Passing For Normal

Okay so, firstly: ALL THE HUGS FOR YOU. I've been in the place where medication takes away your writing, and it is both deeply unpleasant and oft-times frustrating to explain to the doctor that yes, maybe you aren't showing typical depressive signs, but the inability to write means that you spend a hella lot of time only juuuust this side of okay.

(I...okay, so currently I am not writing, despite having been off meds entirely since around February of this year, but I am having ideas and creative thoughts again, which i didn't realised I missed until I got them back)

...this is going slightly out of step, isn't it? Sorry. So, you probably know--because I'm not exactly backwards about it--that I have bipolar disorder (currently we're calling it atypical type one, but that is, as always, subject to change), which I was diagnosed with about 6 years ago now. I am currently off all medication, and will probably not ever be able to take medication, as I have hilarious and comedic rare side-effects to (now) everything, which run the gamut from being unable to eat due to throwing up all the time, to auto-immune disease and a few instances of my kidneys saying "...you know what? Screw you, bitch!"

With actual anti-depressants on board, my depressive phases were filled in, but my utter lack of creativity (or sometimes, consciousness period) were as debilitating as the actual depression, which is one of the (non-my-body-is-a-spanner) reasons I got switched onto mood stabilisers instead. The one I took the longest was lamotrigene (which is primarily and originally an anti-epilepsy med that's supposed to be non-sedative), which dulled my creativity a bit, but I could (and did!) write on it. I did stop taking it from side-effects (massive auto-immune skin reaction), but those side effects are RARE and I am absolutely NOT a benchmark for the likelihood of a side effect occuring.

...In some cases I am the only documented case of said side effect. Like the time a mood stabiliser gave me synaesthesia and a concommitant "allergy" to the colour blue (if I saw something blue, I sneezed uncontrollably) /o\

wrt to the suicidal ideation: boy howdy do I know where you're coming from there, and I'm so glad that you're able to recognise that behaviour as abherrant. Is there any kind of mental health crisis outreach set up in your area? The local mental health centre to me (well, before it closed) used to run these sort of open-house/coffee morning things where you could go if you were hitting that kind of spiral down, but you didn't actually have to talk to anyone if you didn't want to, but sometimes just the act of being somewhere else and doing something routine was enough to break the bad thoughts.

And, okay, so sometimes it isn't. And hospitalisation/medical eval seems really fucking scary from the outside (and, okay, yeah, it is), but it's not necessarily bad. And you do come out the other side of it. (I have. More than once).

&you;