Of the many projects I have started and ended over the course of my life, this one has lasted the longest. This blog, through some vortex in my mind, saving it from my usual whirlwind of deletion and record-clearing whenever I start my life over again, has stayed true and steady. I can read back farther than five years ago, and so can you.
This is not the post where I end it all. But it may be the post where some of you stop reading.
I consider one post to be above all the greatest accomplishment of this blog. It’s the post with the most comments, the most views, and, ironically, the least relativity to my continuing life. It’s the one about a mental disorder I was diagnosed with called Cyclothymia.
When I wrote that post, I was in full-swing martyr mode, convinced that this disorder was dooming me to mediocrity, and happy with using it as an excuse. Happily, like many of my fad-obsessions and ideas, it soon fell by the wayside for other ones. I will start by telling that story.
The post was written on March 25th, 2010. During that time I was seeing a psychologist and psychiatrist once a week. I was flunking out of journalism school because I simply stopped attending classes or communicating with the deeply-concerned instructor. I had just been bed-ridden and feverishly sick for the longest period of time of my life, and had been doing literally nothing other than watching the 1980′s “Sherlock Holmes” series, in which the actor who plays Holmes is rapidly and visibly deteriorating in mental and physical health throughout the series due to medication for, and the effects of, bipolar disorder.
I was not in a very healthy, happy, self-confident, or mentally-stable state of mind. This instability gave me something to latch on to. I found stability in instability.
I did my own research, and talked to the mental health professionals, all of it telling me that a disorder called cyclothymia was the likeliest source of blame for the symptoms.
In the middle of all this, I wrote a blog post.
A few months later, I started culinary school.
There are many other posts I could write about why I enrolled in culinary school, and I’m not foolish enough to try to condense them here. But I can tell you that by the second or third day of classes, I had no room or energy for supporting my habit of indulgent self-pitty sessions. I realized that if I was going to make it through culinary school, already predisposed to flightiness and a confessed quitter, I would have to maximize my strong suits (a strong command of the english language, an obsessive personality, the ability to remember almost anything I heard or read the first time around) and minimize my weak ones (namely a self-perpetuated lack of control of my own emotions).
It just wasn’t an option to continue whining.
I should stop right here, as I am sure that the possibly excited reader stumbling upon an update to the post that they had so enthusiastically related to before, and reading what they interpret to be someone basically saying that all he had said before was bull, saying that anyone who thinks they have this disorder is imagining it. This is not at all what I am saying. In fact I still believe that I am predisposed to drastic mood shifts. I still believe that I may very well, through a series of causes, “had” the disorder. But I don’t identify with having it now, and do not take any steps, other than leading my life to prevent it.
Three weeks into culinary school, I did what I have since learned is an idiotic and irresponsible thing. I stopped taking all of my medication (which was at this point, a very strong dose of antidepressants with an even stronger dose of lithium) cold turkey. 100%. One day on, one day off. The next day off. The next day off. I had simply come to an end with them, and wanted to be rid of them. I felt in my heart, and very deep down in my soul, that they were doing more harm than good. That they had served a purpose. And that my new medication, the incredible and intense focus one is forced to have when working with fire, hot metal, and sharp knives, was providing enough distraction and stabilization to render them unnecessary.
When I had started each of the medications, I had noticed HUGE behavioral changes. But when I stopped, I noticed no difference whatsoever. And with the medication went any notice of mood shifts.
But blogging time was no more. Coming home exhausted and with a pile of personally-asssigned research and homework, I just couldn’t sit down and write any sort of post updating the many who had started the dialogue with me regarding cyclothymia. And what was I supposed to write anyway? ‘I’m sorry you’re having this trouble, but I am inexplicably cured’? That was not something I wanted to write. And then, as two years passed without an update, it just got awkward.
But as I read some of the comments, urging me to keep posting, I feel that I owe it to readers to be honest about where the disorder really took me, and how I feel about it now.
I still feel that cyclothymia is an issue of concern, and valid enough to be considered a real disorder, but whether it is naivety through my own unique experience, or propaganda my head was filled with growing up in a household with a naturopathic doctor, I can’t shake the idea that cyclothymia is nothing more than an unhealthy state of mind brought out by an unhealthy state of body and spirit. When I truly began to explore my passion, exercising my full potential for each day, exhausting myself with knowledge acquisition and real, hard, primal, work, the issues melted away. When I began to exercise more, began riding my bicycle to and from school every day, standing up on my feet more, and focusing on something tangible and real, the issues that had plagued me were eliminated.
So take from this post what you will. I still believe that the last one is a valid, hopefully lucid account of how someone can feel in the throws of mental instability, whatever the cause. I hope that people continue to draw strength from it. I will try to answer any questions that are thrown my way regarding this issue, though I have been out of that world for a couple of years now. Good luck to all, and thank you for opening up your hearts and minds to what I’ve had to say on this issue.
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