After getting a bad start on the day, I had to do some shopping, go to a medication appointment and spent a good chunk on family time. Thus, no posting for today. But I do promise some light posting in the morning (I got something that should help with the insomnia) and substantial posting Tuesday night. All my shows are set to record so there’s no stopping me tomorrow.

I think the main reason I haven’t been running at my best over the past few days is because I’m suffering through a rather nasty case of insomnia. I have been trying to go to sleep since 10:30 and that just means I’ve been laying in bed for the past 3 hours and 45 minutes with nothing but my racing thoughts.

Oh, well, back to try again. Maybe I’ll fall asleep in the next hour or so.

Following links from USS Clueless again, I happened across the Pournelle Political Axes, a 2D X/Y scale to reflect political leanings. A very thoughtful read. I have a couple of Ayn Rand e-books that I’ve been meaning to read, now that I see where she lies on the scale, it might be a waste of my time to do so.

My only disagreement was the Editor’s analysis of Reagan as a 4/2 is a little too far. 4/2.5 perhaps, but no lower. He also lists President Bush at 3/3. I would put him more on a 3.5/3.25, his leanings into Social Engineering with the Medicare prescription plan and such puts him over the edge. Otherwise Bush would be a 3.5/2.75.

Where are you?

Things haven’t been working out too well over the past 24 hours. I visited my family yesterday afternoon to deliver some prescriptions and I couldn’t get into the mood. You know, the one where you enjoy yourself in the company of those that you love. I actually went back to my apartment early and didn’t make it to a MechWarrior tournament because something wasn’t right with me.

Today was worse. Between picking up a couple of new people that live in the extreme corner of the county, and the office calling every 10 minutes to make sure I was picking up somebody or another, my first load ended up an hour long. Then a quick second load from the list the other driver normally gets (he’s been out sick for the past two weeks). During the quick one hour I spent at the center, I spent most of it banging my head into hard things.

I bang my head because I am frustrated and there is no other way to express it. I bang my head because something isn’t working right and I’m trying to find the restart button. There are times I can feel my brain undulating because it wants to explode and I must expose my brain to the air so it can explode. There is some thought or concept in my brain that I must let out at all cost. I don’t know what it is, but I have to get it out, no matter what.

Considering how well I’ve done over the past 24 hours and the fact that I would be working alone tomorrow, I decided to call in sick ahead of time. Can you blame me?

Please excuse me while I crawl into the closet and scream for a while.

Since I missed work yesterday, I’m making it up today. My Case Manager will be visiting me at work this afternoon. I plan on asking him to refer me to a new counselor. I’ve been through talk therapy with over half-a-dozen different counselors, but my wife wants me to try again. There are a lot of issues I haven’t fully faced yet. I have a lot of emotional baggage that I am dragging around that is contributing to my depressive mood. Like I’ve said, I’m trying to brute force my way out of this, but I’m not making a lot of progress. If you know of an LCSW in the Memphis, TN area that acts like R. Lee Ermey, please email me, my address is to the right.

I had to take off yesterday to take my wife to a doctors appointment because she can’t drive. So I was free when it was time for a MechWarrior tournament. So my son and I made it there early, and we discussed tactics and battle plans on the way down. Once there, we took our time picking our forces.

In most wargames, the only criteria is how many enemy units did you kill. I like MechWarrior because you have three Victory Conditions that you need to consider to win a battle. You need to consider:

• Destruction of enemy units
• Control of the battlefield
• Deployment Zone control

Under certain conditions, you can wipe out every enemy unit and still lose. So you have to think smart, not just “Kill! Kill!! Kill!!!”

Any how, in my first game I was properly aggressive and handily won. I killed several units and didn’t lose any of my own. In my second game I had to go against my son. He played smart and he was winning toward the end of the game. In MechWarrior, under certain conditions you can damage your own unit. Well, those conditions came up and he accidentally killed one of his units. This put me ahead by one point and he ended up losing the game more than I won it. He was upset until I told him that he played an excellent game and it was one bad dice roll at the wrong time that cost him the game. I also told him I was proud of him for winning his first game and his excellent play of his second game. I was also proud of him not getting frustrated, which is something that can happen easily with him.

