Denying myself especially when it is my personality is painful. That is what lithium does to me, it feels as if it holding me back and that I am detached from the rest of the world. That lithium has put up walls between me and being alive.
With music about Lithium dramatising the medication, making it interesting and even those negative connotations are depicted as if validating my bipolar. It adds to the ever gaining pressure. That pressure of being destructive, out of control and a liability. That I am a force ripping through my friends and family. It makes me also feel at peace at times and even understood. But that doesn’t stop me despising Lithium when I feel outside the room.
When taking Lithium I move from my sofa to the bed in disdain after swallowing the chalky toxic element. I visualise the poison travelling around my body, clogging up parts of my brain inhibiting my neurotransmitters altering my brain. I imagine my heart clogging and think to myself tomorrow I will stop poisoning myself and be who I was born to be.
Maybe I am just in denial about having a mental health problem as being labelled Bipolar still catches in my throat. I spent years in denial never wanting to own up to having a mental illness. Telling people that they were never sure, that my diagnosis was ever changing. I even said this to professionals when I knew I had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder when accessing a new mental health team after moving that I did not have a formal diagnosis. Just because I wanted to put it off as something that just needs some therapy. Even after being sectioned and immediately placed on a mood stabiliser, in hospital for around 7 weeks and not remembering much of anything taking haloperidol, lorazepam and quetiapine like candy. I was sure I had just had a mental breakdown. A blip. I blamed everything on other people who hurt me the most. They did do some awful things but so did I.
I started on a clean slate. I always start on a clean slate but it’s just means me getting rid of everyone I know.
Nothing is ever simple, stigma has held me back and made me avoidant. But then I have held me back and never taken the straight or narrow. Privately rebelling and never breaking the surface.
Words made from trees 