Guitar Mysteries – A Little Humor

I’m not all serious stuff   I have a hobby or two… love to write, and have, I believe a good sense of humor . . . they all come together in a nice way once in a while . . . . Something I wrote a while ago, and thought I would share

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People who know me will say that I am many things – among them are thinker, philosopher, a writer, and one of my favorites – a guitar player. It would only seem natural that throwing all these attributes of mine into a blender, would be a cause for consternation, and I believe I would have to agree.

I have been driven, almost obsessed with inane and frivolous thoughts of guitar picks. More specifically, where do all those guitar picks go? Over the years, I have purchased literally hundreds of different picks. As my tastes and needs changed, so did my pick style. I have owned standard wedge shaped ones, ones that slip over the thumb, and even ones that had a scalloped edge so that I could hold on to them better. Despite this ever-varying taste in picks, one thing has remained constant – I keep losing them! Again, I ask, “Where do they go?”

I am sitting here contemplating this problem and am trying very hard to ignore the echo of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” reverberating through my poor, defenseless brain. I honestly, just do not understand how I can continue to go through a nonstop supply of guitar picks. Do they go to some mysterious “Guitar Pick Heaven,” where they are retired with the honor of having assisted some poor, hapless, and perhaps talent-lacking musician? Is it the guitar pick’s method of protesting at having been used and almost tortured by my guitar playing? Is it possible that the picks are on strike because I have occasionally chewed on them while trying to work the kinks out of my latest batch of lyrics?

I’d like to entertain the notion that not only have my picks gone to Guitar Pick Heaven because they have been saintly through their patience, and toleration of my discordant playing, but that there is some mysterious being who is using them to play their own music. Could it be possible that my playing has seasoned them so that when used by that mysterious being, the sound they produce is so much more melodic and sweet than that which I would produce myself?

Whatever the answer is to my question, I have come to one definitive conclusion – It is fine to be a philosopher, wonderful to be a writer, titillating to be a thinker, and great to be a guitar player, but in order to preserve one’s peace of mind, try not to be all these things at once. It is torture!

The Joy and Pain of Medications

Living with Bipolar disorder means that I must take medications on a regular basis.  It’s just a fact of life… I’ve come to accept it.  Taking these medications however is something which I hate to do.  Why you ask?

First, it’s easier to talk about what the medications do in a positive way – they stabalize my moods.  The extreme moods swings that I experience that can happen very rapidly are all but gone.  One way to understand what these swings are like is to imagine two different people:

• The life of the party – the person you want to have at the party. They always have a joke to tell, nothing seems to phase them, and they are the last person to head out the door at the end of the night.
• The Party Pooper – the person who if they even get to the party, stays in the corner, quiet, brooding, looking very unapproachable.  Given the wrong comment, they could growl at you and stalk out the door angry.

Okay.  I have used these two types of personalities just to demonstrate what the moods can be like.  In NO WAY is the person with Bipolar Disorder two different people nor are they two different personalities.  What I am trying to show here is this is what my two mood extremes are like and the shift between the two can happen quite quickly, sometimes even in a day.    The meds smooth out these extremes, and generally speaking, I end up as the person in the middle – pleasant, happy, quite content to talk with people, not likely to offend – just a normal Jane (so to speak.)

This is the joy of taking medications.  Going from one extreme to another is rather harsh and can be quite bewildering, not only for me, but for the people watching it happen.

On the Pain end of medications, or as some would prefer to call it, the drawbacks, is the smothering of my emotions.  Unfortunately, for me, taking the pills makes me feel like I walk around in a cotton baton cocoon.  It’s not that this is totally a bad thing, but there are days where I long to experience the highs and lows that affect other people.   I still experience them, just not ’same’ – and from having periods of time where I have been off medications and well (yes, this has happened before for extended periods of time) I know there is more to experience, more to feel.

The medications place a control on my life – the emotions which then in turn control what I might say.  Funnily enough, this control sometimes can show through in ways where people think I don’t care.  This just isn’t so – it’s hmm… it’s like … it’s hard to explain, but essentialy, it (the meds) make it hard to express my feelings.

The other drawback – don’t tell me you didn’t think of it . . . the physical ones.  Some medications have long term effects on your body and require constant supervision to make sure you aren’t damaging it.  Other can cause weight gain, while some can trigger panic (a real problem for me.)  The most bizarre side effect I’ve ever had was stuttering – wow – don’t wanna do that again.

So that’s it.  The down and dirty of medications.  How they help, and how they hinder.  The way I have come to terms with taking them is knowing that the way they help out surpasses the damage I do to my life without them.  It’s always a trade off – always!   As for the emotion squashing – I fight against it; I struggle to stay in touch with how I feel, to be sure that I know what I am feeling and why and … to appreciate the ones I do feel, and value even more so the fact that I don’t feel the ones that harm me (or the ones that result because my chemical imbalance is out of control.)

Bye for now!

In the Beginning

Still feeling a little a tad restless … that’s okay. Comes with the territory of settling back down to “normal” – whatever that is

Maybe a brief history recounting is in order – a tiny snapshot of where I came from or at least when it appears that things weren’t quite what they were supposed to be be for me.

My best guess is that the mood disorder thing started at a very early age – probably pre-teens. Yes, they do diagnosis bipolar in young children now. Back then they didn’t though. You were, or I was, just a troubled child with a temper, extremely moody, couldn’t get along with any of my peers… yada yada yada… that story.

In grade one I was suspended for some reason I cannot remember, but I do recall is being hauled out of the classroom by my grandfather – me with my feet in the air (in his hands) and my hands firmly gripped on the door jamb. I was not going anywhere! No siree! Naturally, I did. Who do you think won that battle? 7 year old, or 50 something man. *grin* That week is burnt well into my memory banks as every minute that I would have spent in a classroom, I spent in my bedroom. A lesson I never really forgot. An event I’m sure my Grade One teacher never forgot either.

That was probably the first hint of things to come. Yeah, there were others. I’ve been told that I refused to have nap time with the other kids in kindergarten, that my choice was to sleep on top of the play house. What can I say? I’ve always been different.

I have to say that my memory is not that great when it comes to my younger years. There are bits and pieces which are imprinted on my mind that will never go away, but for the most part, I have hmm… recollections and generalities. For example, I know that elementary school was not a kind place to me. I didn’t really fit in – the moodiness did not help. There were other factors too – I went to a church with my grandmother and the things they believed in had me sticking out like a sore thumb (long hair when long hair wasn’t in;) I was also blessed (read sarcasm) with some vision and hearing problems and had to wear a patch over one eye for a long time, and swimming lessons meant donning a swimming cap. Ugh! So, yup… I hated elementary school. And well… it seemed to hate me too.

At 13, the er… crap hit the fan. My family moved into town so that us older kids would not have to attend the local country highschool which had a reputation for being quite brutish. Maybe we should have stayed in the country because from that point on things just went from moody to totally black. Maybe it was the arrival of my menstrual cycle that finally kicked things into high gear… I dunno. Maybe it was the fact that now I was in town and had places to run to. No one will ever really know the answer. However, from there on… wow! What a nightmare! For me, and for my parents who had no idea what was going on.

I did the usual running away thing – couldn’t explain why, just did. I would inevitably be picked up by the police and returned home. Then a shift came… I would get so upset that I ended up in the hospital in the local psychiatric ward. Nobody else knew what to do. A nasty revolving door evolved:  Run away – hospital – home – run away. All because I had this friggin’ chemical imbalance that nobody could diagnose at the time. My official diagnosis then ? *laugh* I was a Juvenile Deliquent. hehe. Still makes me chuckle to think about it.

Things settled down somewhat after 13 – I failed grade eight but was passed into the next grade under a special contract (at least somebody knew something was up) and I never really looked back academically from that point on.

Of course, it didn’t stay settled, did it? Nope… but I think I will leave the next history piece for another post lest it get to be really long and boring. It can! I promise!

Bye for now!!

Panic on the Rise

Today is a bit of a day from hell in terms of of anxiety.  When I got sick about 4 or so years ago, I had the pleasure of adding a new diagnosis to the mix – Panic Disorder.  Life was tough enough just dealing with the bipolar, but when the panic started, I will say that I was absolutely stunned and totally devastated.   You see, the ups and downs of the Bipolar, I had become accustomed to – I had developed coping techniques; knew what to expect; knew what I had to do to get things going right again.  Not so with the panic.

Panic – I work in the mental health field – have talked to people who had it, but had never really grasped how it could blow your life out of the water.  I didn’t have the faintest clue . . . nada!  Not one!  And, I understood it on the theoretical level – all the signs and symptoms – but experiencing it was completely different.  Hell, it wasn’t until after about the third panic attack that it finally clicked that I was having one.

My typical scenario would be driving to work.  I would start out with just little butterflies in my stomach, and about half a mile down the road, it felt like I had a herd of buffaloes trying to pound their way out of my chest.  I couldn’t breath; I couldn’t think … well actually I could think but all I could muster was “I feel like I’m going to pass out” or “I think I’m going to die.”  There were many times where I would almost get to work and have to turn my car around and come home.

Once I got to the stage where I realized what was going on (the panic,) it was a mighty fast and slippery slope – a self-perpetuating one.  All I needed to do was “think” about work, and then after that all I had to do was consider the idea of leaving the house… then I hit the stage where if I thought I might run out of something in the fridge and then have to leave the house …

As you can imagine, it did not take long to head down the path where I was now dealing with Agoraphobia.  *shrug*  It just was what it was… by that time I was so wrapped up in a constant state of emotional turmoil and heightened “flight or fight,” that I was essentially running around primed all the time.  I ended up burning myself out even faster.

I can’t say how I managed to get past the panic, because the truth is I still deal with it… right along side of the bipolar disorder.  (I’ll describe how I cope with it day to day while working in another post.) Today my task was to go to the grocery store, which I did, but when my defenses are down (as they currently are while I try to get things back on track) the panic comes to visit me a little more frequently.  And, it isn’t as if I can always just turn around and leave the situation – trust me that occurred to me today.  On a scale of 1 to 10, my panic hit a level 8 – the “I think I’m gonna pass out” point.  I cranked the stereo in the car as I had someone who was relying on me to be there when they got out.

I’m pleased to be back home, and sadly, today was also one of those days where I had to resort to taking something pharmaceutical for the panic or things were just going to keep going in a never-ending spiral.  Typically, I rely on a lot of self-talk, meditation, breathing control exercises and general awareness to combat this demon of mine.

Well… that’s it.  By the way – the other way I cope?  Writing about it.

Bye for now.