Gabrielle's blog

Thank you again Karen Tyrrell for visiting this blog. Karen's answers to my questions got me thinking. That's the great thing about sharing your own experience with other Bipolar Landers: you always learn something useful.

So how would I answer my own questions? I have given below the most honest truthful answers I can.

I am thrilled to announce that Karen Tyrell, author of Me and Her - A Memoir of Madness will be guesting on this blog on 17th May as part of Karen's International Blog Tour:

ME & HER Blog Tour 14^th - 20^th May

14^th MayKaz Delaney- Writing Inspiration http://kazdelaney.wordpress.com/

I haven't written for a while because it has been VERY difficult for me to know what to write. If I had written anything it would have looked something like this:

I am feeling green around the gills... A 700mg dose of Carbamazepine (Tegretol) is doing its anti-suicidal work very well. The zone between my ears is wonderfully clear. If anything it is a little on the empty side but I can live with that.

Unfortunately it is working rather too well in two other areas:

Last Saturday (a week ago today) I hit rock bottom. I mean by that that I was fighting the urge to swallow all the pills in the house on a minute by minute basis. Who would have thought that staying alive could be THAT exhausting ... It's not so much that I desperately wanted to die but rather that I desperately wanted out of the torment I was in.

Things aren't improving much and I am finding it hard.

I can't do anything and because I can't do anything I don't know what to do with myself.

Bi-Polar Land is the only place I know where someone can sleep for eighteen hours straight and wake up just as exhausted as before going to bed. It drives people who go trough it crazy and I am no exception. It is driving me round the bend.

The last two days I have been in prison. I am not aware of having committed any crime but I have been incarcerated all the same.

I reach a point in the deep depression phase of my BPD (Bi-Polar Disorder) when my body feels like a block of concrete. I can hardly move. I walk about as if I were wearing an all-body straight jacket with heavy plaster casts on my legs. I feel like I weigh a ton. Each movement demands enormous effort. I am two inches away from becoming a statue.

Inmy book Conversations with Batty - How Talking to myself Kept Me Sane, I wrote a chapter on willpower and it's place in recovery.

Just so that you understand the 'conversation' that follows, here is how it came to be: