Last assignment done and dusted!

At last, my seventh and final TMA for my Open University course, U211, Exploring the English Language, is finished. It was the assignment from hell, but it’s done, though this time with only three and a half weeks to spare. I’m left with seven and a bit weeks to prepare for the three hour exam - not looking forward to that, but it’s got to be done. I will be immensely glad when this course is over - but there’s no chance for me to recuperate - the next course, Advanced Creative Writing starts three days before my exam. Oh yes, I am a glutton for punishment. Then the Art of English starts in January - fun, fun, fun. I must be mad… oh, I forgot, I actually am mad. My psychiatrist asked if I felt as though I could cope with doing two courses virtually simultaneously, but I was manic when I told him it would be a breeze. It will be hell, but what the heck. I think I must like pushing myself beyond the limits of my endurance. I’ve written 90000 words of the new version of Pieces of my Life in five weeks. I’m averaging 17000 words plus every week now, and I have the carpal tunnel syndrome to prove it. My wrist is now splinted and I’ve been ordered to rest it, but not to be beaten, I’ve found that I can still type reasonably fast with the splint on. I won’t let anything come between me and my goal of finishing this book by no later than the middle of September. You see, if I don’t, I won’t get much revision done for my exam. There is method in my madness… you just have to look pretty damn close to find it.

Mania + Writing Obsession = Trouble

Okay, so I’m sane enough to recognise that I’m heading for trouble, which is a good thing. The problem is that I’m not quite sane enough to really want to stop it. I can tell myself that it’s creative inspiration, but I know that it’s more than that. I’m manic. I recognise that. My senses are too sharp, I’m getting sensory overload nearly every day. I’m buzzing, distractable, I can’t concentrate on TV or reading or anything much. But I can write. And write. And I want to do nothing else but write. (And surf the internet for too many hours, ebay being a particular favourite and danger-zone; I want a new laptop even though there’s nothing wrong with mine.) But the writing has hit obsessional zone. I know it’s got there when I panic if I don’t hit at least 1500 words a day. It used to be 1000 words, but now it’s got to be 1500. I’m working towards 20000 words a week. I’m writing till 2 or 3 in the morning. I have no need or desire to sleep. And I’m actually frightened of the intensity going, even though I know that long term it’s bad for me. I’m neglecting my OU studies, because they interfere with the writing. That is a particular problem, because the deadline’s only 5 weeks away and the exam’s only 4 weeks after that, and I’ve not done all the things I planned to do. I could make myself a schedule, but I’ve never ever been able to keep to a schedule of my own making. Even at work, when I was manic, I beat my drum to a different tune. What I would love is some kind of balance. But I don’t hold out much hope.

Madness and Creativity

I’ve been reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire”. It blew me away the list of writers and artists thought to have suffered with some kind of mood disorder - either bipolar or unipolar depression. William Blake is thought to have suffered with bipolar. Byron was almost certainly bipolar. Vincent van Gogh had a mood disorder of some sorts, as did Emily Dickinson. The list goes on and on. The whole issue of a link between madness and creativity is a thorny one; some research done has supposedly poured cold water over the idea, but other research, performed by Jamison herself, showed that about 80% of a sample of British Writers and Artists exhibited some symptoms of mood disorders. That’s a pretty high statistic. And most of the sample talked about periods of intense creativity - with features such as racing thoughts, goal driven behaviour, sense of well being, great enthusiasm and excitement, elation, sleeplessness, irritability, agitation, restlessness. That pretty much fits within the diagnostic criteria for mania. It’s certainly what I (too) frequently experience, though to varying degrees. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a pretty convincing case.

From my own point of view, there seems to be a corrolation between my mood swings and my most creative periods of writing. Yes, I write when I’m depressed, but that’s because I force myself to do it rather than because I’m creatively inspired. My mania and my creativity go firmly hand in hand. I fear the lows because I lose the spark and I come to loathe everything that I write. More often than not, depression leads to me making very bad decisions about things that I’ve written; once I threw away dozens of stories I’d written just because I thought they were “crap”. Then again, I can make similar decisions when I’m manic, because my writing doesn’t come up to the skyrocketing expectations I come to have of myself. It’s a case of “I’m brilliant, so why isn’t my writing. Do it again. Do it again and again until it’s fucking brilliant”.

But yes, back to the point. While it’s not the case for everyone, I think there has to be a strong link between madness and creativity. As Lord Byron himself once remarked: “We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”

Bipolar Child

In the USA, kids are often diagnosed as bipolar. However, here in the UK, it’s rare for a child to get a mood disorder diagnosis. But just because the doctors over here don’t recognise bipolar in children, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I was a reckless child; when I was two years old, I tried, repeatedly, to throw myself into Lake Windermere. I was a typical tomboy - for years, with my short hair and boy’s clothes, I actually passed myself off as a boy, but that’s beside the point. I feared nothing. I was restless, I had a short attention span, I had obvious mood swings. My mind often raced far faster than I could keep up with. When I was seven, my year 3 primary school teacher repeatedly humiliated me in front of the class for missing out words when I was reading aloud. She thought I was dyslexic, but I wasn’t. What I was doing was skipping over the obvious words: and, the, it, he, she, they, them. Words that my brain filled in automatically as it sped on ahead and I assumed everyone else would fill them in the same. The same happened when I was writing - it still occasionally does - I would miss words out of sentences. I was branded as stupid - but what if that was just one of the early tell-tale signs of my bipolarity?

