A week for a wobble
So, my brain likes order. Not particularly routine as routine is humdrum and banal. Routine makes me feel claustrophobic and stifled. Order makes sense of the chaos, or tries to. Order is knowing my shifts, having my childcare lined up, meals planned, food in the fridge. Order spirals very quickly into something compulsive. The need to clean the oven, remove every item from the fridge, declutter the entire house, sort the recycling, clean the windows, do the washing, vacuum, clean the bathroom, make the beds. And it needs to all be done now and it needs to all be finished in the next twenty minutes and I also need to write a list with empty boxes to check off as I rampage through these tasks and I need to write at least three lists of things I need to do or buy or make.
On Tuesday when I wrote this, my mind was buzzing and I was exhausted because I never know where my off switch is and I never want to actually press it. I always feel the need to write more, do more, be more. I can barely sit still. “Mummy, can we play Cluedo?” Why play Cluedo when we could go on a four-mile hike, or organise the kitchen cupboards, or actually fashion outfits and dress up like the Cluedo characters in order to play? This is my manic. It is tiring because I am invincible and I couldn't possibly sleep more than the bare minimum (“If I fall asleep now that'll be 4.5 hours' sleep, that's quite a lot, I'll just do one final lot of ironing, read one more thing”), otherwise I may not achieve world domination. My manic wants to achieve world domination, it wants to prove I am good enough. Even now, days later, I can feel my heart thundering in my chest, my jaw aches because I've had it clenched all week, and my back hurts from hunching over and cracking on with whatever task is in hand.
I should have known this was on the horizon. Despite exercise, fresh air and Nytol, I had problems sleeping before my night shift at the weekend. I've been sleeping less and less each night. I've been feeling the anxiety levels rise. I've booked hotel stays and have the forms for a new gym membership. I've been tripping over my words when speaking to people all week. My mouth quite literally cannot force the words out with any coherence because my brain is seemingly trying to fire out too many all at once. I can hear that I am excitable, agitated, rambling. A professional conversation today blew my mind because I had to try to make sense. Concentrate, focus, sit still, hide the “crazy”.
“Maybe you need to work part-time, maybe you're doing too much” they say. Manic doesn't take on more than it can chew. Manic takes on more and more and more, chewing and swallowing every last crumb. And doing a pretty good job in the process, I hasten to add. At the very least, manic is conscientious. Nobody has been short-changed in terms of care they've received this week, except me and my kids. We've been the ones to lose out. This week I've learnt the meaning of the word hypocrisy: spending your working hours advising women to eat well, sleep as much as possible, encouraging them to love themselves, ask for help, telling them they are good enough as they are, and then going home and torturing yourself, not caring what you eat, rationing sleep, closing the door on people. Ahhhh hypocrisy. Do as I say, not as I do!
I've cared for so many women this week who actually needed a good dose of love, rather than anything else I could offer. I love that part of the job the most, what a privilege. However, when you are questioning you're very existence, loving women and giving them all you have can make matters worse. Being in a caring profession and being manic is doubly exhausting. As well as being exhausting, manic is scary. If you're spiralling upwards, skyrocketing towards the stratosphere, pretty quickly you'll come hurtling back down to earth with an almighty crash. As you're defying gravity on the way up, you're scared of the fall. It's like the part of the rollercoaster where you can hear it crank you up to the top and you know you're going to plummet. You want to look and not look, because you know what's coming. You are all too aware of the mind-numbing and earth-shattering terror of the darkness, but at least you know that from the depths of despair things can only get better, whereas from the dizzying heights you know your world is about to come crashing down around you.
This weekend marks the end of my first three months as an NQM and I still absolutely love it. I've had a very positive start, more so than I dared to imagine, and I am lucky that my mental health hasn't taken this dip before now. When I was a student, these peaks and troughs would happen every week. There would be three or four days a week spent spiralling out of control, bouncing off of the walls and exhausting myself before I would crash. I would then spend the remainder of my days slumped in a pit of despair, waking up each morning wishing that I hadn't. We meet so many women with mental health concerns, yet sometimes we are shockingly bad at noticing our colleagues, asking how they're doing, and actually listening to the response. Or the meaning behind the response. “I'm fine”. Hmm, liar. Ask again.
Last week I uttered the words “I'm fine” to a friend who asked whether I was having a wobble. She knows me too well, she could see that I wasn't OK, but I shut her out and declined help because the high was niggling and not quite in sight. I knew I was off kilter, but I couldn't place my finger on what was wrong. I was also scared, because I've worked so hard to get to this point and saying the words "No, it's not a good week, I want to die" would have felt like a monumental admission that would threaten to topple me.
This week's wobble has scared me witless. What if this is here to stay?
