mental health over the last year
I've been struggling with my mental health over the last year.
Starting last June, I lived apart from my wife for 3 months for a work obligation where I struggled to fit in and enjoy fully. Working an office job post-covid is now a weird mashup of fully hybrid all the time but also with in-person obligations. I was sitting in a cubicle on a teams call with people in the next building over. More than once I wondered, "why the hell did I move to Virginia to sit on a teams call?". The on-boarding was awkward and isolating and i felt like a child. i sat in a beige hellhole for 9 hours and saw no one most days. Papa died on my first day. i was making rhubarb crumble with produce my wife M had brought for me when I got the call. I distracted my grief and isolation by diving into hiking. i felt i needed to do ANYTHING to hide from it, and to cope with my feelings. i went hiking that first weekend, and not just a casual day loop, i started on a 14 mile extremely difficult trek. I hid at my bnb most evenings, exhausted from the beige day and too socially drained to meet with the other summer interns most of the time. I'm proud to say that I went hiking at least once every single weekend that summer. The work itself had problems due to poor communication, a lack of direction, and my own tendency to be overly independent and not ask for help. The latter of which I'm quite aware of now and am working on allowing myself to professionally ask for assistance and to collaborate more.
The rest of the summer went how it did. I came back mid-august and we got a second dog, Apollo. The twin brother to the greek goddess Artemis. I still hadn't mourned Papa's death. it felt more real because of my grandparents I knew him the most and he was the last to go. He was always goofy and funny and witty. He was a prolific painter and I love to have some of his works hanging in our home. Spooky cosmic coincidence, a watch of his that I own stopped working the day he passed. I've been avoiding getting it fixed.
Then in September, my dad and I stopped speaking to each other. He went ballistic upon hearing the news I am forgoing my given last name and choosing a new one after our formal wedding. He said things to me that were so hilariously childish and inappropriate and he refused to apologize for them. In fact he got more enraged when I asked him to apologize. After unpacking what his outburst and previous interactions with him hinted at, I realized that my dad has narcissistic personality disorder. I'm still mourning that relationship. I'm realizing that the ideal I held in my head of my father-and-son dynamics was never really there. I deluded myself that our relationship was fine and normal and nurturing, but the reality was completely different. I convinced myself for a long time that he provided the emotional support and connection I needed from a father by subsisting on the fumes of affection and empathy I seldom got. I'm not sure what level of interactions I even want with him moving forward. For now the status quo is no contact, and I'm fine with that.
After a month and still no reconciliation, I started getting very depressed. Perfect timing on my PhD work to come grinding to a halt with a plethora of annoying showstoppers. My funding also changed to an RA position around that time. But it turned out to be a total bullshit job where the project was already completed 9 months ahead of schedule and there was excess funding to cover a few students. Yay me for a getting tuition waiver and with a 14% pay cut but its something. The underlying ethical issue of literally wasting taxpayer funds from [source] felt and still feels gross. i hate it. I'm getting paid to do literally nothing. I feel guilty. But no one in my program, including my advisor and the PI gives a fuck or even thinks its odd or immoral that we're doing this in order to keep me funded and stay in the PhD program. In practice nothing has changed with this RA gig and I'm still working full time towards my dissertation which is otherwise only supported by miscellaneous discretionary spending.
By late october it was clear to me and to M that i was depressed. i struggled to get out of bed some days, i actively avoided or justified not going to the lab. lots of irritability, a shorter temper. Just generally not feeling like me. I kind of just floated and avoided the big scary things for a few weeks and drowned my brain in tv and melatonin.
Thanksgiving was nice. bacon wrapped dates. garlic mashed potatoes. we stayed home and had our pups. With the leftovers we made scallop po-boys on homemade bread. that was a good day.
By December, M again pushed me to get into therapy and seek more help. i was avoiding it. i had made a goal to start by November 1st and super blew that off. i was so drained all of December and just wanted to sleep. I finished off my final class for my phd requirements with a B-, worked another day or two in the lab, and something broke in my experiment. i dont even remember what it was, but it broke and it was like another 10 hours of labor to reset, this happened on the friday afternoon before Christmas (dec 20th). i fucking gave up. i cleaned up the lab, made notes on what happened, and left. I chose to take the week off to recharge and enjoy the holidays.
i was in agony. i felt like a shell of a human. i was so tired and dreadful all the time. i was exhausted with every social interaction. I ended up not working the entirety of december. I fantasized about dropping out every day. On christmas, M wore a funny sweater that said,
when its the holidays but you're dead inside
*skeleton wearing a santa hat*
hilarious and too real. i was very down.
christmas eve and day was weird. i was super depressed, and sensitive. fragile. i felt like crying all the time. Dad and i didnt speak on christmas. i felt nothing. i realized there was nothing there between us. no acknowledgment from him that his reaction was overblown or even a half hearted apology. he didnt even act if everything was normal, he avoided me like a coward. I realized he has nothing to offer in our relationship. it was never what i needed it to be and now i dont care that its not what i need. but it still hurts. That realization felt like an iceberg cleaving from a huge cliff, a massive release. I dont have to care anymore, I dont have to tiptoe around anymore. I can just be me.