Long time, no post

I’ve been a little crazy these last couple of months. A mixed episode that is still fucking with my mind. I got a little paranoid, well, too paranoid to post, started having panic attacks again. I went weeks without touching the internet. I’m still in a mixed mood, but I’m working through it. All right, I’m trying to work through it. It equates to the same thing.

My lithium’s been increased, for all the good it seems to be doing. I’m cycling rapidly between mania and depression during the course of each day, which is not good for my OU course, or for my novel.

Ah yes, my novel. I posted in May that it was finished. It was. Now it isn’t. Now, I’ve done my favourite manic trick, decided it wasn’t good enough and started writing it again from scratch, in the third person instead of first person. In two weeks, I’ve worked up 34000 words. That’s impressive, even for me. It took me four weeks to hit that word count last time. But I’m on a roll, and I don’t want to stop for anything, and that’s where the problems start to kick in. Not sleeping makes me more manic; when I’m in a mixed episode, not sleeping makes me cycle faster. But try telling that to my manic mind when it’s two am and I’m still hard at it. I’m even toying with the idea of buying an eee or an Aspire One to make the whole process faster - I type on my ipaq in the dead of night, but it’s slow progress on the touch screen keyboard.

I’ve got a ipod docking clock radio now - took my ipod out of its silicone sleeve for the first time in months so I could dock it with the clock radio. It’s a tough little thing my ipod, when you look at the huge dent it acquired when I fell on it, pissed out of my mind, in June. I hadn’t seen the dent before. That really hit it home. Shit, I really mustn’t try to do anything so fucking stupid again. I don’t mind fucking myself up. But £160 worth of ipod - that’s really not something I want to damage.

Five years ago today…

I entered craziest part of the most craziest of my manic spirals. Five years ago today, I met Tony, and ten hours later, was beating the fuck out of a brick wall. Five years ago today I crossed a line.

And five years on, where am I? No better than I was then? Well, I suppose you could say I’m worse, because now I can’t even work. Not that I could really work then, because it was being at work that set the scene for my madness. But emotionally, mentally, I feel like I’m actually in exactly the same place. Right now, I could cheerfully beat the fuck out of a wall, but I can’t, because there’s nowhere I can go to do that, and someone would notice grazed knuckles now. I have no escape, no freedom, no safety valve, no way of letting off steam, so when I should (in my opinion, at least) be better now than I was then, I’m not, because I’m slowly suffocating. It’s my own fault. Sometimes I suffocate myself… I bring it on myself.

I miss working. I miss the books, I miss the buzz I got from being in charge, from having people come to me to ask stuff, from doing the layout planning and all that shit. I miss having a purpose. I know I’ve got my writing and my OU courses, but… well, it’s not the same. It’s just not the same. Because I’m always in the same place, with the same people…okay, not always, but nearly always. I went into the shop the other day, which was a big thing, because even though it’s nearly five years since everything blew up in my face, I haven’t been able to face going in. But I went in. And there wasn’t a single member of staff I knew, and everything had changed, of course, and it made me want to cry, because all that had changed and I hadn’t, I was still stuck in the same rut. I’d love to work with books again, but I won’t be able to, because I’ll never get a reference now. Besides that, I couldn’t trust myself not to go totally crazy again.

Sometimes I love being bipolar, I love the creativity, the excitement of mania. But right now, in the grip of a kind of dysphoric hypomania (be fucked if I know what it really is), I hate it. I hate what it’s taken from me, and what it keeps taking from me.

In the middle of the night …

UK time: 04:24. Sleep is an impossibility, mainly because during the 34 minutes between 01:38 and 02:12 when I tried courting sleep, I had some weird kind of half-waking nightmare that had me flinging my pillows at the wall and trying to pull my hair out. It was something to do with giant cacti attaching electrodes to my head to extract all the pieces of my life. Now, I’ve been plugged into my ipod for the past two hours, too scared of being left with my thoughts in the silence to turn it off. But it’s not so bad. My ipod, whose name is Satnin_Elvis, seems to understand me better than anyone else. Every song he throws out at me has a special meaning, and he seems to know what I don’t need to hear right now. It could be worse. I could be alone in the darkness. Though it’s actually not so dark now. It’s heading towards dawn. I only have to make it through another couple of hours…

Coming back to Earth

I am worried that I seem to be living an emotional mirror of five years ago. These last couple of years, I’ve come to expect mixed episodes to toss me straight into depression. But this one hasn’t. I’ve just gone straight back into high-level hypomania, and while it feels good, and I’m bouncing around like the Duracell bunny on speed, there’s a little part of me that’s going “whoa, this is not good, this is like before, and that really wasn’t a good thing to have happen”. I know nothing can happen like it did that year - I’ve removed myself from the situation precisely for that reason, but what’s getting to me is the fact that if I hadn’t removed myself from the situation, if I was still in that situation, it could happen all over again.

