So why am I nutting this out at 10.21pm on New Years Eve and not at a gathering with friends? I got invited to a good friend's house, but turned it down. Just felt like being alone, watching my box set of My Name is Earl DVD's, ripping into the Pepsi Max and fags, surfing the net. It's just another night for me, New Year's Eve. I started feeling this way about it around 5 or 6 years ago, the same time I stopped panicking about having no social engagements lined up for Friday and Saturday nights. The same time I started feeling content with being on my own and not lonely. My friend Liz said to me it's a sign of maturity. I hope that's it, and not a sign of losing touch with vitality and feeling alive.
I was watching a favourite DVD the other day: "Dracula" (the one made in the early 90's with Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves; the latter 2 doing awful wooden performances and horrible english accents, but otherwise enjoyable). There's a scene in it where Winona comments about how she felt "so alive" when in the company of her Prince (Oldman as Dracula). It brought me back to how I felt when first watching this film in the cinema aged around 23: I felt a strong chord strike at me during the film about the wonder of sensations which I have rarely felt since age 25 when I was first diagnosed and thus medicated. I guess I'm referring to the elation that I used to feel with my unmedicated moods swirling about unfettered and how intoxicating this could feel. Looking back on these feelings, I really understand how some people with mood disorders remain non-compliant with taking medication: when you're dosed up with a mood stabiliser like Lithium or Epilim, what was once a kaliedoscopic world can suddenly become very grey and drab.
When I say grey, it's not automatically like a depression (which I describe as feeling like you view life through shit-covered filters while trying to wade out of emotional quicksand). It's just that...there's no Spark, no mojo. I saw some truly amazing ocurrances when going through undulating moods in my early 20's....I wish I could remember them all. I just had more charisma and was able to enter into conversations with strangers more confidently and fluently. An example being: I was at a friend's 21st and was going to leave early as I had a headache and was getting a bit peeved by some of her obnoxious Uni friends (they'd done a very "in-joke" speech which none of us old friends were impressed by). I talked briefly to one of these friends who invited me to a drinkies lunch they had mined up for the next day to keep the party humming at a trendy pub. I made an excuse not to go, saying I had a headache: the girl eyeballed me "Forget the headache" she spat "we'll see you at the pub tomorrow". I glared at her and said "see you there". I did turn up at the pub the next day; nobody else showed, they were all hungover. I ended up chatting to a lovely afro-american guy for a couple of hours. We went out to dinner a week later, but thereafter didn't see each other again.
My point is: I had the chutzpah to dress up, show up, not be daunted and feel ok talking to a stranger in a bar alone. I wouldn't probably do that sort of thing a few years later when medicated. Being diagnosed and medicated sort of 'extracted' my congeniality out of me. Sure, I can express things ok in a written sense, but to verbalise it is something totally different.
I'm aware that this written/verbal thing is not the exclusive domain of being medicated, and there surely must be people who do take meds who are certainly adept at conversation and many other social skills. I however, am not. I used to be.
Anyway....I've strayed from my initial line of thought: feeling 'alive'. As I type this I can hear the distant thudding bass of a party at a neighbour's house, along with erratic shrieks and shouts of those well on the way to imbibing their way into a jolly new year. I remember feeling pretty alive doing this sort of thing too in the past. These days my 'alive' moments tend to be fleeting, like the rush I get when I sit down and relax with a glass of water and a smoke having just walked for an hour. The blood is rushing around my body, my feet tingle and I feel really awake. Or the alive I get when I mix Clary Sage essential oil with massage oil and rub it into my neck and shoulders. Or if I'm watching a close and exciting football match which goes right to the wire.
It doesn't match the kaliedoscope world of unmedicated mood fluctuations, not by a longshot. I hope one day I can become less medicated, but until then I have to be content with the perceptions I have and also those I create for myself and for others.
Have a happy 2011. I certainly hope to.
