Replay.

In enlightenment of the desire to log in and write this post, the past few have held a small series of events.

1. Quetiapine got too much. It took me 3 months to get an appointment with my local mental health team, in which they proceeded to carry out a grueling 2 hour assessment with the outcome that the psychiatrist ‘may or may not decide to take my case further,’ and that I will receive a phone call the following week of a promise of an update which never happened.

2. Almost 5 weeks later, the event that did not happen; The phone call.

3. 2 month after initial assessment, I received a letter from the community MH team, implying that I had an appointment with some completely different party on the 2nd of august, which confirmed my worries that said psychiatrist declined the offer to see me in person and take my ‘case’ – the struggle that was indeed, MY life – any further.

Back to initial assessment. Lovely bloke full of empty promises named Kyle.

“If we decide that your medication was not to be reviewed, would you then proceed to carry out the conscious decision to reduce or stop taking said medication?”

My answer; ‘No. I’m not that stupid.’

Which brings us up to date. I decided to stop taking my meds.

Arse-holes. That will teach them to piss about with me and decide my struggles aren’t important (it’s not the first time either. Flash back to when I was sent to A and E in an ambulance after having a total freak out, admitting to them that I didn’t want to be here anymore, for them to just leave me sitting casually with my suicidal thoughts in the waiting room for hours).

My sertraline withdrawal was harsh but I dealt with it. A few shadows floating about here and there due to withdrawal, extreme tiredness and a few teary life crisis episodes over bills. About a week ago, I started to custom reduce the quetiapine. No, it’s not the wisest decision I have ever made, as I fully know the consequence of not taking head meds.

(another flash back – “After 10.5 years of you struggling to hobble along with life, we came to a conclusion that you shall now receive an actual diagnosis…. Here it is, SURPRISE!! You have Bipolar disorder! Congratulations, now you no longer require our services. Now off you pop to suffer on your own….” – okay, that was a little over-dramatized but you get the jist).

As a result, I am now reverting to how I was as a little girl growing up, and how I felt all through my teenage years. I am feeling EVERYTHING. Every single thing hurts. I forgot how intense this is. When I see a charity advertisement – it hurts, when I watch the news – it hurts, when someone says something funny – it hurts, when I look in to my beautiful baby daughter’s eyes and feel that love, that intense love, my God – it hurts so much. I am a blubbering teary overly anxious mess.

The anxiety is not your standard ‘let’s unconsciously over analyze everything in my life and worry’ anxiety. It’s Doom.

It’s raw, impending, heavy Doom. It’s death and despair and fright. I am frightened.

But I have been through all this before. Everything seems familiar. Like I have been on a long dreamy trip away from the known, and now I have arrived back home.

I have a memory. One in which, when it resurfaces, I tuck back away until the next time it bubbles back up unexpectedly. I suppose I am in the right position to let it out for the first time, ever.

It’s of my mother, when I was a little girl. And this feeling I used to have. It was my love for her, but rather than it being lah-di-dah dreamy love that you would expect the label of ‘love’ to possess, this was different.

Every time I looked at her face, thought about her, missed her it was an emotion that screamed. It was an emotion of the most intense, raw, horrific origin. It stemmed from fear – fear of losing her, loving her too much, abandonment, I don’t know where the hell it came from. It was like the devil itself was mocking me, every time I felt that emotion of what the daughterly love for her mother should of felt like, he’d reach in to my heart instead and suffocate it. Cut off its blood supply and suppressed it, twisted it so my body screamed for air.

I thought i’d slowly (over the past twenty-five years of my life) learned to cope with it, reduced the pain and moved on, I thought I had matured and grown up and had some spiritual awakening that made me confidently say to myself ‘You don’t have to feel like that ever again’. I was wrong. Because when I look in to the eyes of my daughter I feel that torture all over again.

I thought I had finally learned to manage this life of neurochemical imbalances and wrong choices and haunted pasts.

Love shouldn’t hurt and torture and scream and be trapped inside me. Not when they are supposed to feel good. I feel like I am stuck on replay, in a nightmare of the past.

Everything hurts.