Fast-forward many years, a recent ex-boyfriend would often refer to me as his "manic pixie girl." At the time, I had no idea what it meant, thinking that he just threw some fun words together, and I just rolled with it. It wasn't until I saw a reference to it online that I realized it was a thing. I read up on it, and while I'm sure he didn't mean it in the manner in which I took it (I imagine he solely meant it in a way of being a chick who in fact did brighten up his world, but I don't think he was minimizing me to solely that), I was not appreciative of the term because of the chord it strikes within me based on my former self (and, in some ways, my current self--as per my last post on disentanglement). I remember telling him, "I'm not that. I'm a manic pixie real girl." Because I'm three-dimensional. I can help you in furthering your story, getting to your goals, but I have my own story in which I'm the lead character. I have obstacles to overcome as well. Many of which are inside of me.
Which brings me to the name change of "hypomanic." For anyone who knows me, I try my best to be transparent about my mental health because I don't believe in fueling the stigmatization. I spent a long time denying it, even to myself, for several years. Looking back though, I have dealt with anxiety and depression for at least 23 of my 34 years of existence. I used to write poems holed away in my room in middle school while I listened to Garbage's first album on repeat. Back in the '90s, being emo wasn't a thing. Or it was, but we didn't call it that. And I used to think of myself as a goth, but I wasn't that either because I was too chipper when I wasn't fantasizing of ways of to rid myself of the burden of existence. Which most people seem to find jarring when they think of middle-schoolers having suicidal ideations, but I don't bat an eye at the notion because it seems to make a lot of sense to me. I mean, you remember middle school, right? That was when things started to unravel at the seams for me because prior to that, no matter how chaotic my home life was, I had school to back me up. I had friends on the school bus and in my class, my teachers praised me, I was on the honor roll, and I was "academically gifted."
But all that changed in middle school. I learned that a lot of my mannerisms weren't socially acceptable, and I couldn't keep up with what was. I even gave myself flash cards after observing people and watching popular television shows as a a means of trying to educate myself (which didn't work for me). My goals for the beginning of each school year were to make my way up the social ladder and be nominated for the "spring court" at the spring dance they had each year (which never happened for me). Anyway. I talked about my suicidal ideations to my best friend at the time so often that she got tired of it, saying more or less, "Do it or shut up about it." I remember I was cutting a [formerly] frozen pizza into slices for myself and my younger brothers and thinking of what I could do with the knife in my hand, but what my friend said on the other end of the line when I said that out loud jarred something inside of me. I'm sure that she'd never say anything like that in adulthood because it's definitely not the kind of thing that you ought to say, but I recognized her intent behind her words. Did I really want to die? And I realized that I didn't. So I, somehow, managed to do some thought-stopping techniques whenever I started feeling that way, and I didn't talk to people about them for a good, long while.
My anxiety increased in high school. It was totally a thing in middle school, but looking back, it worsened during that phase of life. Which makes sense, because I'd just spent three years being laughed at by the vast majority of my class. So I questioned the motives of many people, including but not limited to the cute boy on the junior varsity football team who asked me out on my 14th birthday. Like, there was no way that this guy wanted Live Action Daria to be his girlfriend, right? And I spent a lot of high school questioning everything, overreacting over everything, and worrying myself into migraines and even back pains, causing me to miss days of school. I didn't even put it together at the time what was happening.
Also, I’d always had insomnia. Always. I remember being five or six years old, waking up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep, sneaking upstairs to my oldest brother’s room, and watching shows with him until I was ready to try again to go to bed. I remember playing movies in my mind while trying to fall asleep at night, getting almost through the entire third Back to the Future movie before finally losing consciousness. A lot of the time, I’d stare at the ceiling, noticing my eyes adjust in the dark. Despite that, I’d still wake up each morning around 6:00 and didn’t even need an alarm clock until middle school. Even then, it was just for backup because I overslept once. And after that, I double- and triple-checked my alarm each night before bed, and maybe a time or three more after lying awake for a good half-hour.
Absolutely none of that changed when I got to college. I would spend a lot of time holed away in my dorm room, writing in my online journal about things that had happened throughout the day, chronicling my life and maybe convincing myself that I had finally made it. I had found a circle of friends who seemed to appreciate me, even though I was also left out a lot of the time--probably because I was creating some self-fulfilling prophecy by hiding in my dorm room typing about my life rather than living it. Probably. I’d vacillate between confiding all of my thoughts in my friends and bottling it all up. Because sometimes I didn’t believe that these people really wanted to be around me. Maybe they were just tolerating me. Some days, I was able to talk myself out of that.
Some days, I was up and out the door all day, keeping myself busy. Armed with a camera (a REAL one, with film even--until my mom got tired of having to pay for me to develop rolls, so I eventually upgraded to digital), I’d go out and document things as I saw them. I would volunteer a lot of my free time at the university’s literary magazine. I would study the course catalog and plot out my courses for as far out as I possibly could. I decided that, in addition to studying psychology, I would double-major in sociology with a concentration in criminology. This second major ended up being a second degree, with me deliberately spending a fifth year in school to accrue enough credits to earn a second Bachelor’s. But I also wanted to study anthropology and philosophy and gender studies. I wanted to sign up to learn three different languages. I wanted to learn French, Spanish, and German. I wanted to join the school newspaper. I wanted to be a DJ for the school’s radio station. I ended up doing none of those things, but I did take as many courses as I could most semesters and even enrolled for a summer session. I eventually applied for a couple of jobs on campus and worked 20-30 hours a week in addition to taking 4-6 classes. I joined clubs and became a mentor for underclassmen. I was doing things! All the things!
Other days, I’d realize just how overloaded I was and would reinforce staying in my room. I’d skip entire days of classes. I’d have migraines and have to call out from work. I resigned from my job as literary editor, and eventually did the same for my job at the library. I no longer co-chaired the dorm’s choir club, and I dropped a lot of other clubs. Like I said, I never did all of those other things, like learning three languages (I did take the minimum amount of hours I needed for French), working for the school paper or the radio station, or picking up any minors. I did take philosophy classes for fun though.
I had my first anxiety attack in the middle of my third year of college, waking up in the middle of the night in a panic, feeling disoriented thinking that it was morning because of how bright my room was, but then being confused because I realized that the light came from my roommate’s lamp while she worked on a paper while quietly playing Postal Service through her laptop speakers (or maybe loudly through her headphones). Shortly after that night, I began developing chest pains. For a solid week. Before I decided to go get that checked out at Student Health. They ruled out anything medical and determined that it was psychological, so I got set up with a therapist.
I don’t know. At some point, I realized that I had debilitating anxiety, and eventually realized that my self-doubt and shadowy thoughts that could sometimes only be lessened by going to sleep and doing what I now call a “cold restart” were, in fact, signs of depression. And I saw therapists off and on for a few years. Then consistently for about a year around the time I turned 30, after moving back to our home state after being gone for seven years, dealing with making new friends in a new city (because despite being in our state, we are still about two hours away from family), and mourning from a miscarriage that had happened within weeks of moving. Unfortunately, my therapist didn't do me much good because she spent a lot of the time trying to get me to validate her abilities as a therapist, so I was more of her therapist and got more out of being my own therapist whenever she’d cancel sessions than when I actually met with her. So I stopped going. Like I said, I got more out of helping myself, which was joining a lot of social groups through Meetup.com, spearheading a charity/community involvement subgroup in one of my social groups, and trying to launch a photography business, all while being a stay-at-home mom. So I’d stay busy. Sometimes too busy. Realizing I had overextended myself once again, and would end up needing to cancel a lot of engagements, removing myself from a few groups, and stepping down in the community involvement group.
Anyway. To make a very long story short, I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression for most of my life and have been conscious of it for 10-15 years. However, it wasn’t until maybe a year ago (after a couple of years of medication management and a year of therapy with a GOOD therapist) that I started wondering if maybe I was misdiagnosed, kinda sorta slightly. I’d been on Zoloft from 2014 to 2017, briefly taking a break while pregnant with my second child, but it lost its efficacy, and I ended up getting on Wellbutrin, which helped a fair amount. But eventually that didn't seem like enough either. My psychiatrist and I discussed our options, and I’d considered having my dosage increased; however, I was dealing with a lot in my life last year, so I decided to wait until things were more stable. Because maybe it wasn’t that the medication wasn’t working so much as my life sucking, so I didn’t want to medicate myself into numbness. But life has improved dramatically over the past six months. After about four and a half months of the good life, I realized my mood hadn’t changed enough to reflect just how good I’ve had it. So I got my Wellbutrin dosage increased. But after a month and a half, the only thing that happened was that my mood worsened.