The other day, I thought I’d come up with the universal truth. Life is a book, and I am the Author, but for some reason nobody reads their stage directions. That pisses me off. It really pisses me off. Five years ago, I wanted to open a bookshop on the moon and an Academy of Elvisology - now I know it’s not quite on the same scale, but thinking that I’m the Author of the Book of Life… yeah. I scare myself sometimes with the intensity of my thoughts. And it’s not just that. I’m finding myself drawn to music again, with that feeling that the lyrics are trying to tell me something. Am I heading for trouble? Or am I just reading too much into it, looking for trouble when it isn’t even there?

I saw Rebel Without a Cause again the other day, the first time in five years. It’s a taboo film in our house now, because once upon a time I had a weird obsession with James Dean and  Rebel, and watched the film a couple of times a week. It’s been a long time, but it still hit me with the same emotional force. That movie was made about me. I am Jim Stark. “If I could have one day when I didn’t have to feel all confused, if I felt I belonged someplace…” Jimmy taught me to punch walls instead of people. He taught me a lot. But he’s still persona non grata around here. It’s a shame. I miss him.

Pieces of my life

I’m writing 3000 words a night now in a frantic race to get my novel, Pieces of my Life, finished in time to send off as an entry in the Daily Mail new novelist competition. The deadline’s the 2nd July. It’s going to be a tight deadline - I’m still 40000 words from the end and I need to leave time for editing - but I like a challenge. Who needs sleep? Not me. I’m eating, breathing and sleeping this book. My characters have permeated my consciousness and taken up residence. Even when I’ve not got my laptop or pocket PC in front of me, I’m writing scenes in my head. I haven’t felt this connected with a story since I was writing Mindstorm: Armageddon five years ago. God knows, this book has gone through so many drafts, there’s a small rainforest in tatters somewhere because of all the paper I’ve wasted. I got one draft to 96000 words before I decided it was all wrong and scrapped it. Other drafts fell to the wayside at around 20 or 30 thousand words. How many words is that I’ve wasted? Way too many words, and a whole year of my life. But this time, I’m going to get it finished. This time, it’s sheer brilliance. My characters aren’t cardboard cut-outs, they’re real. So real, they jump out off the page. Sometimes it feels like it’s not me writing the words at all, like I’m just a vessel for them, like the characters themselves are dictating their words. I had a rigid plot structure that bears very little resemblence to what I’ve got now, because it’s like the story has a mind of its own over where it wants to take me. It feels right. Everything gels. It feels fucking fantastic to have a purpose again, to feel driven and in control, and just so alive.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Eleven)

I met my psychiatrist in January 2004. I was scared of myself, of what I’d done, and my mind was pretty screwed up. I was kinda paranoid, and my mood was fluctuating wildly between deep depression and mild hypomania. Mostly, it was depression. Very often of a suicidal nature. Though in a hypomanic phase, I bought at least a couple of dozen books on religion in the hope that I could find some meaning to life. Funnily enough, I never found it there. Or anywhere else for that matter.

I was given a diagnosis, but it didn’t fit. Not really. Little bits of it fitted in little ways, but I always doubted it, always wondered if maybe sometimes even psychiatrists get things wrong. Or maybe it was the things that I said that made him think that. Strange things tumbled from my lips the first few times we met, so perhaps it was my own fault I got slapped with a label that was meant for another bottle. Still, it’s sorted now, so that’s all that matters.

Well, I say it’s sorted. I mean the label not the bottle. Despite medication, the last four years have been like a mini roller-coaster in many ways. And the ride isn’t over yet. Right now, I’m sailing along in high-level hypomania, with my credit card having to be kept under lock and key. Lithium takes the very top off, but it sure ain’t stopping the ride. I’m sleeping under four hours a night. I write at least 2000 words of my novel a day, and get panicky if I don’t. I’m also about five weeks ahead of myself on my Open University course. I feel reckless. I feel giddy. The world is beautiful. My career plans are boundless. And yet, just a couple of months ago, in the depths of depression, I was on the verge of slitting my wrists.

Welcome to my world. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s sure as hell gonna be a bumpy ride.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Ten)

It was October when I really started coming apart at the seams, big time. And I mean big time. Once again, the Christmas layout planning had fallen to me, once again, I’d come up trumps (I’d also been given responsibility for the January layout changes, too, only I never got the chance to see those through). I had a big plan that was worked out with military precision - and even though I was due to be on annual leave the week of the implementation, I generously offered to give up two days of holiday to work a 15 hour shift overnight to get it done. I offered mainly on the basis that the whole thing would fall apart if I wasn’t there to see it through. Let’s face it, at that point I actually believed I was indispensible. I also thought it would be a good idea to open a bookshop on the moon - if that isn’t a clue to the state of my manic thinking, then nothing is. I was even toying with the idea of opening an academy in Memphis to teach Elvisology. Yeah. I was that bad. But I’ve got sidetracked. I’m not too good at thinking in straight lines right now. But bear with me. October. The famous 15 hour shift (okay, not exactly famous, but within my world it is). I started off with buckets of enthusiasm. Tons of the stuff. I was virtually bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. At that point, I’d already been awake for around about 36 hours solid. It was, no doubt, a recipe for disaster, but I didn’t know that. Tony had given me full control of the whole operation, which, incidently, put me in charge of Bob (and that went down really well!). I had about 8 or 9 people at my disposal, but I found myself driven by fear that they weren’t working quickly enough. I felt as though everyone around me had slowed down to an extent that it was like one of those slowed-up action replays on TV. I was the only one working at a proper speed (though in actuality, I was working at warp-speed and everyone else was working at a normal speed). I could feel the anger building in amongst the fear. It was all I could do to hold myself together when Bob announced we should take a break and get some food. Everyone went up to the canteen, but I stood my ground, working frantically. The only thing I consumed that night was copious amounts of black coffee.