At the end of the night I ended up with the Champion prize. Even if my son won the game, I still would have ended up with it because he would have given it to me. There are different groups to collect in this game and this prize belongs to the group I collect.

I ended up having a good time last night. It gives me hope that my other days can be like this.

I have been an enthusiastic player of wargames for years. I would spend hours pouring over the statistics and charts of weapon systems, studying how they would interact with other systems, devising tactics and counter tactics. And I was good. In some games I was almost unbeatable.

Even with MechWarrior, before a match I would invest 2-3 hours in developing several battle forces, analyzing each force for strengths and weaknesses. Last night, I was ready to skip the entire thing. I just didn’t feel up to it. But my son looks forward to these events, so I picked him up and off we went. I just threw a force together and lost both games. Even when I was winning, my failure to properly use my forces led to my losing more than my opponent actually defeating me.

Depression steals enjoyment. Even the things that you love to do becomes too much of a bother to actually expend the effort. You would rather spend time staring at a blank wall for hours than doing constructive things. The depression makes you sad. Your inability to do things you once loved compounds the situation, heaping sadness upon sadness. All you can dwell on is the sadness, so anything you can do to get away from the sadness is the best you can hope for.

I have to brute force my way out of my sickness like John Nash (A Beautiful Mind ). I have tried about three-quarters of the anti-depressants currently on the market, and they have either drove me into a manic frenzy, done nothing or given me severe side-effects. I am documenting my struggles not only to provide insight to you, my readers, but to help me combat this thief.

I think I’m down to a 6 on the depression scale. Things seem just a little greyer lately. Yesterday, I was actually awake at 7:45 in the morning, but I couldn’t get out until 9:30. I remember being a hard charger. While I didn’t leap out of bed, I made it out in good order, got ready and got to work. Yesterday I might as well been trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon. To lie there, helpless, makes me angry. But it wasn’t enough to get me going.

Another thing is food. I no longer enjoy eating. To me, food is simply fuel to keep me going. I don’t enjoy the taste, I don’t savor the company if I am out eating with my family or friends, as long as it isn’t nasty, it’s just “okay.” I have all of the excitement of eating as I do taking a dump. They are both the same to me, merely something that must be done.

I haven’t written any personal stuff over the past couple of days because I haven’t been up to it. I’ve been trying to fight the depression and I have slipped back somewhat. While I did get up at 8:30 this morning without a problem, today was the exception. Monday night was particularly rough. I hit a low that I haven’t hit in a while that night, followed by having to get up early for work. I was not at my best yesterday.

Right now I’m just perusing until my Case Manager arrives, then I have some family time planned.

I’ve told you about my Sun Conures Rocket and Corkscrew. I have some other birds as well. I also have 4 Zebra Finches as well for a total of 6 birds. I keep a brother-sister pair, Spot and Plucky, in one cage and a breeding pair, Ozzie and Silver in another. Silver laid a clutch of five eggs a couple of weeks ago, and starting this weekend, a chick a day has been hatching. Four of the five chicks have hatched, and I’m waiting on the last egg. The chicks are cute, they look like a hairy inch long worm. And they are always hungry. Now starts the 6-8 week process while they grow up. When they are old enough, I take them to the pet store so they can have a family of their own.

I tried launching a few of my model rockets today. And, like NASA, I got a scrubbed launch due to weather. The wind was whipping around too fast for a lot of launches. I got one in, but it took off and instead of going straight up, it leaned into the wind and had a large amount of horizontal distance involved. It landed about 3/4 of a mile away, in chest high soybeans. If I didn’t have a locator beacon on it, I never would have found the rocket.

