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lyraeon · 7 years

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Hi! Sorry for intruding, and you definitely don't have to answer if this too personnal or invasive, but I've been wondering if my depression might be a bipolar one for a while now, only I don't always see myself in the way people talk about mania/hypomania, only sometimes I do? And the way you described mania being /straightforwardly frustrating/ sort of spoke to me, so I was wondering if you could explain what you meant by that? (or direct me to posts where you have?) Huge thanks!

Hello friend!

I’m sure I have other posts about it somewhere, but short of digging through my whole relevant tag, I wouldn’t know where to look for them. But I don’t mind explaining overall.

First of all, if your depression seems to come and go, but not necessarily be replaced by hypomania or mania, it may be something else. Seasonal Affective Disorder is the most common alternative, but Cyclothymia is also a thing, and should especially be looked up if your depression also never hits a bottomless pit level. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “well, it’s not THAT bad, so I guess I’m ONLY cyclothymic and I shouldn’t worry about it” or whatever though!! That’s just the depression talking and trying to keep you down. Ignore it.

I don’t know if I get manic or hypomanic, doctors have consistently disagreed about it. But, I know I have two main modes of mania, though they can bleed into each other.

There winds up being talk about hallucinations, self-harm, and graphic nightmares in this, so if that’s gonna bug anyone reading this, J on past it

Hyperactive mania:

What is sleep? This is not me procrastinating sleep or being distracted by other things, this is me flat out not needing more than 3-4 hours of sleep a night and having trouble getting to sleep to begin with, not in an insomnia “I’m so tired but can’t settle down” way but in a “I don’t feel tired unless I drink or take sleeping pills or otherwise really wear myself out” way.

Zero focus - I have little to no attention span most of the time to begin with (I suspect I have ADHD but most doctors will be reluctant to diagnose that in addition to bipolar, since mania has a lot of overlap). This typically gets worse during mania; I will repeatedly get up out of my chair to walk laps around my house, often gesturing wildly and definitely talking out loud to myself if no one’s home. I’ll sometimes try to play music to get the energy out to that, but rarely get through a single verse before skipping to the next.

Hyperfocus - and when I do manage to focus on something, (which has to either be something I’m REALLY ENJOYING or something social) I will get dragged into it for 14 hours and only snap out of it if I need a bathroom break or something. The Sims is a common one, not just for me but for a lot of people from what I hear. I always know something was a hyperfocus and not a thing I really wanted to do in general because after 3 days - 2 weeks of the thing I won’t touch it again for months or years. My last manic fit involved playing a sim city phone game for 6-7 hours a day and binge watching multiple people’s entire hermitcraft 4 season. The one before that had me playing rollercoaster tycoon constantly.

sex drive - suddenly characters and celebrities I had not previously regarded as hot are hot. Suddenly I have 15 AO3 tabs open. I feel like people who know me well can notice my mania just by how often and what gets reblogged to my NSFW blog.

poor decision making - I’m far more likely to buy ice cream or alcohol or other things I don’t need to be spending my money on. I’m far more likely to give in to the whole not sleeping thing, or to take sleeping meds despite cutting it way too close to when I have to be up the next day. I lose my verbal filter. I still don’t know if the fact I don’t do anything life-ruiningly stupid is evidence I’m only hypomanic, not manic, or just my anxiety keeping me in check.

Intense emotions - I cried at a University of Phoenix ad yesterday y’all. I also in general am not one to cheer or yell at something happening on TV/in a video, but get more invested when manic and react on a level closer to when I’m actively playing a game or something.

But there’s also the frustrating side (not that the above isn’t often frustrating, just that the above are more associated with positive emotions or at least not a pervasive Stressed Out feeling)

Easily frustrated - I am not one to get mad, normally. I actually get criticized for just letting things slide that obviously upset me/”you keep saying it’s okay right after saying it’s not okay”. I don’t know how to handle getting mad due to gaslighting issues growing up that I won’t get into right now so when I do start getting mad, it tends to build up until I find myself tense and literally stomping mad and sitting in the car screaming in frustration (because if I scream in the house someone might hear me). I also snap at people far, far more often when manic, losing any patience I would typically have and sometimes going for passive aggressive gouges if what they’re annoying me with has built up over a couple days as opposed to instantly. For example, yelling at people who are in my raid group.

nightmares - dear god the nightmares. I will do things in them that I find barely or completely unquestionable in them, then wake up freaked the fuck out because I just - well, we’ll go with today’s example, which is that I fuckin shot my dog in my dream, and for no apparent reason! Death is a pervasive thing in these, including me getting jolted awake by my own death in them, but unstoppable torrents of water are also common as is things just not making any sense - an object I’m holding turning into something else the moment I try to give it to someone else is also something that happens a lot

tense - dear god do my shoulders and back hurt, and not my normal everyday chronic arthritis pain, because that’s in the joints. This is every muscle pulled as tight as it will go and locked, and often carries a sensation of “the only way to fix this is to literally claw them off the bones”. Upper back is the most common but my forearms come next (especially near my elbows) and every major muscle can feel that way if I’m far enough gone. This used to lead to self-harm in the form of me scraping at those areas trying to make the sensation stop (and has lead to weird masochism stuff), but it’s something I consciously avoid now. I’ll usually try to rub at them or stretch to relieve the tightness, but often sleeping it off is my only real recourse.

really, really, REALLY unable to focus - I can’t get through two minutes of a video without pausing it. I skip every song 4 seconds in and instead of just feeling like they don’t fit quite right, each song feels like it’s personally offending me by not being the right one and I eventually give up and take off my headphones in a huff. I’ll forget I was loading the dishwasher halfway through. I’ll keep doing one more little task and one more little task for hours to procrastinate simple things like eating or walking the dog. I always in general have trouble finishing my sentences sometimes, because I’ll lose words or I’ll wind up reading/hearing something mid-sentence, but it becomes every third sentence.