By 2am, I’d whipped myself up into a kind of frenzy. I was sending myself dizzy. Tony virtually ordered me to take a break, so I found myself alone in the canteen with another paper cup of coffee from the machine. How exactly I ended up straddling the window sill, preparing to take a graceful dive, three storeys down into the river, I’m not really sure. That incident is one of the reasons I fear the black manias so much. For me, at least, they are a thousand times more dangerous than depression.

For the next month, I just got more and more out of control. I was working a ridiculous amount of hours. I just couldn’t stop. Literally - I felt as though my whole world would implode if I stopped even for a short while. And I couldn’t bear to let anyone else do anything - I had to take control, I had to do it all. I thought I was being terribly dedicated and efficient, but in reality, I was just causing chaos. Inbetween all the chaos-causing, I was also making frequent attempt to break bones in my body and visualising myself hanging from the stairwell, or plunging three storeys down into the basement. I discovered that it is virtually impossible to throw yourself down a flight of stairs - I tried it many times.

In the end, my world did implode, most spectacularly. By the end of November, my behaviour was too bizarre to ignore, and I found myself out of a job. My manager’s advice was that I seek medical help.

In a sense, what happened was perhaps the best thing that could have happened. Losing a job that I loved more than any job I’d ever done was the kind of wake-up call that I needed, even if the shock of it all did plunge me deep into a depression that sent me a little way over the edge. For the first time in seven years, I had to admit that all was not well in my world.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Nine)

But I did wake up, groggy and a bit disorientated, to discover that no one had even noticed my absence. It felt as though I’d crossed some kind of line, then, and there was no going back. My failed attempt at suicide had a strange effect - it plunged me into a black mania, that restless, agitated state where my thoughts were like bullets but their content as dark as hell. It stayed that way for weeks. I was most probably intollerable to work with, because I was permanently on a short fuse. I remember that the Saturday staff were wary around me, because I lost patience with them so many times. I was angry to the point of spitting feathers with what I was being expected to do, and I made sure that everyone knew it, too.

It was in June that things started spiralling out of control, though. The manager went off sick for a fortnight for an operation, and the whole shop started to feel like a sinking ship. One of the other supervisors was left in charge, which meant he was left to distribute hours of holiday cover to the different floors. At that time, one of my staff was off sick, long term, and there were a bunch of holidays that I needed cover for. So for the whole month, Bob allocated me 6 hours. Six f***ing hours. On the basis that the ground floor had to be a priority. To say I lost it would be a gross under-exaggeration. We rowed, spectacularly. I told him I was finished, that everyone was taking the piss out of my willingness to keep the shop afloat, and I’d had enough. To prove my point, I rang down from the cash office and told my colleagues on the first floor that they’d have to learn to do the rotas and organise holiday cover from now on, because I was on strike.

I almost went through with my threat to leave. But instead I beat holy hell out of every available wall until my knuckles swelled to twice their size and I ended up in A&E for an X-ray. I did apply for other jobs, but my rage turned out to be transient, and the arrival of a new assistant manager calmed me down.  More than calmed me down. I fell in lust at first sight - not love, because I don’t think manic love is quite the same as rational love. Later, I did admit to Tony that if it wasn’t for him, I would have walked out. It would have been much better for me, and everyone else, if I had, but I can’t blame Tony for that. I can’t blame anyone else but myself when it comes to it.

By the middle of June, when the 5th Harry Potter book was released, I was virtually bouncing off the ceilings, though there were still occasions when the mania was more black. I wasn’t sleeping much at all, it seemed such a waste of time. Instead I was writing for much of the night, obsessed with the idea I’d had for a series of children’s books, similar to the Alex Rider stories. And my mood just kept on getting higher. I felt so speeded up, it was impossible to stay still, and everything started coming apart in my mind. I’d start sentences and forget what I was saying, pick books up and forget what I was doing with them. I was entering something that I’d never quite experienced before.

Living on a Roller-Coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Eight)

It was probably sheer exhaustion that made my mood take a temporary dive. I was barely sleeping, and sleep, aparently, is the one thing that the human body can’t do without indefinately. So when it came to the final stage of the Christmas layout, the small room where we displayed toys and jigsaws, the assistant manager found me quietly sobbing in the midst of a pile of Monopoly boxes. I couldn’t explain to her what was wrong, because I didn’t honestly know myself. I just knew that the very thought of arranging boxes on shelves had overwhelmed me.

It didn’t last long, and I came to think of the couple of weeks at the beginning of November as just a blip, a mini-crash. I was soon back to being over-exuberent, over-confident and convinced the whole shop would fall apart without me. I sometimes think, if only I knew then what I know now, everything would have been different. But I didn’t, and it wasn’t. In the run up to Christmas, I worked late shifts every day, supposedly supervising the temporary replenishment staff but in actuality running around the shop to some frenzied agenda that only I was privy to. I thought I was fantastic. I thought I was saving the shop from ruin. I didn’t realise that reality was slowly edging away from me, leaving my perceptions warped and distorted.