There are three different subsets to model rocketry. There is the true model rocketry, which the rockets are generally 6″ to 24″ in size and use A to D powered motors. Then there is mid-powered rocketry, where the rockets are 2 to 4 feet long and use E to G motors. Then there is High Powered Rocketry, where rockets start big and go toward massive. These use H and up motors. I included motor sizes because I wanted to tell you about them. Every letter you go up, you double the total power of the motor. Two C’s equal one D, Two J’s equal one K. But, one K equals 256 C’s.

When I say High Power Rockets are big, I mean big. As in 1/3rd scale, 1/2 scale, in one instance full scale of a real life missile. It is not out of the ordinary to see a 1/3rd scale V2 rocket at some of the larger launches. The difference is we build ours out of cardboard tubes and Fiberglas, not metal. Instead of a warhead, we have a parachute so we can recover the rocket intact and fly it again. Rockets also have no guidance system, they just go up and come back down again, hopefully the take off and landing sites are close together.

I have a high power project of my own underway. The last one didn’t fare too well, you can see before and after shots of them with me. The landing on this one was a little rough. The parachute didn’t come out like it was supposed to and it fell straight down from 3,000 feet, driving the nose cone about a foot deep into hard packed soil. It was a total loss. Hey, it happens.

Now comes the fun part. I am a rocket scientist. I must understand and harness the same principals of construction and flight dynamics as those big boys at NASA. The only significant difference is their budget is bigger than mine, so of course their rockets are bigger.

Rocketry is a fun sport that can be enjoyed by children and adults, boys and girls, and it is frequently a family event. Try it today and see!

My soul needs a little baring, so you, the reader, know some important things about who I am. I have several items to write about, but I am going to purposefully leave this on top for a day or so to make sure everyone sees what kind of person I really am. I don’t want people to think I’m an all-right kind of guy.

I had a conversation the other day that reminded me that actions have long term consequences. With five years of verified mental illness under my belt, I can look farther back and see years more of undiagnosed mental illness. Passed off at he time as “just being weird,” I was running a pretty constant 5 to 7 on the mania 10 scale. Impulsive and excessive spending, impulsive decisions, the whole works.

In May of 1997, I forced my wife into taking a vaccine shot that I thought was important. She was hesitant, but in my “normal” style, I bulldozed her into taking it. She ended up having a severe reaction to the mercury in the vaccine. Being scared and impulsive, I buried the her and the problem, making believe that it didn’t exist. A year later, through nothing less than a miracle, my wife made contact with just the right person at the company that made the vaccine, by accident. This person set up a case for her. All related health care would be free, plus a healthy annual stipend was hers if I would just fill out one piece of paper. I didn’t do it. I was so deep into denial about the problem, so intent on making it go away rather than solving it, I did nothing.

To this day, my wife still has a multitude of health problems and disabilities, all related to the vaccine or the cascading of problems from not treating it in a timely fashion.

There are several other intense incidents of similar fashion, but I think this one sets the bar pretty high.

Believe it or not, things got worse after I became ill in 1999. For the next four years I ping-ponged between manic 10 and depressive 10. I became dangerous during my manic swings. I became abusive to my family. My wife, who was trying to protect me, would do her best to prevent me from doing fatally stupid things. Being so manic, interruption of my impaired thought processes led to train wrecks of monumental proportions. I did my best to keep that manic train rolling, including over her if necessary. There are multiple fist-sized holes at the level of her head in various locations. While I have never struck her, I have done other equally reprehensible things to her.

If I didn’t have a built-in insanity defense, I would have gone to jail for spousal abuse on multiple occasions. Instead, I was shipped off to a psychiatric facility for a few weeks where they tried some new drugs on me and then dumped me back home for the cycle to start all over again. It took a hospitalization after I got a job for things to change. My wife made it clear to everyone involved that I had my own money now and I would have to use that money to find a separate place to live.

