All is quiet in the house, just as it should be; everyone is asleep, except me, like usual. I’m going on five days now, or is it six? If it’s three something in the morning do you count it as the next day or do you still count it as the night of the previous day when you are trying to keep count.
I am so incredibly exhausted.
Every muscle in my body is tense. I swear not a single muscle has had a single moment of relaxation in over a week. My eyes are bulging out of their sockets. They have been open as wide as possible for as long as I can remember, just as if someone has been holding them open all this time. When I try to close them all I see are strange flashes of light in neon colors. The flashes are so distorted that I try to make out what they are but can’t because it is too painful to look at the random images I see with my eyes shut, the contrast of black and neon makes the flashes so incredibly bright. This is ridiculous, its hurts to keep my eyes shut.
My stomach is burning. Much like the feeling you get in your throat from the carbonation when you drink a soda entirely too fast, only multiplied by like a zillion. When I sit in an attempt to relax, if I can even sit in one place for any amount of time, my legs are running a race against each other it seems. Both feet arched with the balls of my feet pressed firmly on the ground. Bouncing both of my legs faster and faster, as the left one is bouncing trying to bounce faster than the right, then the right leg trying to go faster than the left, imagine the calories I must be burning.
There is this disturbing feeling of guilt for hating everyone that is so peacefully asleep as they should be. I know I have done nothing wrong, but it sure feels as if I had. For some reason the quiet hours of the night that slowly turn into morning, they are the loneliest and hardest to make it through, especially when I’m alone. As I see the sun coming through the window my eyes begin to hurt, and I begin to cry, another sleepless night has passed making it six, when will this end?
That was a journal entry of mine from March 5, 2005. It was between hospital visits, and I had come down from NC to stay with my parents in FL until I could get well enough to go back up to my life in NC again. If I remember correctly this stretch of sleepless nights was not the longest I had been awake due to mania. I think the longest may have been nine or ten days. After a certain point it's impossible to keep the days apart.
I still worry that nights like that will return. Especially now with the schedule I am keeping because of nursing school. It's a constant source of stress for me. Everyone struggles with a sleepless night here and there, but when you have bipolar a sleepless night can trigger a cascade of symptoms that will make even the most balanced person become unstable again.
And my asking, when will this end... well that's the thing about the stretches of manic sleepless nights, they always come to an end, a crashing end. Cycles are simply the nature of manic depression. I used to try and make it seem like things weren't so bad when I was on a manic stretch by joking with my parents and saying, what goes up must come down.
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