Welcome

This blog is a chronicle of my experiences as a bipolar sufferer.

About me: I have been diagnosed BiPolar-II for almost 7 years, but those involved and I believe that its onset was at age 17, which is clinical prime-time for mental instability to hit the fan. I am nearly 30 and engineer software for the mental health industry (go figure) for a living, am married, and have no kids.

I consider myself educated enough about this illness to shoot myself in the foot with amazing accuracy. I welcome and encourage corrections in my posts that are cited from a trustworthy source.

My goal here is to dictate to you what is going on in my life that is BiPolar-related, and ideally you'll get something out of it, but I don't know what; that's not my job. Hell, I don't care if anyone reads this, really. What I intend to get out of it myself is a log of my prior experiences, since I am so good at reinventing the wheel.

Thanks for reading.

Take your meds

I haven't taken my medications for... it's hard to remember at this point. Probably a month and a half.

I take a depakote and abilify cocktail.

In the spirit of this blog, here's what I've noticed in that month and a half:

• I can't think, at all. It's to the point where I'm embarrassed to think out loud or be put on the spot for design decisions, because the garbage that comes out of my mouth is hard for me to absorb, much less anyone else.
  
• I am hyper-critical of myself and those around me.
• I have distrusted everyone's sincerity and thoughts increasingly to the point where I have ascended (descended?) to distrusting myself in no different of a manner. For those of you who are not familiar with the inner-workings of a mentally ill person, imagine being able to question your complete sense of objectivity. It's a very scary feeling.
• I have over-taxed myself, my co-workers that have reached out to me, my family members. I'm getting a polite version of the silent treatment from all these groups, and for good reason.
• I nearly quit my job today, a job I love, with people that I love to work with, all because I thought I needed to preempt the inevitable, which is increasingly rendering itself as a delusion.

When you go off your pills, it's like being at the edge of a vacuum named "Dementia". If you're lucky, you're still close enough to the railing named "Occam's Razor" to grip onto when you come to your senses.