She said, He said…A Bi-Polar conversation

09PSYC-articleLargeSHE:  Well, hello!  It’s good to see you.  It’s been a while.  How are you?

HE:  Good.  Yeah, I’m doing pretty well. Thanks.

SHE:  Great.  That’s super.  I’m glad.  Come in, come in.  Have a seat.  So, let’s see…, your labs look good.  Kidney’s fine.  Liver’s fine.  Your sugar was up a bit.  Did you fast before or no?

HE:  No, I didn’t.  It was midday, though, and I hadn’t eaten for a few hours.

SHE:  That’s fine.  It’s not a big deal.  Things look good. So, how are you feeling otherwise?

HE:  Good.  I still have moments, you know.  I still have times when I can feel myself going one way or the other, and I can feel how I push the outer edges of things, you know?

SHE: Ok.  How do you mean?

Counselling and Support

HE:  Well, I can feel myself slipping into a manic place and it almost feels like I’m changing in some way; literally changing into somebody else.  I’m making choices that I don’t want to make, and I don’t even know why.

But, then I think I can work it out.  I can see that I’m headed down a dark tunnel, so to speak, and things aren’t going to be ending well, and I pull back.  Sometimes it’s the opposite, though.  Sometimes I see myself falling down.  I’m drowning in all of the potential misery, all of the possibilities of all of the things that could go wrong– my wife dying, my kids getting sick, you know, all the worst stuff.

So I step back, go for a run or something, and try to regroup.  So far, so good, I guess.  I haven’t tried to run myself off of the road in a while, you know?

SHE:  I think those are some good insights, don’t you?

HE:  Yeah.  I guess so. Yeah.

SHE:  You talked before about being afraid that your creativity would be stifled with the Lithium.  Do you still feel that way?  You’ve been on it for a while now.  Definitely long enough to know.

HE:  I don’t like how I feel when I’m on it.  I feel emotionally castrated.  The truth is, I stopped taking it.  I haven’t been on it for quite some time.  I just took it for about a week before I went in for those labs.

SHE:  I see. Do you think that’s wise?

HE:  Probably not.  I know you called it a…what did you call it?…a “mood stabilizer,” but I feel like it keeps me from places I need to go emotionally.  On the other hand, there are some places I don’t want to go to emotionally ever again, in my real life, anyway.   You know what I mean?

SHE:  I can understand that.

HE:  Can you?

SHE:  I think so.

HE:  Okay

SHE:  Have you been drinking at all?

HE: Sometimes I do.

SHE:  To self medicate? Escape?

HE:  Sometimes, yes.

SHE:  Does it help?

HE:  No.  It makes it worse.

SHE:  What do you think about that?

HE:  I think it might be time to stop.

SHE:  That probably would be best.   (a brief silence)

It’s been a while since we talked about what happened.  Would you like to talk about that today?

HE:  No.

SHE:  Okay, then.  Can we talk about you taking your medication again?

HE:  I guess so.

 

_____

Follow Scott on Twitter: @scotylang

Author: Scott Langdon

Scott Langdon is an actor, writer, and photographer living just outside of Philadelphia in Bristol, Pennsylvania with his wife, Sarah, and their dog, Watson. He can be seen on stages throughout the professional Philadelphia theater community or writing in one of his many favorite local shops in his beloved "Borough", where the only way they could get rid of him was to tell him there was a pandemic. He has a hard time knowing when he's not wanted.

One thought on “She said, He said…A Bi-Polar conversation”

  1. Scott, you are courageous. Thank you for your last two blogs.
    We all know people.
    I pray your words will encourage and educate so that we can all care and love little bit more.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.

WordPress.com Courses

Educational Resources for WordPress.com

THE SCOTT LANGDON PROJECT

ACTING LIKE A HUMAN

Bespoke

ancient ideas, fresh trails

Chocolate Covered Race Medals

Where I race to the chocolate bar

Natalia Maks

Travel. See. Shoot. Learn.

Authentic Life

Real living of a genuine faith in Jesus while our world watches...

Revolutionary Paideia

Social, Political, and Cultural Commentary

Eric Clapp 4.0

Words About God, Life, and Coffee

Lexi Windsor

Lexi Windsor .:Singer.Dancer.Actress:.

BACKYARD+GARAGE

a blog archive experiment about the Nelson fam on Springvale Drive

Princess Scribe's Blog

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.” ― Rabindranath Tagore

%d bloggers like this: