I originally had an whole different idea for what I wanted to write today about goals and dreams and middle age. But my brain had different ideas. I take Abilify for my bipolar disorder and it works great. It slows my brain down and keeps away the mania and depression. Mania is the real culprit that gets me into trouble, but depression is the part that makes me hate myself once the dust settles.
But it has side effects. Sleepiness and brain fog. The Brain fog is hard to explain. Its like this haze that goes through my head. Its like my brain is underwater and every thought or action is just so hard and feels overwhelming. The idea of sitting down to write anything feels like it would take so much effort an energy, the mere thought of trying makes me exhausted.
That is the thing I hate the most about managing bipolar. This is why so many with this disorder come off their meds. When not on it, the mania feels fun, exciting and freeing. It’s like being high without taking anything. It feels good, until it doesn’t. I’ve tried to come off my medication but then catch myself being grandiose or fantasizing about risk taking. On the meds, the idea of any kind of risk-taking feels awful. Off of them it feels fun and exciting no matter who it might hurt in the end.
I don’t have any great solutions for the brain fog. It usually passes at some point in the day, but I hate waiting for it and slogging through the day. Sometimes I’ll doze off where I’m sitting and the crazy thing is I don’t even realize I’m tired or that I’m falling asleep until my wife wakes me up.
Sometimes my family gets frustrated with me, because they want to spend time with me, want me to engage and take part in things or just have a conversation, but I’m falling asleep mid sentence.
It’s not my dosage. I’m on about the lowest dose you can be on. Raising it at all makes it worse and I take Effexor to help manage it or it would be even worse than it already is. Talking to my doctor, it just goes with the territory and all of the various medications cause pretty much the same thing. In some poeple worse than others.
I’ve always been prone to the worst side effect in any medication. They will work on me as advertised, but if there is weight gain, loss of sex drive or sleepiness all of it will hit me and likely all at once. Believe me, it is highly frustrating.
Things I try to fight through the brain fog are drinking water, exercise helps sometimes, but only light exercise. Eating something sweet, but not TOO sugary also helps. Napping only makes it worse. I think some days if I give in an take a nap I’ll feel better, but usually I just feel more groggy when I wake up.
When you’re a creative this is highly frustrating. There is so much I want to do, and the brain fog doesn’t kill the ideas in my head, it just flattens my execution of them. Even as I write this right now, I feel like my brain is in a mud bog and every key stroke takes maximum effort, but I am making progress. I had to be determined to not let it weigh me down.
I publish one or two essays and or poems or something a day. Taking a day off would not hurt me at all. But I feel like I have to download the stuff out of my brain and it feels like a waste if I expend all that energy in a journal no one else reads. My hope is my own struggles help out someone else dealing with the same thing. I want people to know they are not alone.
Bipolar disorder is awful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’m not sure why it chose me, but some days I hate it. I suppose my illness is part of what makes me unique and all that superpower stuff. But I just wish I didn’t have to fight with all of hte ugly stuff.
People over the years have tried to tell me not to take my medication, but that almost has ended in near disaster when I’ve tried weaning off of them. And fact is, you wouldn’t tell a diabetic to stop taking insulin or a heart patient to stop taking blood pressure medications. Bipolar is a medical disorder. Even on brain scans, our brains look different than a healthy brain. Telling someone who is mentally ill to stop their meds is dangerous and reckless.
Just now, as I was writing mid-sentence I got hit with a big wave of what I call Head Tiredness where my brain and eye lids feel really heavy and I can’t stop yawning. I took a few sips of my energy drink which seemed to help.
I have some errands to run this afternoon, and it will likely clear up by then once I’m moving around more. Plus, later in the day is usually better. But today I wanted to write and wanted to share what was on my mind even if it was weight and slog that is currently holding my brain down.
If someone else experiences this same thing, just know you are not alone. Stay the course and stay on your medication. I know it’s tempting to come off it, and feels good for a time, but the results and consequences are rarely worth it. It doesn’t help that in the Year of our Lord 2026 there is STILL a massive stigma around mental health. Unless you’re just a little sad or acting silly, any scary symptoms at all, which are real medical symptoms, and people want you locked up or accuse you of making excuses.
The hard part with bipolar is it looks different for everyone. Some people shop like crazy, some become hypersexual and engage in unhealthy and unsafe behaviors, others get angry and violent. Some just get really sad and stay sad. It doesn’t matter who you are in life. I worked at a psych hospital years ago as a mental health technician and we had a preacher’s wife come in who was picked up by police walking around naked asking men to have sex with her. When she got medicated and calmed down, she was so humiliated and embarassed by what had happened, yet she felt powerless to stop herself.
I know when I’ve had bad manic crash outs, it was incredibly shameful and humiliating. I still feel guilt over things that happened years ago. I try to forgive myself and some days it’s easier than others. But that’s all part of the package. Learning self-forgiveness, managing the illness and fighting through the fog. I guess dealing with all of that really is a superpower for us. Even if society tells us we are deranged. We just just see things differently in a world that was never made for us. Survival and success is how we win.
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