Note to Self: Stop Whipping Life Into a Froth

Let us now consider Lena’s propensity to work herself up.

I wrote a great post yesterday, entertaining and resplendent with high drama. Rather than publish it last night, I decided to sleep on it. I’m glad I did, cause this morning I saw how skewed it was in the direction of “sucks to be me.”

I’ve talked a lot here these past two months about not sleeping due to hypomania. My psychiatrist now has me on a substantial dose of Geodon to knock that hypo into submission. I’m sleeping well again, so you’d think I’d be happy, right?

Here’s the catch. Geodon is gifting me with random zombie attacks.

Some days I’m ok all morning, but need a two-hour nap in the afternoon to function. Other days, the afternoons are ok, but I barely keep my eyes open in the morning.

Yesterday I had an 11 am conference call for work. At 10 am I was in a panic, crying, afraid I’d fall asleep during the meeting. Your clever girl, though, had the presence of mind to do her acupressure and then found that walking and doing one-arm bicep curls throughout the meeting kept her awake. Plus she got some nice arm-toning in the bargain.

Unsettling, but not a catastrophe.

My psychiatrist says this is temporary. In the meantime, I am so done with forgetting about eating mindfully. I so easily lose focus when I get lost in flurries of anger and panic about situations that end up resolving themselves.

My practice of eating with attention and gratitude enriches my whole life. I’ve even stopped stepping on my plants when I garden because I’m becoming more mindful in general. Especially now that things are challenging, I can use every smidgen of awareness I can get my hands on.

So. I got myself some Indian mango pickle yesterday. Much as I wanted to tear into it as soon as I got home, I remembered that I’d enjoy it more if I saved it for dinner. Had I stood at the kitchen counter eating it out of the jar, I would have barely registered it. Instead, I would have felt a little guilty and a little out of control.

It tasted mighty fine at dinner mixed with chicken and served up on a chapati.

Eight Times Down, Nine Times Up

Everybody has their own favourite version of “don’t give up,” right? I love the matter-of-fact Buddhist expression “eight times down, nine times up.” It assumes we’ve already failed to meet our (unrealistic?) goals a number of times. It implies that things aren’t hopeless, so we might as well get back up. And it doesn’t pressure you with a requirement to succeed: “You’d better get on the stick and do it already. If you don’t, well, forget about it cause you’re a schlub.”

As a way of living that emphasizes paying attention to the present moment, Buddhism isn’t particularly interested in achievements. Rather, it talks about being conscious and skillful in as many moments as possible. In meditation, we don’t expect that our thoughts won’t wander a bit, or even a lot. The point is to notice that our attention has drifted and to return to what we’re meditating on. That is mindfulness.

So why am I talking about all this? To gently encourage myself back to my mindful eating practice. I’ve done well with almost-daily meditation, which is quite an achievement (ahem, Lena, see paragraph two) in itself. Mindful eating, though, flew out the window, oh, two and a half–three weeks ago. I was disheartened to find myself bingeing three times last week. Haven’t binged that much in ages.

Eight times down and nine times up.

I suppose I could revel in the perverse satisfactions of some quality self-flagellation. I didn’t manage my recent bipolar fun without overeating and bingeing. I may do the same the next time I have an episode. Today, though, I’m back to sitting down when I eat, closing my eyes at times to taste the 10,000 flavours, and doing the dishes with respect and gratitude.

Reading the blogs of other people who work with eating issues and/or bipolar disorder encourages and inspires me. My thanks today to Carla at Rain and Clouds for her recent entries about forgiving herself, getting back on track, and celebrating what she’s been doing well as she heals her eating problems.

“For Health…” Poster created c. 1941 – 1945

“For Health…eat some food from each group…every day!”, 1941 – 1945, a photo by The U.S. National Archives on Flickr.

I love these WW II-era posters. But I’m confused……..I see neither coffee, nor garlic, nor Nutella groups.

But you’ll notice that potatoes were listed with the other vegetables and fruits. I’m sure they meant french fries (excuse me, freedom fries) and ketchup. I heard that the most commonly consumed vegetables in the U.S. do, in fact, come through french/freedom fries and ketchup.

“In addition to the basic 7…eat any other foods you want.”

Doritos

Bud Light

Cocoa Puffs

White Castle (Get ‘em by the sack!)

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Loose-Leaf Notebook Paper with Paste

Wheat Grass Juice

Krispy Kreme

Ok, Lena, let’s get back to work.

A Coming to Terms

Another tough week. But I think I may finally be getting to the other side of this. I started having trouble sleeping again last weekend, and we increased the Geodon Tuesday. Today I feel better than I have in three weeks.

When I was awake at 3 am last Sunday morning, I e-mailed my friend and started spiraling into “oh no, what if, what if, this is TERRIBLE!!!!!” I then had the presence of mind to at least say the words: “I need to stay in the present moment, even though it’s hard.”

A couple days earlier, I’d been saying to my coach: what if this gets worse, what if I cross the line from my less severe Bipolar II to the more severe form, what if the meds stop working, what if I develop some whole new problem, what if the sky falls. When she replied, “And in this moment, you’re ok,” I was initially taken aback. It offended my sense of Drama.

But some how this sank in. Ok, so I have bipolar disorder. So does Sting, Francis Ford Coppola, Buzz Aldrin, Tom Waits (yeah!) and all these other people I admire. Ok, so my sleep’s been lousy. But for the most part, I haven’t felt awful. When I have, I’ve made it through and then it passed.

Throughout this time I haven’t been all that depressed or bouncing off the ceiling. Medication works for me; that isn’t true for everyone. A hundred years ago, when psychotropic meds didn’t exist, how many people would have done anything to get the relief that I’m able to get? For many of them, the only relief they were able to get was to kill themselves.

