Lets Get Real for a Minute

I’m struggling today. See, I suffer from bipolar disorder, so discerning my mood is a little tricky. We’re about to go to a festival in my old hometown, and while I want to go because I want out of this house, I really don’t want to leave the house. We’re meeting family, and while I love them to death, they sometimes overwhelm me. Then tomorrow we’re going to a wedding—another big gathering where I’ll just be lost in the crowd. Hopefully I can find some good conversations to keep my mind busy. That’s a taste of how my mind works.

You see, for years I figured I was bipolar, but I didn’t show the same symptoms that my mom did, so I actually figured I was safe. Little did I know that I was actually operating in a hypomanic state most of my life. I was always elevated, social, ready for any adventure. This came with downsides though, as everything does. I was extremely selfish with my time, and it strained my marriage something fierce. Then COVID hit, and we all went into isolation. I don’t know if it was the isolation or the constant fear-mongering that finally broke me, but I broke. I broke hard.

I would be fine and then start crying for little reason. Like for instance, that summer we had our nieces and nephew down for a stay, and it was a great stay. When they went to leave, I packed them up some food and started to cry as I was sending them back home. I just didn’t want to see them leave. Then other times I’d just get angry as hell, out of nowhere, for the smallest things. It could be as small as someone eating potato chips—not chewing with their mouth open… just the crunching of the chips in their mouth.

Compound all this with having lived in emergency mode since March of 2020 due to work. My boss, who insisted on managing all the alerts, left and helped me navigate the potential errors very little. Then that fall, our app servers started crashing fairly regularly, causing tons of support overhead for me. I couldn’t even leave the house without an alert popping up and me having to restart web servers. Then there were the changes that needed to happen to the system. These changes never stopped, and we never spent any time refactoring our code base to migrate into Spring Boot instead of raw Spring to make deployments simpler and potentially get rid of whatever was causing the problem. See, our Spring framework version was from ~2014, so I’m guessing there were plenty of CVEs opened against that version of the framework by the time 2020 rolled around. This was my life for 2 years with very little support and constantly running around, so very little time to come up with a better strategy to prevent these errors.

It’s now early 2022, and I am starting to break. I don’t notice it at the time—I just figure it’s work that has been getting to me with all these emergencies. But it was something much deeper, and I’d broken to a point where I needed medication. I was eating well, exercising quite a bit; I was in the best shape of my 30s and 40s so far. Physically I was feeling awesome, but mentally I was coming undone. This went on until spring when my wife really started noticing me getting really funky. Don’t get me wrong—that whole winter I was quite unbearable, and it only got worse.

A good portion of the rest of the spring and into early summer is mostly a blur to me. I don’t remember specific events, but I know I was sleeping less and watching more political news, which was terrible for my mental health. Then the weekend of July 4th approached. I don’t think it was the pending holiday that broke me, but I broke around this time. I was almost not sleeping at all, and it was early in the morning. We were about to head somewhere, and I needed to do something. This something wasn’t actually important, and my wife, having spent months and years dealing with me, finally snapped and took an ultimatum approach with me. I either chill out and get in the car, or she’s calling the cops because I was acting very erratic.

I didn’t budge from my task and dug in deeper. I pleaded with her to just let me do what I had to do, and I’d be on my way. In many ways I’m thankful for my wife calling for support. How it played out was fucking terrifying, but no one was hurt, thankfully. They took me to the hospital, which was quite jarring. I was very focused on not being put into an electronic system, and they didn’t understand why I was hell-bent on not giving them my information. I was going on about how I was older than what I seem because the essence that made me had existed as long as humanity existed—pretty wild shit I was going on about. I was still standing my ground that I do NOT want to be put into any system, but alas… that’s how our society has gone… everything has to be hackable…

In the hospital… oh fuck it… let’s call this duck a duck… it was a psych ward. I didn’t have anything that could be used to hang oneself. I went into basic training mode. I didn’t ask for anything and merely followed instructions—except when it came to medication. I didn’t feel that I needed medication. This went on for just a day until I realized they’re not going to let me go until I submit to their will. So I took the meds they prescribed. They seemed to help with what I call my anxiety, and they kind of started to stabilize me. These meds aren’t instant though—they take time to fully take effect, plus they do actually change you, so you have to get used to the new you.

While I felt better and I started to behave more like how I’ve always felt—pretty antisocial and actually an introvert. See, when I was in my hypomanic state and being social, I think I was doing that out of social pressure. I didn’t want people greeting me grumpily, so I acted more outgoing and upbeat most of the time. I talked to anyone and everyone and seemed extroverted, but I always felt like I was an introvert. And while I was social, I wasn’t forthcoming with anything really personal. So people got to know only one aspect of me—my techie side. Getting used to my new self would last about 2 years as I dialed my medication in with my nurse practitioner.

This brings us to today and how I feel about this weekend and the following week. We’re going to have one of our nieces down… and maybe the other… the maybe part kind of pisses me off because I NEED TO KNOW how many people will be in my house, and I need to know how to prepare. You see, this other niece has really disappointed me. She’s refused to take her meds for her social anxiety and constant outbursts. I figured she would have grown out of it by now, but it’s only gotten worse. The other niece has disappointed me as well for other reasons. So really, I don’t want to be around them anymore for right now until they grow up. This post is helping me out, so thanks for being my rubber ducky :D.

Rubber ducky, you’re the one! You make bathtime LOTS OF FUN!!! Rubber ducky, I’m awfully fond of you :D. Ba-doomp doomp doomp doomp.