I’ll never forget the first time I took medication and woke up.  It was 6:00AM.  I jumped in my car and immediately drove to my best friend’s house in the hills.  I exploded into her room, fueled by excitement that I had never experienced straight out of bed in the morning.  Ever.

“I woke up normal.”

My friend rose from her heavy sleep and smiled. “That’s awesome.”

“No, really, is this how people wake up?  Like, rested?”

“Yeah!  I told you you should have gotten help.  I’m so happy for you.”

“Happy isn’t even the word for it.”

I’ve never had a word to describe that feeling.  That feeling of living 28 years of my LIFE waking up with terrible exhaustion and one pill, one night, changed everything.

Time is an interesting factor in understanding Bipolar II.  In the Bipolar II world, an hour feels like ages.  When people would say, “I don’t have any time,” I never understood it.  You don’t have two minutes to pick up the phone and say hi?

I had way too much time and it haunted me. My life was filled with more activities by far than my peers and it still wasn’t enough.  When your mind is on fire, thinking a hundred miles a minute, constant thoughts coming at you non-stop, time becomes a true nightmare. Your sense of time is never like everybody else’s, and that clock ticks in slow motion all the time.

The afternoon I took my medication for the first time, I sat down and wrote a poem.  I didn’t want to be the cliché that medication kills the artistic spirit.  That was seven years ago, and eight hundred poems later I’m still charging away and waking up alive.

POEM: TIME AND THE VCR

Tired but awake

Aware but delusional

Freight trains

Of thought

Burst

From the brain.

Then it becomes silent.

What did I do?

Where did I go?

I have no idea

Because the madness lives in

Mania

Madness that I believe

Earns truth.

And it does

Somewhere

But it’s not a job

It’s not productivity

It’s simply a moment in space

Of severe

Thought brought forth through

Heightened energy

And it’s awesome

And quick salvation

From the world

But it doesn’t live in the day to day mind

I will never have a day to day mind

Because time is a nightmare.

Am I going to sleep tonight

And wake up exhausted

Fueled by anxiety

To go where

To do what.

Time and the VCR

It’s an unreal clock telling me the external world is slow and boring

My mind is fast forward all the time

Or on pause

While the world walks in slow motion

And I’m felt alone

Inside.

 
Man with clock photo available from Shutterstock

Tweet

Comments

This post currently has 5 comments.
You can read the comments or leave your own thoughts.

Trackbacks

Bipolar II Sense of Time – Slow Motion « opfocus1304y (September 4, 2012)

    Last reviewed: 28 Aug 2012