January brought with it a strange mix of moods. I was restless, agitated, with boundless energy, but there was no hiding from myself that I was also rather depressed. And the black mood was compounded by my supervisor taking me to one side and telling me that he wouldn’t be offering me the supervisor’s job because I didn’t have the “people skills” necessary to do the job. He said we’d carry on as we were, that he wouldn’t be filling the post of supervisor. I didn’t point out that if I didn’t have the people skills to do the job, then I wouldn’t be able to carry on doing what I’d been doing for the last nine months. I just slunk away, feeling as though things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

But of course they did. In February, my uncle died, and I just felt utterly desolate. Too desolate even to cry. And what was waiting for me when I got back to work, that was like a sick joke that God or someone was playing on me. I knew the assistant manager was leaving to take a job down south. I’d accepted that I was going to be taking on 75% of her tasks (even with my lack of people skills, the manager was happy for me to do the recruitment and staff training). What I hadn’t bargained for  was two of my colleagues being off sick and another on holiday, leaving me, and me alone, to staff the first floor and organise events for World Book Day. I should have kicked off and said there was no way I could manage like that, but I didn’t. My stupid pride made it that I struggled through, so nobody saw that I was sinking fast into my own private hell. Not waving but drowning.

In the weeks that followed, I never complained. I carried on like I thought I was expected to. I organised recruiment sessions, inducted the new staff, did training sessions with existing staff, all on top of the day-to-day running of the first floor. By April, I’d had enough. I couldn’t cope but I couldn’t ask for help, so I did the only thing I could, or felt I could. I lay down on the cash office floor upstairs and swallowed 50 paracetamol. Then I folded my hands under my head and hoped never to wake up.

Living on a roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Seven)

To say we were left in pandemonum would be grossly under-exaggerating. It was chaos, and certainly not the organised kind. Sam’s leaving meant that the assistant manager had to shoulder all her responsibilities, too. When she asked me to help, latching on to the rota-planning I’d done at Boots, I enthusiastically agreed. And I didn’t stop with just doing the rotas and organising holiday cover, either. No, I had big ideas, astronomical ones in fact. I saw the supervisor’s job as mine, never mind that I was only 20 and hadn’t even worked at the shop for a year. The job was advertised within the company, and there were a couple of applicants, but when they came to spend a day in the store, I did everything in my power to put them off. That part of the plan, at least, worked. So in the absence of any other applicants, the manager proposed that we give it six months as we were, and then make a decision about the position of supervisor. I was happy with that. Six months to prove that the job should be mine. I planned to shine, to dazzle them all with my brilliance. I got involved with recruitment and new-staff inductions, as well as running some of the regular training sessions for the regular staff. I thought I was nothing short of amazing. Truly, I believed it. As for my Senior-Sales training, I completed it all in six months, when the company prescribed that it would take a year. I didn’t do anything by halves. Some mornings I’d come in at seven to reorganise sections of books that didn’t really need reorganising.

But my pièce de résistance came in the form of the plans for the store layout changes for the run-up to Christmas. My assistant manager was supposed to work on them with me, but she was always busy, and she trusted me to know what was best. I looked at the plans, and I could visualise how it would look. I could see what was wrong, what needed changing, how I could make the whole floor mesh beautifully. I felt totally connected with the building, with the books, with the shelves. Everything made sense in a truly magical way. I felt as though I was blessed with a gift. My alterations to the plans were authorised by head office, and I drew up detailed schedules of how the implementation would be achieved. The plans, I thought, were fool-proof.

But they weren’t. They couldn’t take account of the series of unfortunate events that unfolded in the week before the implementation. Two members of staff who’d volunteered to help pulled out. Another’s grandfather died. The assistant manager was on holiday, and everything was falling apart. It was pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back. Me being the camel. And my brain being the back. I flipped. I just totally flipped. At the time, the looks that people gave me angered me. It didn’t occur to me that when I said, bugger everyone else, I’ll do it all myself, that sounded a bit crazy. Impossible even. But not to my mind. Why couldn’t I do it all? I couldn’t trust anyone else. I was the only thing that stood between the shop and ruination.

I was persuaded to have a couple of people help me, but in reality I didn’t trust them to do anything important. I treated them like gofers. And I worked overnight like something possessed. I didn’t stop. I arrived at the shop at half past five, and it was half past four before we left. Towards the end of the night I was hurling books into lensons, the big black skip-like things on wheels, like I madwoman. WIth surprise, the others wondered why I wasn’t tired, but at that point I actually hadn’t slept for several nights. Sleep was unneccessary, because I felt superhuman.

I drove home, manic beyond reason. In a 30mph zone, I must have done double that. I was absolutely buzzing with energy and enthusiasm. When I got out of the car and looked up at the sky, I felt as though I could just reach up and touch the stars. And it felt wonderful. Why would I have thought there was anything wrong?