So now on top of a debilitating illness that I inflicted on her, I have given my wife a generous case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Bring up the wrong subject or person, and she relives these and other terrifying moments of her life with the same amount of terror that she had going through the original events themselves. These memories do not fade with time. It was just such a moment that prompted this blog entry. I am unable to atone for my actions, because my wife can relive them all with perfect clarity on a moments notice. Short of Jesus descending from heaven and healing her body and spirit, neither one of us can move forward from those years of terror. She lives everyday with the aftermath of the carnage I have caused, and I live everyday with the knowledge that I am responsible for doing it.

So you see, I have some very large and noisy skeletons in my closet.

The sad part is, I have always had a pretty good ability to analyze, define and solve problems. But when it comes to the problems I face in my own life, all I can do is beat my head and scream, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!” Even when my wife literally leads me through the problem all the way up to the solution, I am totally clueless and avoidant to the problem.

And this is one reason for this blog. Not just to document my trials and tribulations, but to induce deep, introspective self-critical thought in you, the reader. Thoughts and processes so you know where you are and why you are there. Before you can follow a map to treasure, you must first know where you are so you know where to start from. All the directions are worthless if you don’t know where you are.

Good night.

Finishing the last article and trying to fix the page has brought on an attack. I’m heading into the closet for a while. Wish me luck.

I would love to get up at 6am again. It would give me plenty of time to surf and find appropriate stories for you to read when you get to work. It would give me hope that I can face the day. I got 9 hours of sleep last night before the alarm went off at 8 this morning, and I still stayed in bed until 10:30. This angers me to no end. I want to get up, but the depression drags me back down again. The ironic thing about it was it was like someone threw a switch. One moment it was impossible to get up, the next moment no problem. I wished that would work for the rest of the day. I’m working myself up to actually shave and brush my teeth next.

Living with depression is like living with an extra 100 pounds. But instead of it being around your waist, or in a backpack, it’s all carried on your neck and shoulders. It drives your center of gravity forward so you are off balance. It curves your spine so you’re always looking down. It makes your knees buckle so every step is unsure. If you’re not careful you can be driven to your knees. When I am overwhelmed I literally feel every pound on my neck and shoulders. When a decision or problem weighs heavily on you, that load can be shared with family and friends. I don’t have that luxury.

This is the reason for this blog. For me to tell you people what it is like to live with a mental illness.

My alarm clock went off at 8 am this morning. I am trying to get up at the same time every day for stability. That means no sleeping in. I got up long enough to feed my birds, then I was driven back to bed to hide from the world. This wasn't a fear attack, but rather a "I can't face anything" type of attack. 8 o'clock suddenly became 11:30. I am angry over this. But then the definition of depression is "anger without the enthusiasm." On a 10 scale of being depressed, I am about a 5. This slope I am on is steep and slippery. Below me lies closet time and suicide attempts. Above me lies normalcy. I struggle with easy things. Personal hygiene is a monumental task. I don't smell, but if I shave twice a week, that's good. If I brush my teeth 5 times, that's outstanding. Taking the trash 30 feet outside the back door might as well be climbing Everest. I know these things need to be done. I want to do them. I know they are not hard to do. But actually completing the task is nigh impossible.

But I also have an added danger in my life: mania. "Normal" bipolars spend months or years on either side of the scale before falling off the other side. I myself was mistakenly diagnosed as ADD instead of bipolar. I spent most of my life on the manic side. A fast cycling bipolar can literally switch in seconds. Several of my suicide attempts were preceded by a severe manic swing. I experienced a perceptual narrowing (I overfocused on something small and insignificant) on something dangerous. When my wife got through to me about how stupid I was being, I would go from a manic 10 to a depressive 10. These severe manic swings also led to trips to the hospital under police escort. I was on a first name basis with the police that specialize in handling emotionally disturbed people. Luckily the Memphis police don't carry Tasers, I would have been brought down at least twice that way. Let me clarify something. I was a standard bipolar (diagnosed as ADD) until I started taking Effexor in January of 1999. This drug piledrived me into a depressive swing and I have been like a ping-pong ball ever since. My first hospitalization was in early 2000 and I have had at least 15 hospitalizations, the last one in November 2002. My last manic episode seems to have been in May, and I have settled on my "slightly depressive" spot ever since. Now is the time to move up emotionally. Wish me luck.

I got a rude awakening this morning about 1:30am. The apartment got a loud knock for some reason.

The only two knocks you get at that time of the morning are "police raid" or "death of a family member." It dumped a large amount of adrenalin into my system and took a while to go back to sleep.

Short on time again, nothing really interesting on the news web sites. I'll post something conservative tomorrow when I have the time.

UPDATE: I meant to say the apartment ABOVE. I did not get the knock, but the people above (or maybe even next door).

I've already stated that I work part time. I put in three days a week at a Drop-In Center, which is a socialization center for people who have a mental health diagnosis. It's a job requirement that the staff also have a mental health diagnosis as well. It's so we can better relate to our clients.

I drive for the center. I go out and pick these people up and take them to the center. In the afternoon, I take them home. In between, I interact with them. These are people who by and large will never be a contributing member of society. A good portion of these people also have developmental disabilities such as mental retardation on top of being schizophrenic, or bipolar, or whatever they have. Seeing these people struggle against what you don't even think about helps me do my best to make it through the day. Most of them are happy, because they can't even conceive of the things that are beyond them. They look forward to coming to our center like normal kids look forward to going to Disneyland.

Me? I feel like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon. I remember when I was an Information Technology Manager, my work affecting hundreds of employees and thousands of customers. I used to eat stress and deadlines like candy. Now I must carefully manage myself. If I get too excited or stressed, I end up on the manic side of the scale. That means my productivity drops to zero and I run around like a headless chicken, followed quickly by my ending up back in the closet, screaming like I'm being tortured. I dream about being an IT manager again only 3 to 4 times a day. Followed by the realization that I still have a long way to go, plus there are things that must change externally to me as well before I can go job hunting again.

Thursdays are my fun night out. I play a futuristic tactical game called MechWarrior:Dark Age where the main battle unit is a BattleMech, a 40 foot tall humanoid robot bristling with weaponry and a man at the controls. It’s about the year 4,000 and Man has spread to the stars. It’s based on the old (but still played) BattleTech. It’s a fun game that can be played in an hour or two and doesn’t require pages of charts and stats. Everything you need to know about a unit is on the base, which is clicked as the unit takes damage. So the stats go downhill as the units get more and more damaged.

This and model rocketry are my only two hobbies at the moment, things that actually get me out of the apartment to mix with other people and have fun. I get to do this once a week at most. We used to have eight tournaments a month, but changes at the company that sells the game have cut things back to four events a month. You see, this company hands out free prizes if you win. Not a lot of other game companies do this.

Anyway, I loaded my stuff into the car, went and got my son and we went to Midtown Toys and set up. He played, I refereed. For some reason, we don’t have a lot of players in this area to begin with. Tonight it turned out to be my son and one other player. No multiple battles, no exciting finishes, tonight was a 5 on that 10 scale of fun. I did get to talk with people of like-minded interests for a couple of hours, which is more than I usually do. I also got to spend some quality time with my son, which is always cherished time with me. That’s always a 10 for me.

I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to post more today, but I also had to take my wife to a doctors appointment. I am going to respect her privacy and not delve into the details, but I am worried. If you pray, please put her in your prayers at night.

Thank You and Good Night.

My work hours are 10:30am – 7pm. With this in mind, getting up at 9am is perfectly acceptable. One of the reasons for this blog is for me to adhere to more acceptable hours. I got my alarm to go off this morning at 8am and I managed to get out of bed without an attack. After getting up at 8:00 for a couple of days, I’ll shoot for 7:00. I’m not sure what I will do at that hour, but I’ll find something.

One thing that I must be careful about is doing too much. My life is boring and vanilla as possible on purpose. Last week, in one day I paid the families rent, washed my overflowing dishes, did my laundry at the Laundromat, then took my family out for something to eat. Halfway through the outing with my family, I was overcome by a fear attack. I was able to hold together until I took everyone back to my apartment and I had to hide in my closet for a while. I also had to repeatedly thump my head. Not hard enough to bruise, but enough to provide a small physical shock to the brain. It serves as a “reboot” for the brain, providing a small measure of comfort to me.

The first indication that my life had forever changed was me crawling into the hall closet and started screaming and crying while beating my head into the wall. I was two weeks into taking an antidepressant treating what I thought was adult ADD. I was in the closet because I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I had let down everybody that I had known. I was out of control and my only saving grace was my loving wife crawled into that closet with me and calmed me down. But that was the first of many, many times in that closet. Over the next 6-8 months, I think I spent more time in there than I did out. I went in there for the sensory deprivation. My thoughts would spin out of control and the only way to get them to slow down was to go into that dark, quiet place and let time pass.

So with all things in life, I must find a balance. I have been on the low side on purpose because my primary diagnosis is fast cycling Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. I don’t ever want to go manic because I would be out of control and that would be very bad. Trust me. So this blog is part of my effort to creep back to the center and balance, instead of staying on the depressive side. While being manic is a danger, I want to be able to do more, so by doing more, I hope to be able to do more. We’ll see.

Wednesdays are very important days for me. This is the day that I meet with my case manager. This is a licensed social worker who comes by to check up on me. He makes sure I've been taking my medication, that I'm still stable on it, that I haven't been doing anything stupid, etc. I see him weekly, because of my past history of instability means I must be closely monitored. I used to see him twice a week, but budget cuts cut it down to one. I'm one of the "lucky" ones, most under case management only see their case manager once a month.

Today was doubly important because today I also checked in with my medication nurse. She is a licensed Nurse Practitioner who is in charge of my current drug "cocktail." Between my NP and I, we decide on a monthly basis as to how well my medication works and if any changes are warranted.

Without my medication, I would be dead, literally. When I am not on the correct medication (or none at all) I have an overriding urge to blow my brains out. A constant mental picture of pointing a gun at my head and pulling the trigger. I have been ill for five years now and it has only been the last year that this urge has been under control. I stopped counting suicide attempts when I hit an even dozen. I have tried hanging, pills, guns, even a half-hearted attempt of suicide by cop. I've had the SWAT team out to the house twice that I can remember. Just think about that. Average one suicide attempt every four months for four years. Not good. I never really wanted to die, I just wanted the urge to go away. That was how desperate I was.

Now imagine what kind of pressure that puts on a wife and child. My wife has PTSD from all of the out of control meltdowns that I went through before trying to kill myself. To this day I cannot raise my voice for any reason in front of them. The pets are even scared of me when I raise my voice. I am separated from my family for just this reason. I do get to see them, but it's as a visitor, not as a true husband and father.

So you see, it is very important that I have the correct medication and stay on it.

Thank You for visiting my humble blog. Let me tell you a bit about myself. I am a 42-year-old man who is living with a severe mental illness. I used to own my own home, I used to have a family. I used to be an IT Manager, pulling down $50K a year. Right now I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment, working part time to support myself. More details in later posts.

I meant to get up early and start on this first full entry, but I had an attack this morning. What I mean by “attack” is an attack of fear. I am afraid to get out of bed. Nothing that I’m afraid of, I’m just chilled to my bones with fear. I fight it as best I can. I toss about in bed, punch my pillow, yell at myself, that kind of stuff. It is frustrating to be rational and fearful at the same time. To know that there is nothing to be afraid of but yet still afraid is very disconcerting. So I got up 90 minutes late. There have been days I have missed work because I can’t fight the attacks. Luckily I have been able to keep the attacks to my days off, as I only work three days a week. That’s all I can work for several reasons.

I’m up now, so I’m going to go surf and see what I can see. More posting later.