Art Therapy.

Following my post from Sunday night, due to two accidental med misses, I have crashed.

I was so grateful to have a session with Jan today.

I’ve attempted to mainly sleep through this one, that was my strategy. Meds at 7pm Sunday night, lie there hurting and letting my razor moths burry their way in to my chest and feed off me until my Seroquel sent me under in to the dark.

5.30am alarm for work.

6.30pm return home. Rinse and repeat.

Today, that black heaviness in my chest was so raw that I just couldnt concentrate on my work…. So after a couple of days of persisting I got up off my swivelly chair, put my coat on and power walked to the nearest chemist where I expertly lied through my teeth to get what I wanted. I dosed myself up and continued with work.

In other words, I relapsed to cope through the day.

I have been through this cycle endless times, and each time it hits me like I have slammed full force and unexpectedly in to a slab of concrete. Each time I am winded by the shock of the fall, I forget how hard it is. How do chronically depressed/anxiety live like this? With Bipolar, the storm seems endless, but we know that everytime it rains, it will end.

Even if we have a billion stoms pass through our life cycle.

The coedine helped numb whatever it was that needed to be numbed and I got through work.

Jan made me draw today. She asked me to visually produce on paper this physical anxiety that burrows itself deep in my chest and latches on. I grabbed the chalk from the box and started immediately scribbling, like I’d done this before. I knew exactly what colour, shade, shape it forms, and I even described to her how heavy it was – like the centre was a huge solid ballbearing that weighs down in me, making my breathing heavy and sapping my energy from the rest of my body. I sat with this image burdening down on my lap for a good part of half an hour before I told her “I want you to take this off me, I can’t even bare to directly look at it.” She instructed me to rip it up and put it in the bin.

I got a little relief from producing my anxiety on paper, however physical it was to me was portrayed on paper as a real object. I got it out in the open and I finally got to show someone in visual context.

I shared with someone my personal burden, the dreaded vicious anxiety – my razor moths in which I have to carry around with me when that dark cloud hangs over my head. The burden in which I have only familiarised it’s dispersion through taking painkillers to numb it or slicing my skin with sharp objects until I release some of it’s energy. The main seed of my blackouts, my rage attacks, my overdoses, my ‘it’s not fair, why me’ tantrums, my isolation, my psychosis. The black energy that has had me begging to die and end it all.

I can’t figure out exactly what I have gotten out of today’s session, however, I will keep reminding myself that I do not carry this around alone anymore.

And so I wait, watching the world go by until the storm passes.