Itchy - everything feels wrong. My hair has to be pinned up as thoroughly as possible so it can’t touch my skin, my glasses have to be perfectly clean because the smudges will piss me off, my clothes have to be just right so they don’t touch my skin in ways that will make me jump/itch like if my hair touches me, any rough edge of my nails or cuticles has to immediately be chewed off, if there’s a weird hair or a zit or a scab anywhere on me I will be picking at it instantly, whatever I’m sitting or laying on is too lumpy, etc. My scalp itches regardless of when I last washed my hair, but washing my hair sounds dreadful because the sensation of wet hair weighing me down is even worse (vs it normally being a soothing sensation to me). My ears itch!! it’s maddening and distracting.

noise and light sensetivity - everything is too bright and too loud! I’ll have as many lights off as possible (sitting in the dark, showering in the dark, screens all as dim as they will go; I’ll often close my eyes or blindfold myself if I really need to concentrate on something I’m typing or listening to). I try to get white noise because background sounds like the dog walking around will drive me batty, but white noise will give the same “wrong one” sensation as music, and if I notice ANY repetition in the white noise (obvious bird loops for example) unless I have deliberately chosen a repetitive melody because it feels right, I will snap and have to turn it off and probably just cover my ears for a while.

The sensation that shit would suck less if I was drunk right now, because that would either “at least give me something to do” or “make all of this funny instead of annoying” (but alcohol only intensifies what I’m feeling, so if I’m “good” manic it makes me super happy and if I’m frustrated manic I just get angrier)

just an overall sense that everything is wrong and there’s nothing I can do about it and unlike when I’m depressed, wherein I feel like it’s all my fault and I probably deserve to die because of it, it all just pisses me off more and makes me need to get up and wander around. in the less extreme of these moments, I end up trying to figure out lists of what needs to be done, but getting frustrated trying to think that hard. In the worse ones, things will be blown out of scale and I’ll be plagued not just by the problems in my own life but by how fucking frustrating it is not to be able to fix, oh, our broken government, or how frustrating it is that I don’t have the money to just buy us a house right this second, etc.

hallucinations - this is top floor mania for me. The only thing above it is the roof that I will sometimes lay on at 2 in the morning, limbs spread as wide as possible for minimal skin contact, laughing uncontrollably on the inside while feeling paralyzed. My hallucinations are “mild” ones - I’ve only had one or two visual flashes in my life, everything else has been sounds, and it’s rarely been even words, let alone more. it’s usually alarms and sometimes music. I’ll hear my boyfriend’s alarm going off, or the fire alarm going off, or my own alarm going off, or my family’s burglar alarm going off, etc. This is one that meds have been royally good at keeping under control and I’ve only had breakthroughs of it when I’m also sleep deprived.

-basically, mania is fUCKING FRUSTRATING AS ALL GET OUT because you have all this energy but nothing FEELS RIGHT so nothing gets DONE, 99.94% of the time.

The additional problem for me with breakthrough mania - that is, symptoms that happen despite my medication keeping me mostly “normal” - is that it rarely brings any of the positive aspects that make being manic at least fun in the moment, if not sometimes genuinely worth it. I can get a LOT done when manic if I can take advantage of it before the bad symptoms set in, and I suspect a lot of my current writer’s block issues are because I’m not getting the same kind of hyperfocus days that I used to. But boy do I still itch sometimes, boy are my shoulders craving for me to go rub on a tree like a bear, boy is my stomach cranky because I’m so hungry but eating food sounds like a horrifying chore because what if it doesn’t taste right, etc.

I don’t really know how to explain exactly what I mean by the emotions feeling stunted, but it’s sort of like trying your hardest to find the can opener because you know it’s got to be somewhere, but it’s not anywhere you’re looking, except the can opener is your ability to be excited about this thing you wanted to do, or is your ability to be mad about something you know for a fact you’re pissed about, but you get stuck sitting there just dully frustrated instead because you can only read the label of the can, not actually experience the contents? Or maybe like opening it and finding store brand, “no sugar added” peaches instead of the really good del monte overly sweet stuff; your emotions themselves just feel lackluster compared to what you know they can be.

If a lot of this sounds familiar - if you’re like, yeah I get really annoyed easily and get sensory issues etc but I thought I didn’t get mania because I’ve never been pulled over in vegas going 110 in a 45 and all the media presents of mania is that and crazy chicks putting themselves $12,000 in debt overnight and waking up with no recollection of it - then you probably have hypomanic bipolar. If little bits sound familiar but they always are accompanied by existential dread and/or the pervasive sense you’ve gotta keep moving Or Else, it could be some sort of anxiety disorder. Parts of this list also overlap with autism, or with ADHD, or with BPD, just depending on which symptoms you have.

By my understanding, the one cornerstone of any form of mania is that you feel like you have more energy than normal; not more energy than depressed you, but an actual excess. That energy can fade fast/turn out to be just a sensation and not actual energy, but the sensation is still there, and usually fucks with your sleep.

Hopefully that helped. If it didn’t, or if it did but there’s something else you want to know, feel free to shoot me another anon or a message. I might be slow to respond because my sleep schedule is currently fucked to three more hells than normal, but I will definitely do what I can to help.

#bipolar disorder #mania #bipolar #mental health #lyra's gone full on spazzbucket #tw self harm #tw hallucinations

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