I ran out of olanzapine and had a manic episode and suffered through every minute of it and I just. I'm so goddamn fragile. Two little pills is the only thing that keeps me sane in the most literal sense of the word. If I miss a single night of olanzapine I don't sleep, I can hear my different trains of thoughts simultaneously talking in my head in various voices, I have visions when I close my eyes that sometimes are so vivid that I jump when they happen. I haven't told anyone about the severity of my mania because quite frankly I'm scared, I'm very scared. I know how I used to think, before all this -- people with bipolar disorder or whatever were just... I don't know how to phrase it. I viewed them as lesser, in some sense, it was a prejudice that I was entirely unaware of and never really attempted to correct. And I know there are plenty of people that think like that, and I really don't want anyone to classify me as lesser. So I just tell people, "when I don't take my medication I don't sleep." and it's not exactly necessary, because the olanzapine does control it quite a lot.
I feel myself cycling back and forth between enthusiasm and excitement for my writing projects, and a pervasive and smothering sense of hopelessness and weariness and exhaustion and just... neurosis, I guess. And I know I tend to use the word "neurosis" as a broad category to cover all facets of my proclivity for negativity, but sometimes I fear that my passive temperament has shifted over the past six years from something admirable to something morose.
I keep saying to myself "something needs to change soon, I can't keep doing this," but nothing changes, and I find that I am more persistent than I ever thought I could be. I deeply regret taking all those pills last year because I know for a fact I have brain damage. My memory is complete shit, I can't recall words as easily. But my compulsion toward suicidal ideation has evaporated and I don't know why. I suppose that's a good thing, but I experience no pleasure when I reflect on this fact. I remember when I was 19 or so I would tie the noose around my neck just to know what it would feel like, pulling it tight, letting the rope dig into my skin.
Ironically, that was the period of my life in which I was the most religious. It seems to me that my religious decay has coincided with a general improvement in my demeanor, probably because the sheer amount of self-hatred that religious guilt produced was a pathology that plagued my psyche. It's why I don't believe in Church anymore. I believe in the Christian God, but I don't believe in what Christianity has become, a collection of superstitions, jumping through a million loopholes to try to get everything to be self-consistent. Pathology.
I find myself passively wondering if perhaps there is some sort of inherent, idle, Bacchic compulsion/impulse in my psyche, a compulsion deeply rooted in some kind of hardwired subconscious circuit in the Ape in me. I almost wonder if the cognitive dissonance between many years of my influence by Stoicism (which I would also consider pathological) and this Bacchic impulse is what causes me so much goddamn anguish. I can almost hear my counselor talking to me now, "don't try to push these thoughts from your mind, simply observe them and return to the present." I question the efficacy of such a practice but I do so anyway. Get my money's worth, and all that.