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Six)

This time when I started looking for a new job, I didn’t have far to go. Just across the pedestrianised street in fact. I saw the advert in the bookshop window when I was covering one of the tills by the doors. “Sales Assistants wanted.” I applied straight away and got an interview straight away. It was a group interview, an alien concept to me then, though it would become much more familiar in the years to come. Considering I was at a low ebb and my performance was hardly likely to be sparkling or dazzling, I was rather surprised when I was offered 25 hours a week, working on the first floor of the shop. It seemed like the right thing to do, so I accepted, still believing that I would feel better once I was working somewhere else.

It didn’t get better all at once. For the first few months I was pretty low, to the point of sometimes being monosyllabic and uncommunicative. My colleagues tried to be friendly, but I was a pretty hard nut to crack right then. The turning point was the day Carl Fogarty came to the store to do a signing of his new book. The sheer non-stop nature of the day, the stress, the pressure… it did something. I didn’t have time to think, to pause, to wonder how I was going to make it to five-thirty. By the time I eventually left the shop, closer to six o’clock, I was actually buzzing. When I got home, I couldn’t stop talking about what a fantastic day I’d had. I couldn’t stop talking, full stop.

The roller-coaster took me soaring, and I was determined to enjoy every minute of it. There were times when I saw the highs almost as a gift, as if God or some higher being was rewarding me for coming through the lows. I remember that in the run-up to Christmas, as the shop got busier and busier, I decided to “use my initiative” and open the till that was only used at the most frantically busy times, tucked away round a corner well away from the main upstairs tills. The trouble was, my manic mind wasn’t always connecting the dots. I didn’t tell my supervisor what I was doing, nor any of my colleagues, and so they spent a good ten minutes looking for me in the stock room, presuming that was where I’d gone. I just laughed at their stupidity. I knew where I was and so I figured they should have done, too. Besides that, where did they think half the customers were disappearing to?

It wasn’t an out-of-control kind of mania. It was more low-key, more productive. Well, I say more productive, but what I mean is, I meant to be more productive, but it didn’t always work out that way. I’d start tasks, then abandon them to start something else. The main thing was, I thought I was being efficient, even if that wasn’t actually the case.

After Christmas, when the pace slackened at work, my mood slackened accordingly. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was more a case of my enthusiasm leaving me, and feeling rather flat. Perhaps that’s what other people call normal. If that’s the case, then maybe my roller-coaster is more of a blessing than I’d thought.

So far, the job had proved to be better than the last one. I had this vague notion that maybe my life was finally going to sort itself out. I thought the bookshop might be the kind of place I could stay; one of my colleagues had worked there for almost 25 years. I even gave a bit of thought to a career, starting with working towards Senior Sales.

And then, in April 2002, everything imploded, when my supervisor was deported back to Canada for breach of her visa conditions.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Five)

I was out of work for five months. It wasn’t for the want of trying that it took me that long to find another job. I went for a total of 33 interviews, but I was unsuccessful in 32 of them. Probably, at first, I was aiming too high, applying for secretarial and P.A. jobs that I was woefully underqualified and under-experienced for. But even when I applied for more realistic jobs in administration, there were no offers forthcoming. After the first month or so, my mood was… kind of indescribable. Not normal, by other people’s standards. And yet, not really depressed either. I know I was easily distractable, and I had trouble ”selling myself” when it came to the job interviews. That was probably why I didn’t get them. My performance was probably bland, at best.

And then I changed tack, and started applying for jobs in retail. It was a desperate move, fuelled by the pressure the job centre was putting on me. I didn’t want to go back to working in a shop. I certainly didn’t want to work in one of the “big” shops. But desperation is a funny thing. It pushes you beyond what you want, into the realm of doing what you have to do. So I took the first job I was offered, working at Boots, 20 hours a week sitting at a till like I human robot.

For a long time my mood stayed in that low-like limbo. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good, either. And the lack of stimulation at work didn’t help. I felt as though I was trapped in some kind of void, where happiness was out of reach. And I found myself desperately longing for the roller-coaster to carry me back up to the top again. Just for a relief from the misery. There was a point when it was very much a case of “stop the world, I want to get off”.

I’d been at Boots about six months when I finally caught an upswing. It wasn’t a particularly big one, but it was big enough to lift me out of the gloom. It was a sort of comfortable hypomania that felt great, and didn’t actually get too out of hand. Well… it got a bit weird, but by the scale of things that had gone before and were to come, it was just a tiny plop in the ocean.

At my six month review, I boldly told my supervisor that I was going to leave unless they found me more to do than sit at a till scanning nappies and boxes of tissues for four hours a day. I told her point blank that I was capable of so, so much more. My self-confidence had rocketed completely off the scale. I envisioned myself going on a supervisor-training program, and being a store manager within a couple of years. They weren’t entirely outrageous plans, but they were totally unsustainable. As I’ve learnt over the years, manic career plans are almost always, at least for me, doomed to failure. I just don’t have the focus when my brain is flying at a speed of knots.

But my supervisor took me seriously. She let me take responsibility for my department’s daily and weekly rotas, organising holiday and sickness cover and the like. It meant an hour a week off the tills - so there were still another nineteen where I felt like I was suspended in animation. It worked, though. For a while. A couple of months. I loved it. I loved the power. The power to choose the tills I sat on, the power to choose the tills the others sat on. It was hardly world domination, but it was something.

