paranoia

Kanye West is Bipolar?

| marandarussell

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A couple days ago, I was watching Kanye West’s “interview” in the White House Oval Office with Donald Trump. I must admit I mostly wanted to watch it just to see what kind of crazy stuff Kanye would come up with. To be frank, he has always seemed a little like a loose cannon, even back in the days when he announced that George W. Bush didn’t care about black people, or when he interrupted Taylor Swift during her award speech to say that Beyonce should have won.

However, when I heard Kanye say during his recent interview that he had been diagnosed bipolar, suddenly, a lot of things clicked into place. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but Kanye does come across as highly manic in his speech sometimes, especially when he is all worked up about things and causes a scene. He definitely seems to have pressured speech (his words just flow out everywhere and in every direction), and I recognize flight of ideas as well (his train of thought is often hard to follow, he shares his thoughts in a way that definitely isn’t always linear or seemingly coherent). Kanye often appears paranoid during these times as well.

I heard that after the interview, Kanye was asked about the bipolar diagnosis and said something along the lines that he thought he was misdiagnosed or he had somehow been cured (contradictory thoughts together). Even this reminds me of manic episodes, after all, what is more predictable than someone with bipolar denying their disease or refusing treatment when in the throes of mania?

Anyhow, my main point is that as someone who has bipolar type 2 myself, I do have empathy for whatever Kanye is dealing with mentally, even if I don’t agree with some of his bizarre or outlandish statements.

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A Night Full of Nightmares

| marandarussell

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Last night I had a bunch of nightmares. In fact, I woke up feeling like that was all I did all night – face some of my darkest fears. These nightmares didn’t feature vampires, ghosts, ax murderers, clowns, or spiders…they featured the person I love the most in the world, my husband.

In these dreams my husband turned cruel and cold. He stopped caring about me. He wanted to leave me or even kill me. The betrayals started small in the dreams, with him choosing friends over me and simply being uncaring and dismissive of my feelings, but they accelerated as the dreams went on and turned to him expressing extreme hatred towards me and even trying to stage an “accident” to get rid of me.

Let me say that these dreams ARE NOT representative of my husband’s treatment of me. We have been together 15 years and he has been wonderful. Caring, patient, understanding, loving, forgiving….all of these are adjectives that fit him perfectly. He always puts me first before anyone else, often, even before himself.

So why the bad dreams? My guess is PTSD. When you grow up in an unstable environment with mentally ill, abusive, and selfish people who often put their own desires before your needs, it fucks you up for life. You always feel unworthy. You always feel like the rug of security can be pulled out from beneath your feet at any time. You feel like you don’t deserve good things, and if you do happen to get love and affection, you are suspicious and paranoid about it. How I wish I could just forget the past.

Late Night, Can’t Sleep Thoughts

| marandarussell

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The following is a journal entry of random thoughts and feelings I wrote down one night when I couldn’t sleep. As you can probably tell, I wasn’t in the best mood when I wrote it:

“Lately I’ve been deeply struggling with so many dark thoughts. Not necessarily dark thoughts about myself, but about the world and humanity in general.

I feel like I have lost all sense of personal ethics and could do anything if pushed far enough. Lie. Steal. Kill. Betray. I don’t feel guilty about this though, because I think it is a universal human weakness. I’m not sure that ethics and morality even exist once you push a human being past rational thought.

One thought resounds through my consciousness, that much of humanity isn’t worth the breath that is wasted on them. The twisted side of me wants to see the world burn, even if I burn with it. I am often confronted with the very real possibility that the world would be better off if humans went extinct.”

*By the way, if you are struggling with feelings like these, BetterHelp offers some great advice about online therapy options!

 

Psychiatrist Visit Anxiety

| marandarussell

Today I see my psychiatrist again. These appointments make me nervous because there is always worry that my meds might get changed and I might have a bad reaction to another one, like I did the Cymbalta. I also often wonder what to share with him. I want to be as honest and open as possible, so I get the best treatment, but I also sometimes have a tendency to overshare or over-explain things that might not be pertinent.

I figure the things that I should share with him most this visit are my “episodes” of rage and paranoia the past couple months, even though they only lasted a few days to a week each. I have actually had a couple “episodes” of feeling almost hopeful and optimistic recently, so that is good I think. It was really odd that during one of these times of having at least a few days in a row of feeling pretty good, I had one of the worst days I have had in a while, where I was so horribly depressed and so full of despair that I sat on the couch holding a bottle of pills and wishing I could take them all and maybe not have to wake up again, but of course, I know that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Especially to my husband. Oddly enough, the very next day I was back to feeling fairly decent overall.

I also always wonder how much to address my physical problems with the psychiatrist. After all, he isn’t a doctor who treats those conditions, but those conditions greatly affect my depression and anxiety levels. When the physical pain is extremely bad for a few days in a row, that tends to bring on a kind of despair that is hard to cope with. It blackens my view of my entire future and makes me honestly feel sometimes that life isn’t worth living if you have to be in this kind of pain. I probably should take my Tramadol (opioid pain killers) more during those times, but I am afraid of becoming dependent on it if I take it too often.

