And The Academy Award Goes To...

This blog is dedicated to my friend Maj for inspiring me to write it.

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of praise and encouragement about my writing (thank you, thank you…it keeps me wanting to write and yes, one day I do hope to write a book. It’s really the only retirement plan I can think of!) So perhaps I’m a good writer. But what many may not know is that I’m also a pretty good actress. While I may not have actually starred in anything formal and I have no real credits to my name and you won’t find me on the IMDB (mom, that’s the Internet Movie Database) most of you have seen my stunning performances up close and personal. And while I have had many memorable performances as a lunatic, I’m really referring to my stellar performances of me playing me. I actually spend a great deal of time (more than anyone would ever guess) acting like I am myself. Okay, let me rephrase that. I spend a great deal of time covering up the fact that I don’t feel great and act like I feel just fine. But really, at least in my mind, I pull off quite the performances!

You see, it’s like this. We all know I have this mood disorder thing. We all have our own understanding or knowledge about what it means. Everyone has some level of understanding that sometimes I might get manic or sometimes I might get depressed and that generally there are times when I am just not feeling well as a result of this mood disorder thing. What we don’t all understand is how I actually experience this mood disorder thing and how it affects me and my behaviour and my world in general. This is probably confusing and frustrating for everyone around me but it is even more so for me. Like right now, I just want to SCREAM to people, DON’T YOU GET IT??? But I can’t. It’s not easy to get. If you haven’t experienced it or been very close to someone who has you cannot fully understand it. And I guess I’ve sort of created this myself by being the fabulous actress that I am.

I think mania might be easier to understand because it tends to be a bit more wacky and my performances just happen. Right now I’m depressed, which is when I tend to spend more time actually acting, so that’s what I’m going to try to explain. If you look up depression, you will find that it is generally defined by the following symptoms:

depressed mood, inability to experience joy or pleasure, feelings of hopelessness, impaired thinking, concentration and memory, thoughts of death or suicide, preoccupation with feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy and one’s own shortcomings, sleep disturbance, and exhaustion..

Seems easy enough to understand I suppose.

What this actually looks and feels like for me cannot be summed up so easily. I can’t even do it justice on this short blog. But in a nutshell, I guess it’s like this: a feeling of drowning, of being underwater and being unable to rise to the top to catch my breath. I feel like am being weighted or pushed down, and although I raise my hand to the surface for rescue, I am never pulled out. It is a very grey cloud shrouding my entire world, as if I am seeing everything through grey coloured glasses. It is an overwhelming numbness to everything, to the world around me, to my friends, my family, to my life. I can see the joy around me but I cannot partake. I feel nothing. I have no interest in any of the things that I normally take pleasure in. I have no interest in anything at all really. My mission each day is just to get through it. It takes every ounce of energy I have to perform even the smallest of tasks and takes me twice as long. I’m talking taking a shower can be hard to do! I am riddled with anxiety, my thinking and perception of things becomes distorted, so that I start thinking things and ruminating on things that aren’t based on fact or reality. Tears flow freely for reasons I can’t even always explain. I’m tired, oh so very tired. I can’t concentrate, I can’t think, I am so un-present that I may as well not even be in the room. Having a conversation takes all my strength and even then, I may not pull it off, as poor Dave knows all too well. I am anti-social, I ignore my phone, I ignore my email and generally ignore whatever I can because whatever else I’m doing is taking my energy and exhausting me. I don’t want to see or talk to anybody. I just want to be left alone in my thoughts so I don’t have to concentrate, think of a reply to conversation or be “on”. Being social is hard work when I am depressed. In order to interact in a meaningful way, I often put on my acting hat and perform as if I am present.

So I may be in this depressed state, but more likely than not, when you see me, you will think I am doing well. Or you will think I am “better”. I’ll be as sharp, I’ll be as chatty as I always am, I’ll laugh, I’ll make jokes, I’ll be able to be shoulder to lean on, I’ll be having fun. I’ll be happy (“oh but you looked so happy the other night”). It will appear as though I’ve got my shit together and that I’m functioning just great. You may never know that I’m actually really not doing well. Or perhaps if you know me well enough you’ll know that under the surface I’m not totally well, but you’ll see me acting like my happy self and think everything is okay, or at least more okay than it actually is. I call this being “on”. And it is completely exhausting. And I probably do it too much. And it has probably created a bit of a conundrum for me… Because it is so hard to understand the swings of my mood to begin with, it must be hard to understand that you can see me looking and acting just fine and dandy one moment and then be told that really, I’m not doing well at all, that all of what you saw was just me putting on an act, or being “on”. Covering up how I’m really doing so that I can participate in life.

And so you see, that is why I think that really, somewhere along the way, I have probably earned myself an Academy Award for Best Actress in Her Own Bipolar Life.