Please forgive the deep irony in the title. I don’t mean to start my first post of 2014 laden with sarcasm. But it is a revealing sign of where I am on my bipolar journey. Comfort and joy feel like a very long way away.
It has been a truly awful Christmas. Try as hard as I could – and despite the amazing love and support of my family – I simply could not lift myself out of the deep depression that has hung over me like a suffocatingly heavy blanket since I came home from hospital. And, of course, I beat up on myself for feeling this way – after all, I have everything going for me – but these truisms don’t help.
And the festive season really didn’t help. Despite not being particularly seduced by the commercialism of Christmas, there are a set of unspoken assumptions about embracing the jollity which simply wasn’t possible for me (and many other folk too).
The ‘silence’ of my last post became protracted and more debilitating. Now my sense of emptiness has developed into a blackness – like a deep, black void into which I have fallen, and am still falling, and from which there appears to be no escape.
And I simply don’t know what to do. My CBT tools still feel powerless to help. And I really don’t want to resort to more meds – I am already stressed out and paranoid about the concoction I am taking. Which leaves me in the void!
I’m beginning to understand what it is to feel hopeless.
Christmas
Silent night
Christmas was a silent experience.
Starting on Christmas Eve, I plunged into a real low. Try as hard as I might, I could not extricate myself. I was determined to be on good form for Christmas Day for the sake of my family. But when Christmas dawned, I was as low as I had been in quite a while. At one stage I simply burst into tears when my wife gave me a present.
I just sank into silence. The more I wanted to communicate, the more silent I became. I felt trapped within myself. It is a strange experience to ‘lose’ one’s voice when one is so desperate to talk.
But it’s more than being ‘unable’ to speak. It’s having nothing to say. It’s feeling utterly empty – devoid of anything worthwhile.
Sadly, this is not a new experience. It has been a recurrent and worsening feature of my bipolar lows. The feeling of emptiness is profound and disturbing. It’s as if there is no longer anything of substance to draw upon. All that I am seems to have evaporated. I am a pale shadow of my former self.
And I don’t know what to do about it. None of my CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) tools seem to help. My meds seemed to be helping but then my bipolar modulates again. I guess I need to relax into it rather than fretting, but that’s easier said than done. Meanwhile, my family and I need to learn to live with the silence.
A bizarre Christmas! But at least, trapped within my silence, I have had a lot of space for thinking – about the Christ-child providing a voice for the voiceless, filling the empty, and giving meaning amidst the meaningless. Happy Christmas!
doublenutty 