In the middle of cleaning out the cat room last weekend I moved a box of old diaries in to my office. These were some of my less-interesting diaries, and I hadn’t read thru them in quite awhile, but I pulled one out this morning and thumbed thru it.
The diary was written exactly 8 years ago. At the time, I was living in an apartment and working as a Lotus Notes web developer for Tivoli. I wrote in my diary every day, and what’s most notable is that I was writing the same thing 8 years ago that I write about today – with one important exception.
“Is my insomnia a compulsion, or do I feel compelled to watch the 11pm NYPD Blue because I’m bipolar? And is bipolar what the tight feeling is in my chest or is it stress? Does stress cause all this or is it simply magnified by mental illness?”
“I feel physically revved up, but too tired and unmotivated to do anything about it. The physical feeling is in my chest – it feels like adrenaline.”
“… I found some references on the web this morning I wanted to think about. Each referred to potential problems with med’s I take a lot of every day – Neurontin and Benedryl. They can cause hypomania. It could explain a lot. Mine’s gotten worse since I began increasing the Neurontin last October. And the problems — songs stuck in my head, lip and jaw biting, racing thoughts (when I wake up, especially), and grinding my teeth — have just gotten worse and worse.”
So what’s different? What’s different is that this time I’m proceeding through my winter with the very clear understanding that the medications I take every day – and I have yet to have a single day where I don’t take something – are causing the bulk of my physical (and a lot of my mental) discomfort. 8 years ago I was still trying to use drugs to balance everything out – as evidenced by the fact that on February 26, 2002, I started taking Lamictal on top of the Neurontin and Benedryl that I already knew were causing mania.
I love my diaries. Love how I can look back through them and realize that something that seems new is actually very old, and see that I’ve been following the same path (even if only in a circle) for so long.
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I find it really interesting, though sometimes painful, to go back and look at my diaries and journals. I find that though I may have a lot of the same habits and thoughts, I also can learn a lot about my changes and the things that I still want to change.