Well, thank you for listening to me overthink things as I always do lol.

The Spice Girls of Depression

| marandarussell

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Last night my back pain got so bad that I may have accidentally overdosed on muscle relaxers. I was thinking my prescription allowed me to take up to 3 muscle relaxers at a time, but I was wrong, apparently it was only 2 at a time…and I took 4. I’m not sure if there is actually much danger in that, but I probably should be more careful.

Yesterday was also a horrible depression day for me. I think the combination of physical pain and the despair I feel sometimes about the seeming meaninglessness of life makes for a perfect storm. It probably didn’t help that I attended a group early in the day that talked about the sometimes apparent pointlessness of life when you are agnostic or atheist.

So, last night I was watching YouTube videos (trying to distract myself from the depression) when I watched a video about the 20th anniversary of the Spice Girls. While I was watching it, I started thinking that my depression is kind of like the extremely popular but somewhat annoying 90’s girl group. Instead of Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary, and Ginger Spice, I have Paranoid Spice, Anxious Spice, Angry Spice, Sad Spice, and Hopeless Spice living in my head. Thinking about all these emotions personified in ridiculously dressed, cheesy girl group images did make me chuckle a bit. Imagine those dance routines!

Rages and Paranoia

| marandarussell

The past couple months I have been all over the place emotionally and mentally. I plan to go over all this with my psychiatrist when I see him later this month, but felt I would share here some of what I’ve been going through.

It is kind of weird because I have had several bouts of certain types of emotions/feelings that were overwhelming and lasted at least a few days to a week. For around a week last month, I had a real issue with rage. Not just anger, but pure rage. I hate it when I have these rages, because I normally end up taking it out on myself or my things because I don’t want to inflict it on anyone else but have to get it out somehow. Sometimes during these rages I destroy personal things that I later regret. I don’t cut or do anything physical that leaves real scars, but I do sometimes pinch myself or dig my nails into my skin as hard as I can, just to get the anger out and because acute physical pain can be a way to distract yourself from intense emotional pain.

A few weeks after the rage phase, I went through an odd type of paranoia. I just kept having nightmares every night, one after another. All of the nightmares were either about home intruders or something scary chasing me. The first night it started I had a full night of nightmares about home intruders. I became so paranoid I had to get up and double check all the locks in the house and make sure every door was closed and locked between the outside doors and my room. I was tempted to sleep with a knife nearby (which I actually have done in the past when I was afraid of something like this), but instead, I settled on sleeping with my phone next to me. I have never been a victim of a home invasion and currently live in a safe neighborhood, so this paranoia seems odd to me.

This past week I have actually had a positive upturn, where I have felt fairly happy and almost a little hopeful. These extremes of emotion I have felt recently do make me wonder if maybe the bipolar diagnosis is correct. I have never really understood why I had these rages and paranoia episodes, but if I am truly bipolar, that probably would explain it (although my PTSD could easily be a culprit as well I suppose). It is tempting once these episodes are over to make excuses for them or to try to convince myself they weren’t as bad as they really were, but that is being dishonest with myself and won’t help me learn to deal with these problems in a healthy way.

I was a paranoid kid…is that normal?

| marandarussell

Tonight I’ve been thinking about what a paranoid kid I used to be. I started thinking about the subject when 3 of my cats started acting totally crazy tonight. For some reason they are agitated, anxious messes and seem to think there is something scary in one area of the house, even though I see nothing there. It was starting to creep me out a bit since I am the only adult awake in the house right now. So those thoughts brought back childhood fears and paranoid delusions. Now I am wondering is every kid the freaked out mess I was? Here are a few examples:

  • As a kid I firmly believed that Satan lived under my bed. I have no recollection of where this idea came from, but it was firm. If I happened to have an arm or a leg hanging over the edge of the bed at night, I believed that was an invitation to Satan to grab hold of me and pull me under into Hell. Even after all these years, I still find myself unconsciously trying to keep from having an arm or leg dangle off the bed
  • I also believed that at night three witches would meet in my room to brew potions and cast spells. As long as they thought I was asleep, I thought I would be safe, but I knew if they noticed I was awake, they would have to kill me.
  • One of my childhood friends (I can’t remember who) told me that Freddy Krueger could get to you through the bath tub drain. His metal hand would come up and slice you to death right in the tub. For that reason I was super scared to take a bath for a while.
  • Then there were my dreams. One of a group of nuns abducting me, tying me up and sewing my mouth shut so I couldn’t scream. Another of Jesus visiting and turning into Satan right before my eyes. The one where my mom and dad were getting married in my grandparents’ yard and Satan showed up, wrapped his cape around them and took them to Hell in a fiery exit. And last, but not least, the great cosmic dream where God and Satan fought a major battle over my living room coffee table (apparently it was their biggest fight to date for some reason). Can you tell yet, that I seemed to have a childhood obsession with Satan for some reason? Maybe it was because my grandfather was a hellfire and brimstone preacher…honestly, I really don’t remember why I feared Satan so much.

So what do you think? Was I extra-neurotic as a kid or are these pretty common fears among children? What were your weird fears as a kid?