He's sleeping but my mind is running around again. I hope this perfect day isn't over yet and that I won't ruin it for him by going manic. I can try to pretend I'm tired, and I can try to get him to believe that I am asleep until he falls, but it would be a lie of negative moral association. Already my mind is convincing me that I somehow don't need sleep. In several hours it will still be running happily on the same amount of energy and he will be gaining his through the normal means of sleep. I don't feel ecstatic yet and I don't yet feel the need to clean the entire house, but I feel like I could stay in this same position and not change. Not feel any type of human requirement. I can just empty my mind and let things go because I feel like I'm so active.
My favorite thing about being able to stay awake for so long without feeling at all tired, is the opportunity to watch the sun rise. When everything in the outside world turns that lovely blue color. I love going outside during that time and having a cigarette until they sky turns golden. I sometimes have hot green tea with it and feel like I'm being reborn. It must have been what the world felt like before it was tamed by machine and we started valuing progress more than we value what makes us fulfilled. Because during that brief time before the sun comes out it feels as though no one is watching or waiting to change anything. It's almost as though my mind owns whatever it can absorb, which thus gives me even more energy and keeps me up throughout the day. That feeling is one that gives a sense of invincibility.
That slow-rising euphoria is what makes one feel like they have more than one lifetime provided in order to accomplish anything. It's also what takes away someone's negative judgment. It keeps people like me from ever thinking about the bad when I make a decision. When I go manic it feels like I can't do anything wrong, and that everything can and will be fixed. I trust everyone I talk to, and I feel a sense of joy at talking to anyone and talking to them about anything, because because my confidence is soaring and it feels like they must know I'm intelligent. They must know that such a fast moving mind like mine is intelligent. But in reality when I think clearly, I know that's not what it means. In retrospect I know that it only means I'm unbalanced.
Such reasons are why I chose to get help the other day. The main reason being my lover; the one that is patiently asleep right now. I couldn't survive anymore knowing that because of my "chemical imbalance" he couldn't make me happy. I thought about leaving him after two wonderful years, all because he couldn't make me happy. But I had been sick and failed to count all things together. I failed to notice that when depression would strike, nothing made me happy. When I came down from the mania, I almost left him because I failed to see that the problem was mine not ours. When you experience such strange and uncalled for happiness such as mania, it's tragically egotistical that you never realize you must make up for it in the phases of depression. I never do at least, while it's happening.
The depression of it is exhausting. It's almost as though your body wants to punish you for having so much unwarranted giddiness and carelessness. It comes over you like it's its own being and drives out all of the good and light in you. You can think you have things to offer when you're either manic or stable. Yesterday you could have seen what you've given to others and what you've still got to give. But when the low settles in, it's not going to leave until it decides to. There's no way it can be talked out of. Mostly because you can hardly feel anything once you've reached the worst stage of it. It's not always about being sad. It's not always about not being happy. There are times when it seems to be too much trouble just to live. Not because you don't have this or that, you might have everything, but because whatever the low wants to tell you it does. It speaks more believable words than anything, more believable than whatever you can come up with, and it's never anything that will ever help you. It's not just emotional, it's entirely consuming. It eats everything. It makes you lose weight and it makes you sleep. That's the majority of life's productivity it decides to give you.
I remember when I went manic for three days without sleeping and then I came down from it. I couldn't live my life for an entire two weeks. I couldn't get out of my bed for more than ten minutes and I wasn't awake for more than an hour a day. No matter if I'd slept for sixteen hours I felt if I didn't get even more sleep I wouldn't be able to stay conscious, even if I just lay there. I can't imagine what people like me go through who aren't "rapid cyclers." I know that being such a quick cycler as I am is some sort of good luck.
During my worst stage of the low my mother wished to see me once in a while, but I kept my door locked. The only thing I would say to her was that I wanted to sleep or lay in bed. I was entirely on autopilot it seemed. I didn't want to eat or see my friends and I desired to talk to no one. I just didn't feel real or alive anymore. I felt like the alive part of me had completely burnt out and left something earthly yet inhuman behind. I was convinced that my life's purpose was to stay in that bed and be sick and lackluster. My thought within depression is always that my only reason for living is to conserve my physical body so that others can know I'm still alive and not be hurt. But even that was failing me and I started to see the end. The hardest part in thinking about it now, is that this didn't happen to me for any other particular reason than my brain being off-balanced. I was mourning and being tortured and I lost my will to live while turning off all survival mechanisms over something that didn't happen to me. It felt like such an overreaction but really, really I was sick.
I know if I didn't get help the way I decided to, I wouldn't have survived it much longer. Literally. I had thought about ending everything so many times and I walked backward on it repeatedly. I chose to get help though. Not for me, but because of all who are in my life. If I can't handle the burden of preserving myself then I need the extension that I so received. I need to always reach out, because it's not always easy to see the reasons as to why somebody loves you and needs you, but when you get help and have your head and heart cleared of that horrible entity then you can start to save yourself and it's easier to maintain a life.
Any sort of life.
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