When things were the toughest, I found some deeply moving blogs through The Madosphere, a British blog written both by people with severe mental illness (or “mentalists,” as they call themselves) and mental health professionals. They show tremendous grace and dignity as they talk about what they contend with. Let me do the same.

Happy Birthday, Boy George!!

Culture Club in Brugge, a photo by cote on Flickr.

Who’s hitting the big 5-0 on June 14? Lena’s favourite pop star of all time, that’s who!

Boy George has a lot to celebrate. Since he got clean and sober in 2009, he’s been progressively transforming himself from an unhappy, troubled individual to a man who is active in the recovery community, making a conscious effort to give back, and rejuvenating his recording career. Not to mention, he has 106,815 followers on Twitter!! (@BoyGeorge).

One reason I have such a fondness for George has to do with a turning point in my life. When “Karma Chameleon” was popular back in the day, I was in my 20s and had recently left an ultra-conservative religious group. My life was opening up in a whole new way. I’d finally overcome the group’s strong discouragement against seeing a therapist and was getting the help I needed to heal from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Members of this group weren’t supposed to listen to “worldly music,” and God forbid that we should be fans of a homosexual!! So for the first time since high school, I felt free to listen to popular music, and I just loved “Karma Chameleon.”

Every time I hear that song it makes me feel happy!

I gotta tell you all, what with all my mental health drama lately, I nearly forgot about the Boy’s B-Day. A tragedy averted.

SO LET’S ALL HAVE FUN ON THE 14TH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Magical City

night HDR, a photo by AlexanderY on Flickr.

Is this gorgeous, or what?

Nothing to do with mindful eating or bipolar disorder as far as I can see. Just a beautiful photo that had to be shared.

A Return to Mindful Eating

What a week. I finally started feeling better Thursday. Boy, I’ve felt fragile and wiped out a lot these past two weeks. I went to work Wednesday after taking the prior week off, and was so exhausted afterward that I slept 10 hours that night.

By the way — I feel that bipolar disorder has lost its charm. I’ve decided to trade it in for a scooter.

So yeah…..mindful eating. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about it. Yesterday was the first day in I don’t know how long that I got my book out again — Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays. Such a good book.

A part that jumped out at me was

In mindful eating we are not comparing or judging. We are simply witnessing the many sensations, thoughts, and emotions that come up around eating…Mindfulness is rooted in the realization that when we ignore what we are seeing, touching, or eating, it is as if it does not exist…We remain somehow hungry and unsatisfied.

It’s been fairly easy for me to slow down and notice the tastes, temperatures, textures, and so forth as I eat. When I feel driven to EAT, pausing to be with the emotions is quite another thing.

A comment from Alison of Give This Stone got me thinking about how our internal conversations can make difficulties worse. Like many of us, I avoid the feelings that I don’t enjoy so much — sadness, fear, you know, the usual suspects. When I do that, of course, they inflate and start to look meaner than they actually are.

Overeating works beautifully to distract myself. By the same token, if I sat with the feelings, they’d pass. I could address the real issues instead of creating a whole new problem.

I get all that intellectually. What’s hard is refraining from the impulsive action and instead holding still. So that’s one reason I meditate, to cultivate these skills.

So I’d love to hear from recovering people and anyone else who finds impulse control a challenge: What have you learned about holding yourself still and refraining from the impulsive action?

Comments, Please

Any opinions on the new look?

Ocean Beach Pier

Ocean Beach Pier, a photo by avlxyz on Flickr.

Geodon makes you really, really thirsty. Here’s a photo of part of the water I’ve drank so far today. Look on the bridge a ways to the left of the middle — there’s Steve and me.

Today’s Psychiatric Stability Bulliten

I increased the dosage of the dreaded Geodon this morning. Because of a recent bad experience, I expected it would make me a zombie. But since my sleep was getting worse and worse, and I was becoming irritable unto evilness, I finally said: bring it on.

Steve said that I really couldn’t know how it would affect me until I took it. No, no, no, no, no — silly man. But guess what? No zombie-ness! I feel tremendously grateful. And relieved to no longer be fighting what I’ve known for a month, i.e., the previous dosage wasn’t cutting it.

I was reading a section in The Bipolar Survival Guide about why so many people fight taking their meds. Feeling self-congratulatory, I thought, “Well. I’m certainly not like those people. I would never just stop taking my meds. I never ‘forget’ to take them. I wouldn’t try to hold onto the giddy energy of hypomania — I know better than that. I’m not stupid enough to think that if I feel fine, I should just quit taking what makes me feel fine.”

Silly Lena.

The pointy finger of self-honesty suddenly poked through my superiority-fest. I’d forgotten — for almost a year I’ve been thinking I should talk to my psychiatrist about how bad my sleep was getting. I kept deciding against it because I was afraid that the cheerfulness I felt was actually hypomania. I reasoned that if so, I might as well enjoy it as long as I could before that horrible lady took my fun away. (The horrible lady, by the way, is a very kind person and a top-notch psychiatrist.) When I finally disclosed all this, she said, nah, you wouldn’t have been hypomanic for that long a time.

I’m going to go get myself a slice of humble pie in a minute (and eat it mindfully). But first I want to reassure you: if anyone you know does become a zombie, there are ways you and your family can stay safe. Consult the useful information Chris provides in his blog Pennsylvania Echoes. He even links to an article by the Centers for Disease Control on how to protect yourself should a zombie apocalypse break out.

Nothing to fear — not from Geodon, not from zombies. A good day all the way around.