved it, I played games, I got angry I gained a small gathering of 300 followers in 2 months. I stopped.

So when I was fucked by illness my brain shut down, basic things are impossible, all my aspirations and dreams fall away from me and reality becomes a dream. Life is better when your living in your own deluded brain, Joke all you will about Bipolar. Every person I've ever told has no fucking clue what it is. They tell me to smile and get over it.

I remember thinking someone was in my house and saw them in the kitchen, I remember trying to jump out of a car on a dual carriageway, being under 24 hour care, every time I was in public I wanted to run in front of a car and just fucking end it. I remember everything being brighter and talking so fast and nothing making any sense, I remember being awake for a week, I don't remember my brain being put under so much of an emotional beating that according to my psychaitrists record I had Amnesia for 6 weeks. I'll smile and get over that alright, sure my family where thinking the same thing whilst going through that experience. Thrown into the mix whilst this is going on is an addictive personality that over consumes everything and over analyses every small detail.

100% or 0%. I have no in between. I stopped.

Here we are again, after stopping when things were going the right way for me I decided to start again, I know right. Does it matter? Will I do it all over again? Maybe, but I have to try.

So what will I be doing? Well I'm obsessed with Gaming. I want to write about it, how? However I feel relevant. Reviews, discussions, very informal and all over the place like a Childs story. Mostly on a wall in crayon. I'm also interested in discussing my illness, games, routine and how to manage things when they seem impossible.

Basically I want to be blunt and honest with myself and everyone else, It might be polarising and not for everyone, but every time I have an opinion on a matter it is normally backed up by a fact, I look into what I disagree with also so I can see the opinion from both sides. Sounds like something everyone should do, but I've got into heated conversations with people when I've known more about their opinions point than they have.

I look at the Idea of video games through a magnifying glass. I often take to Twitter to say thank you to Indie developers for an amazing soundtrack or piece of art, sending them my reviews so they know what I thought about my experience, I want them to know how I got to the final result.

I buy the soundtracks, look into the history of the studio and try and buy the back catalogue, the artists involved with creating the feel and tone of the game and the writers telling the overall story. When you look deeper you get more of an appreciation for whats gone into it, tying that whole experience together.

Take away the music and background sound from Bioshock and play it, The game becomes so much easier, what you didn't realise was dictating your pace and that anxious feeling in your gut was the one thing you pay no attention too whilst emerged in that experience, take it away and it becomes a shooter with no jumps or build ups through sound alone.

Probably the most memorable soundtrack that I've brought recently was 'Everybody's Gone To The Rapture' by Jessica Curry. That soundtrack alone is enough to make you cry it's that beautiful, tied with an experience that is literally out of this world. She won a BAFTA for the soundtrack after I'd tweeted her, not that my tweet made that happen but, understandably so, its absolute bliss.

Other stupid facts about me are I have a huge tattoo of Cloud on my forearm, Final Fantasy VII is my ultimate favourite game, Being told not to play something because you won't understand it is all the fuel I need to play a game. I may also want to Call my Children Cloud and Ruby. Nothing to do with Final Fantasy VII at all!

I live in a small room in my grandparents home surrounded by comforts, firstly art from games framed on My wall. The Iconic Image of Joel and Ellie from The Last of us and an A3 image of Elizabeth falling from Columbia whilst Booker tries to catch her.

Drake also lives in my room. One form poster and the other a 3ft Cardboard cut out I may have borrowed from GAME.

I love collectors edition and art books also, I wish I could draw like those talented people. Probably my favourite is the art book for Witcher Wild Hunt.

Slowly I'm collecting more models but my favourite I own is Red from Transistor, Artists Jen Zee is literally insane and anything Super Giant Games touches I will throw my money at! I'm looking at you Pyre! Annoyingly though after again tweeting her to see if I could buy some original art she informed my its all digital, I cry.

Then we have all those Andrzej Sapkowski books, Oh how I love you. Next tattoo is for sure the wolf medallion on my hand. A polish writer who originally wrote the novels and short stories about Geralt before CD PROJEKT RED, a polish company also, Created that amazing world in real life.

So thats it, a small informed look into my life and the thing I love, GAMES.

One day I will make a name for my self, I don't want fame, I don't want fortune, I just want to entertain and help people.

Not sure what to call this? A diary in a sense. A half painted portrait of a glass half full.

A relaunch.

So yes I do have Twitter and Instagram, Currently I'm writing angry emails to Hello Games for selling me a game that's so broken its's crashed on me 18 times in 3 days.

Fuck you Sean Murray. I've got beef. You looked like the coolest person in the world selling your stolen Ideas. Then when it releases you change your tone immediately.

No paid DLC! free updates for every one, 7 days after launch, Might have to pay for that DLC ladies and gentlemen, maybe that'll contain a finished game! we all know it's Elite: Dangerous meets Minecraft and Johan Gielis's "Superformula" anyway. All I wanted was Joe Danger 3. I will get a refund. It may take a while but I will get my £70 back. why £70? because I brought the collectors edition because it came with an art book and steal case/comic. Fix it!

But enough about me being so mad I nearly broke my TV.

My Twitter is @winslowbateman
My Instagram is www.instagram.com/fi5h5tick5/
also I have Twitch www.twitch.tv/fi5h5tick5/profile

So come give me a follow, comment on what you like and share if you can as it would mean the world to me, I have a crappy back catalog of 71 posts on my blogspot so I'm sure one thing might entertain you.

Till next time people,

Caleb, FI5H5TICK5.