Until my concentration went out of the window almost completely, and my thoughts were racing too fast to catch. I started making mistakes. Little ones that weren’t exactly the end of the world but that seemed like it. I’d make mistakes when asking people to cover holidays etc - asking them to work 4 hours and scheduling them for 5. After making several such mistakes, I crashed. My mood just… plummeted, to the point that I could hardly drag myself out of bed in a morning, to the point that I’d wake up feeling sick with dread. My reasoning was almost logical. The job was making me sick, and I had to get out. I thought that if I stopped the job, I’d bounce back up again.

I was still stupid enough to believe it was that simple. I still had some vague notion that I was in control. It was June 2001. If someone had told me then what the next two and a half years would hold for me, I would have laughed in their faces. I was a fool.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Four)

Unfortunately, it wasn’t my last. I managed another three months at the solicitors in a sort of limbo state: not paralysingly depressed, but not quite “right”. I hated the job, but I felt chained to it by my own standards. I couldn’t quit, that would be failure. I felt restless and edgy a lot of the time, not unbearably so, but bad enough. I didn’t normally have a short temper, but I did now. I was still drinking whilst at work, but it never got noticable or out of hand.

But then things started coming apart at the seams again towards the end of March. I noticed the shift in my mood. It was like my eyes were being forced wide open again, and everything started feeling so much more intense. Once it started, it was like there was no stopping it. My sister got me interested in WWE (then called WWF). But of course, when my mood’s up, there’s not really any such thing as “interested”. In my manic mind, there’s only room for obsession. And the main subject of my obsession became WWE star, “The Rock”. I read his biography several times over, and took the book to work with me, photocopying dozens of copies of certain pages from the book that had certain slogans written in fancy font. My favourite was “Know your role and shut your mouth”, closely followed by “Turn that sumbitch sideways, stick it straight up your Candyass”. The slogans spoke to me, though I can’t remember what was going through my mind at the time.

It was one thing photocopying the slogans. It was quite another sticking them on the walls all around General Office. I remember the day I was fired. Earlier in the week I’d had a few days off, and came back to find a pile of photocopying all marked urgent the size of a small country. The boy who’d been covering me was incompetent, I concluded. And I was taken advantage of. I did the photocopying, all right. I did it as quick as the machine would let me. And I proceded to throw each batch at the secretaries who’d requested it, because I felt sure that I deserved better than this, that they didn’t appreciate what I was doing for them, that the whole place would fall apart without me. I was rude. I was short tempered, I kept locking the office door so no-one could get in. But I wasn’t as efficient as I thought I was. I wasn’t keeping the ship afloat, I was starting to sink it. Like when I started shredding a batch of photocopying I was in the middle of doing, and set the photocopier to copy the shredding. The day before I was fired, I even forgot to take the post at the end of the day - which I’d done, without fail, for the last eight months.

The last day, even though I didn’t know at the start of it that it was going to be my last day, I started sticking up the slogans. On the doors, on the walls, on the work-tops. I finished my artwork off with a whole host of obscene messages on post-it notes hidden under the work-tops. By lunch time, I was out of a job, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Life was wonderful, and I was free.

Or at least, life was wonderful and I was free until the manic bubble burst and reality set in.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Three)

By the end of November 1999, I was in trouble. I didn’t realise it, I didn’t understand it, and I certainly didn’t dare to ask for help. I thought that life was meant to be difficult, that everyone felt exactly the same as I did, while at the same time, I had always felt that I was different.

I started drinking the heavy stuff that I’d never drunk before - not out, but in my office at work, or rather in the general office, which I thought of as my own. Bottles of brandy, hidden in the cupboard. I didn’t hide them that well. I didn’t care. I felt angry and restless and irritable most of the time, and the rest of the time I felt as though I was hovering just off the ceiling. I felt reckless and unstoppable sometimes, and persecuted and trapped the rest of the time. It was hell on earth, feeling like I was going to explode, feeling like the walls were crashing in on me, that I was going to be crushed in the wreckage of a building I could bring down with the intensity of my thoughts.

And then I met Paul. We met on the internet. Within three hours of meeting him, I was no longer a virgin, and I felt great. Yet the great feeling didn’t last long. I was more angry, more impatient, more frustrated than ever come Monday morning. There was a kind of desperation inside of me that was insatiable, and inexplicable. I wanted to do something, break something, hit someone, anything, just to make it go away. I drank half a bottle of brandy instead. I spent the weekend with Paul, telling my parents I was going to someone’s house-warming party. But my dirty weekend was the end of my short-lived romance. It was just sex. And I actually didn’t care. I couldn’t care.  At the office party I got drunk beyond reason, and I didn’t care. Nothing seemed to matter.

I stayed in to celebrate the new Millenium, feeling restless and agitated and knotted with tension. I had all this energy and nothing to do with it. Sleeping was unnecessary. I started writing a novel, not the first I’d written. I’d been writing unpublishable books since I was fourteen. When I went back to work several days after New Year, I felt too disjointed to be there. Everything felt wrong. I felt wrong. I was asked to take down the Christmas tree, but something happened when I was stripping off the fairy-lights. I could feel them penetrating my skull, trying to collect all the thoughts in my mind. Instead of stripping the tree of the lights, I dragged the tree, replete with lights, out onto the walkway that ran around the outside of the building, overhanging the river, and hurled it down the stairs. Everyone thought I’d gone totally mad. In a sense, they were almost right.

