Clutter, Christmas, and Mixed States: A Recipe for Exhaustion This has been a rough year. Slowly Im coming to realize that my general condition must be bipolar depression - a mixed state that means the brain is racing even though the mood is depressed. This mentally active depression leads to a variety of additional symptoms and behaviors. Im convinced its the cause of my fibromyalgia - a chronic condition of muscle pain and weakness that can be caused by poor and inadequate sleep along with unusual physical tension. Another symptom is the tendency to become overwhelmed easily, so that when there is too much to be done, one can wind up paralyzed, obsessing but unable to act. It leads to a cluttered home. It leads to exhaustion.Given a task that has its own parameters and built-in structure and discipline, I can keep going. The office where I have my day job did a massive software upgrade effective the first of June. From Memorial Day until some time in August I worked six and sometimes seven days a week, along with my long-time friend (who is also my boss and co-worker) JoAnn. It was just the two of us holding down the front office of a small manufacturing firm. We were struggling to implement and become familiar with the new database when, less than three weeks into the project, our company launched a new product that was an instant sensation. Orders poured in. One Saturday JoAnn and I spent 9 hours each just entering orders - nothing else - and could not get them all entered. Eventually we stopped working such long hours, for the sake of our health. But we did not really get caught up until late October. Had this been a task that I had to organize, Id probably become a gibbering idiot. But because it fit into the structure of the work day, because going to work has its own discipline, I was able to cope. Away from work, however, everything was falling apart.As Ive written about in earlier articles in this series, my psychiatrist and I kept tweaking my medications to try to improve both my sleep and my mood. But I began to lose unpaid bills in the avalanche of paperwork on my desk, on the home office sofa and floor. Because I do a lot of bill paying by computer, certain errors can be made a little too easily - twice in the last three months I have sent a payment to the wrong credit card company. (It did not help that my bank, in doing its own massive software upgrade, changed the way they accept online bill payments and caused several checks Id requested to disappear into cyberspace - and causing me to incur steep late payment penalties even though I had set up the payments on time.) When Lexapro became available, I switched to that - but it caused too many problems, and I had to back the dosage down (see Lexapro and Go, Go, GO! and Half a Lexapro is Better Than None). For a brief period I was filled with energy, but lowering the dosage of Lexapro ended that. Still, for a time in early November, reading two books on clutter and organization gave me some inspiration. I was able to clean out our sunroom, which I use as a greenhouse for raising plants from seed in late winter and early spring, and come up with a design to keep it organized, tidy and multi-functional. Then along came Christmas season. Oh, tidings of discomfort and woe! This time of year is irreversibly colored for me by the death of my fiance just 8 days before Christmas in 1992. Though I have moved forward and recovered long since from that loss, the Christmas season will never be the same again. This year, early in December, I found myself tired, pushing, staying up too late, waking up too early - and spending that extra time escaping into garden books and science fiction. When I saw my psychiatrist on December 19th, he ordered me to establish a regular, earlier bedtime, which I have done. But I felt sick with exhaustion through the following weekend. So for three days I took an extra 5 milligrams of Lexapro. It was just enough. I spent about $90 on gift bags and tissue paper on the 24th, just so I could stuff gifts into tissue-topped bags rather than having to wrap anything. And Christmas itself was okay, though by the time the family gathering broke up, I was pretty well worn out again. I couldnt continue the extra Lexapro - I dont have enough of it. Since Christmas, a pattern has emerged: I am not too bad during the day, but around 3:00 in the afternoon I hit a wall and just slide down it into a heap throughout the late afternoon and early evening. By 7:00 my ribs, back and face ache with tiredness. My throat begins to hurt. And I dont know if the problem is medications, accumulated stress, the mixed depression itself, or there is something else going on. My next appointment with the psychiatrist isnt for several weeks. Im not going to wait that long to talk to him. Its not that long since I had a taste of what its like to feel really good. I liked it. I dont like this. Im not going to settle for this.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 21:03:44 +0000
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