For the past three months I've been going to therapy in weekly sessions. I revisited my generalized anxiety disorder and have been taking steps to manage it. I've been working through a general theme of whothefuckami now that I know I grew up with an overbearing parent, and had a rough year. But still things didn't feel right.
I started to realize things were really not great when I found a bunch of my old journals from a few years prior. This was mid-december. It had insane levels of goal setting. The entries were frustrated and frantic. Stuff like I'm going to learn swedish in a summer so I can go take a job there but don't have a current passport nor know anyone in Europe (learned a fair bit but never seriously pursued the job). Stuff like I'm going to fly to the Dominican the next day for a weekend trip over the fourth of July by driving 5 hours to ORD instead of getting a connection flight (did that). Stuff like I'm going to spontaneously buy a car in cash then immediately take it on a week long 3000 mile road trip (did that). During this time, I spent a ton of money. I got really into day trading stocks. I bought and sold crypto. I worked 12 hour days even in the summer without school or an internship, I just filled my days with STUFF to do and improve myself and learn and it all had to be done. It wasn't all without benefit though. During that time I learned 3D part design in solidworks and passed some certification test. I learned the fundamentals of computational fluid dynamics and the basics of aerodynamics. The problem was the unsustainable pace of all this. This period ultimately ended with extreme burnout when the fall semester restarted and I kept going with this energy. Skipping over the details here, but it wasn't fun, I almost dropped out of college. After a wake up call, I started seeing my therapist twice a week and getting really into Buddhism and meditation. I got better. I moved out of my shitty apartment with a shitty roommate and took a semester off from school for an internship in another town. I continued to get better.
I reread those old journal entries in December and thought "huh, that's weird, this doesn't sound like me at all but I sure as hell wrote this and did those things... sounds kind of manic...". The smoking gun was an entry about trauma-dumping from my mom and how she was diagnosed as bipolar. Statistically, it's something like 1 in 2 cases of bipolar have a genetic factor. So I talked to my PCP about the various stressors in my life and also my mental health concerns. He wasn't the most helpful to put it mildly, a direct quote from him,
That's tough man, you want some Xanax or something?
Although he did refer me to a psych office for a consult.
The initial consultation and diagnosis itself was straightforward, we talked for about 90 minutes about my mental health, and my concerns of why I think I could have bipolar. He was very understanding and asked a thousand questions about my habits and what my baseline personality is like compared to when i thought i was elevated or depressed. The consensus between him and the attending was that I was currently in a depressed mixed phase but definitely have had one or two hypomanic episodes in the past. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.
I used to be on an SSRI in undergrad and oh boy did I feel better when on that. If you have bipolar, your brain chemistry and uptakes are different than a neurotypical brain. An SSRI is an antidepressant which basically makes your brain absorb less serotonin, so you get a surplus and thereby become less depressed. If you're bipolar, you cycle between too much and too little. A "normal" depressed person produces too little all the time (very basically, I'm not a psychiatrist just a tourist). If you're bipolar and you take an SSRI, it will make you less depressed, and then you will start to swing up and that SSRI will be working overtime and you get a HUGE surplus of serotonin. AND YOU WILL START FEELING INVINCIBLE AND CLEAN YOUR WHOLE HOUSE AND START LEARNING FRENCH THEN BOOK A FLIGHT TO PARIS AND SPEND LOTS OF MONEY and it just goes off the rails. The SSRI pushed me into a hypomanic state for about 9 months and nobody caught it or realized that something was off. Eventually things cooled down and for unrelated reasons I discontinued the drug. And things kind of laid dormant after moving out from my shitty apartment, meditating a lot, and generally creating a calmer safer lifestyle.
And things stayed dormant until my grandfather died. I think now looking back on the last year, when Papa died I was sent into a mixed elevated phase, marked by high activity and some depression symptoms. I hiked a lot, way more than I ever previously had. Later I think my dad's outburst and the fallout kind of shattered me. I was already fragile from my grandfather dying and being away from M for the summer, then I came back and got a second dog which was chaotic and scary but that's worked out now (love you Apollo), all while restarting my phd work and trying to graduate. Those things led me into the depressive part of the cycle where I now am.
So right now I'm much more accurately treating my mental health under the bipolar two diagnosis with generalized anxiety by working on a drug treatment and seeing a therapist once a week. In some sense I'm still the same person I've always been before the diagnosis but there's more clarity now. There's been a lot of truth bombs during the realization process a la 'oh I chose to do that because I was on the worst possible drug for my disorder at the time'. Or the fact that I was super irritable in October and November was the low cycle fully kicking in after my dad's eruption which had really been started when my grandfather died and I lived alone for 3 months.
I've been trying to "wipe the shame off of things" post-diagnosis. That notion while in a maelstrom of self realization, and reforging my own values. Its been a lot of heavy lifting. There are a lot of stigmas and misinformation about bipolar disorder and what it means. Thankfully there is also a lot of useful guidance and support out there if you know where to look but that's a topic for another time. I just turned 27 and I'm hopeful that the next year will keep improving.
Have a good day,
Bruce