It was my first taste of psychosis.

Life on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part Two)

Somehow, I made it through two years of A Levels. It was a weird two years. I started off in the sixth form of my secondary school with several friends, but left with none. I frightened them all away with my erratic moods. Who could blame them for keeping their distance? For several weeks I might be over-the-top with wild, reckless enthusiasm - like the time I suggested we dress up to raise money for Children in Need, arrived at school dressed as Elvis Presley, replete with sideburns and pink trousers, and proceded to perform a very off-key, embarrassing version of Blue Suede Shoes in front of most of the the lower school. They cringed for me, because I thought I was fantastic. But usually, the enthusiasm for life was fairly short-lived, and my mood would darken again, rendering me monosyllibic and uncommunicative. I couldn’t bear the company of others; I would take myself off to the nearby woods during break times and free lessons, sit in a tree, and think about all the many ways I could end my life. I worked Saturdays in a bookshop, and discovered that even at my lowest ebb, I felt okay amongst books. Daft as it sounds, I actually thought of them as my friends. In my more enthusiastic spells, I dreamt up my future career in bookselling, running my own chain of bookshops… though later that plan would come back to haunt me in a quite devestating way.

By the time my A Level results came out (An A in English Language, and Cs in General Studies and History) I was working full time, not in my beloved bookshop, which was closing down, but in a solicitor’s office. My job title was Office Junior, but for that, read General Dogsbody. I started with great enthusiasm, imagining myself as a legal secretary within a couple of years. But then all the enthusiasm left me, and the whole shittiness of the job hit me full force. But this time was different to all the other little loops of the roller-coaster. I was about to swing into something worse than I could have imagined. Dysphoric mania: otherwise known as a Mixed Episode, something to which I am rather prone. The first time round, it scared the hell out of me.

Living on a Roller-coaster: Bipolar and Me (Part One)

Officially, I was only diagnosed last year. With bipolar, that is. Psychiatrists make mistakes, even mine. He’s good, but I was in a really shit state when I first came into contact with mental health services. I don’t blame him for making a mistake. It didn’t cost me anything, not really. My self-confidence was eroded long before I had a really frightening label slapped on me. But it’s nice to know now that I’ve fallen neatly into the right box. People might rant against psychiatric labels, but personally I think they’re important. And necessary. Mine means a lot to me.

Back to the Beginning

Rewind to February 1997. I was almost sixteen, four months away from sitting my GCSEs. My mock results were good. Life was good. I had plans for my future, university after A Levels. There had been lots of bleak moods in the recent past, but I accepted them as a necessity of adolescence. Nobody, after all, said it was going to be easy. But the depression that hit in February 1997 knocked the wind out of my sails. Mainly because it came out of nowhere. I remember standing in the yard at school, convinced my friends were talking about me behind my back, conspiring against me, spying on me. I beat the hell out of a nearby brick wall, filled with such utter desolation, I hardly knew what to do with myself. I cried all the way through double Design and Technology, inconsolable. Not that anyone really tried to console me anyway. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I didn’t want anyone to know. For me, there was a great shame attached to falling apart in public. There still is. So I tried my damnedest from then on to keep it all hidden. I learnt to be proficient at “pretending to be me”. For the most part, I pulled it off.

I didn’t know then that it was a roller-coaster. It was just deep, dark, misery. But by the time my revision leave started, I noticed that something was different. I was fizzling, bursting with excitement, full of energy and enthusiasm. I felt invincible. Untouchable. I couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at things that weren’t even funny. I was filled with such optimism that I breezed through the whole exam period without a care. My thoughts were like rockets, blazing through my mind. I had so many brilliant ideas, I couldn’t follow them all. I found hidden meanings in everything. Delusions of reference is the technical term. Songs were about me. Things on the TV were about me. All in good ways. I could feel all the cosmic connections around me. I’d never felt so alive. I developed an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and borrowed books from the library in droves. It didn’t matter how much I tried to cram information into my head, though - I couldn’t concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. But I was happy. So, so happy. I thought those dark months at the beginning of the year were just a blip, and everything was going to be wonderful and exciting. I still couldn’t see that I was on a roller-coaster.

My exam results should have made me happy. They were good. An A*, 2As, 4Bs and 2Ds. Much better than my mocks, much better than my predicted grades. But they didn’t make me happy. They made me woefully unhappy. Unhappy to the point of suicide. I couldn’t see a future anymore. All I could see was dark, crippling misery. There didn’t seem any point to life anymore. One evening, I sat on the steps outside the community centre whilst my friend was line dancing inside, and I stared at the swings in the playground and saw myself hanging, lifeless from the top bar. I walked over to the swings, caressed the smooth wood of the supports. I was shaking and crying. There was a huge part of me that wanted to be dead, but when it came to it, my courage failed me. I sat on the swing instead, until it was time to go home. For safety’s sake, I didn’t go back.

That was when I realised I was just a passenger on a roller-coaster that I couldn’t ever get off.