I mentioned in my last post that it had been a rough couple of weeks, between work and sickness. What I didn’t mention was that I’d spent a lot of last week depressed. In fact, on Thursday, I spent a lot of my free time doing literally nothing. Thankfully, I was due for a psychiatrist appointment and went on Friday. Initially, I was going to talk about getting on a different medication. However, I remembered that I’d taken a genetic test a year or so ago, and Wellbutrin was supposed to be good for me. So what was making it not so good?
Y’all know that I’m a therapist, right? So I know a thing or two about diagnostic criteria for this and that. And I did some self-discovery last year, and then again recently, and I meet a lot of the markers for Bipolar II Disorder. This is not to be confused with Bipolar I, which is the type that most people think of when anyone says “bipolar disorder.” I hadn’t really thought about type two because they don't really go over it in school. My mania has never been exactly destructive. If anything, it’s helped me be more productive. It’s what got me to learn HTML in high school to work on my own website. It’s what allowed me to learn what I know about Photoshop or how I was able to make minor adjustments on pictures through simple programs like Microsoft Paint and even Paint Shop Pro in college. It’s what’s gotten me to clean my entire house or rearrange a room in a day. What has made me commit to running half-marathons in recent years and what makes me want to write a blog. But when I run out of energy, I realize I don’t have a lot of hours in the day. So I need to manage my time wisely. Anyway. This isn’t mania, but hypomania.
Per Wikipedia (2017), hypomania “is a sustained state of elevated or irritable mood that is less severe than mania and does not significantly impact quality of life . . . Because many of the symptoms of hypomania are often mistaken for high functioning behavior or simply attributed to personality, patients are typically not aware of their hypomanic symptoms.”
So I went to my psychiatrist and hoped that he was willing to listen to me. I know that doctors tend to dislike when patients show up talking about a thing they read on the internet. And while I am a recovering hypochondriac, my diagnostic game is on point, and I’m not just a random person who googled symptoms. I have a Master’s degree in counseling and am working on my doctorate in counselor education and supervision. My husband and I share a DSM-IV, and I have a pocket guide to the DSM-5. And I do this sort of thing for a living. So I go into my psychiatrist’s office, and I say, “The increase didn’t work, and I think I know why. I think I have Bipolar II. Not Bipolar I.” And I go on about hypomania. He seemed familiar but wanted me to cite specific examples to make sure (which is legit). So I talk about my years of insomnia. I talk about how I own a ukulele but don’t know how to play it. How I overcommit socially. How I sometimes have the energy to go out and run and tell myself that this is the year I’m going to run a marathon. How I’ve taken up blogging. I didn’t even mention 70-hour workweeks during my gap year between college and grad school or 60-hour weeks of work and internship near the end of grad school, or how I took classes while I was preparing for my wedding and was doing homework on my honeymoon, or any of the other stuff I mentioned earlier in here. And my rapid speech may or may not have helped, because that’s just how I talk. My mouth goes faster than my brain sometimes. Anyway. So he lowered my dosage back to 150 mg from 300 mg of Wellbutrin, and I’ve been put on a mood stabilizer (Abilify 5 mg, starting at 2.5 mg a night for the first five days, and then the full 5 mg after that). It’s definitely too soon to tell if this has helped, but my follow-up is in about three weeks.
To make a long story short, I’m not manic: I’m hypomanic. Hence the change to “hypomanic pixie real girl.” And with the change in title, I want to also address my anxiety and depression, in hopes of continuing to battle the stigma. Maybe I’ll help someone who deals with these things too, and they’ll feel less alone. Maybe I’ll educate someone who has no idea what this is like. I’m still totally focusing on polyamory too though.
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