The Fall

The Fall

By Sophia Bishop

I've been touching base, from my own mind for the last couple weeks. Talking about the things I feel as someone who suffers with Manic Depressive Disorder(MDD)

To help others not only understand what its like inside the mind of someone with this illness, but to help those I know understand what's going on inside my mind half the time. Not because I want attention, I think others who suffer with MDD can tell you the last thing that we actually want is attention.

I would love nothing more than to crawl inside a hole and stay there, hide away from the world in my own little pit of darkness, but at the same time I also want to be seen. More than anything its all I have ever dreamed off, being seen and actually seen, for someone to see past the face I put on and the mask that I wear.

No I dont write this blog for attention, I write it for understanding, most of all...I like to think I write it hoping someone who is at their worst, in a place I once was, in the place someone I loved very much once was and that maybe reading my few words they will see that someone out there does in fact understand because they feel the same way and that instead of doing what I do and shelling up, hiding how I feel until eventually like a grand explosion it blows from me and I am left in a pit of depression that can last weeks, months even. And that they wont ever do what that person I loved did and give up on life.

Have you ever fallen in love, so hard with another person that it was terrifying. Loved someone so much that it hurt you to your very core.

I’ve felt that in my life.

Its funny really, when your young and you see this one person who is simply, magic to you. Nothing they could do, could even begin to change how you see them. To you they might as well be an angel. Nothing they could do would be wrong and you think that person is the all time love of your life, even at a young age you can look at them and see forever and sometimes that forever can seem like the longest time, but you do not fear it.

Once upon a time, I loved a boy. I was just a young girl, looking back on it I probably didnt even really know what love was but at the time he was the be all end all of my life, even when I didnt see him for a long period of time he was always on my mind. I looked at him and I thought I saw forever. He made me laugh, he listened to me and most of all he cared. 

Little did I know that all the love I had to give him, all the love I felt inside and the love he felt in return, it wasnt enough to urge that darkness away that consumed him and at the age of 15, he took his own life.

I can remember the day I found out as clear as day. The day before I had spoken to him, I remember that day clearly as well because I realize now he had been trying to spare me the pain, he had been trying to say good bye. I remember crying when he told me goodbye. I remember the tears on his cheeks as I told him I loved him. Most of all I remember the look in his eyes when he told me it wasnt enough.

I can remember clearly the feeling when I found out he was gone for ever.

It was like time froze around me and I was trapped in that moment. I was lost in that pain. I succumbed to it. I gave into that pain for a long time. Years of my life was lost and the person I used to be before he died, she died with him. It took me a long time to realize that fact. And even longer to realize that I was mad at him. I hated him.

It makes me feel selfish to say that to this day. I shouldn't have hated him because he was in so much pain. But I did. To this day part of me will always hate him because I would have gone to hell for him and fought to give him a better life. But I also understand now, what I didnt at the time and that was, that his pain was too great. His agony suffocated him and his darkness in the end it consumed him.

After that I was convinced I would never feel any degree of love again. I bounced from relationship to relationship. One of them with a man who hurt me in a very bad way. But I never loved anyone to the depths of which I loved that boy. I never felt that overwhelming feeling.

My skin never tingled from a touch. My cheeks never pinked from hearing anyone whisper my name. And for a long time I was unable to tell anyone I loved them. I found an amazing person, who helped me find a new me and realize I had to put that person before to rest. I found someone who was able to make me smile again and someone who loved me enough to accept my darkness. But still..I never felt that overwhelming love that surrounded me like a cloud leaving me in a state of delirium. 

Until I met him.

I met a man who was actually a lot like myself. Scarred from pain he would likely never want to talk about just as I never wanted to talk about mine. Someone who understood all my pain and the baggage I would always carry with me and wasn't afraid of it, or put off by it. Instead he wanted to help me carry it.

But I couldn't do that, I still cant.

I can't seem to give him my bags to carry and it breaks my heart because it means I cant show him the depth of which he touches me.

I read an article once about a woman who said that she knew her husband was a her soul mate. I scoffed at it. Damaged and left alone I didn't believe in soul mates. She had known it because she said that the first time she ever heard his voice it made her soul ache. And the first time she felt his touch her soul leaped with the rest of her. And nothing he did would ever change the level of which she loved him. I remembered thinking that I wished I could find that again.

And I did.

But that simple fact, terrified me beyond belief. Because I convinced myself that this, beautiful man who made my very battered and bruised soul leap into the air would one day tell me the love I had wasn't enough and once again I would be left on my knees in the rain crying as what was left of my heart broke.

Even now I still wait for it because the truth of the matter is that I...cant even compare. To him. In my eyes he is imperfect perfection. Nothing he does makes me love him any less. Each day I love him more. The long distance kills me and time apart from him makes me ache but every time he comes back I only love him more despite convincing myself every time he will come back and not love me anymore.

Its no fault of his. I know he loves me, he tells me often. Its simply me and my scarred sense of self. I look into his eyes and see beauty. I know he will be an amazing father. I know he will be an outstanding husband and I can see forever when I look at him. And that's what scares me the most, because when I look into my own eyes all I see is darkness and despair.

 People who see through my mask tell me to speak to him of the truth of how I feel. That he should know my fears but most of all he should know how loved he is.

I hope on some level he does know how much I love him. I would die for him. I would give him the world wrapped up in a bow. I would do pretty much anything for him, there is no one on this earth I love more than I love him.

But I don't compare and I never will.

In the mind of someone with MDD that is common, the lack of belief in ones self, the lack of faith and the lack of self esteem. You can be told you are beautiful. You can be given thousands of compliments but none of them sink in because in your own mind you will never be good enough for someone who can love you. Someone who can adore you despite all your flaws. Because you see yourself as this...thing that is just...disgusting and the person your able to love is something so beautiful. Its not because they don't want to be loved. They just don't feel worthy of it.

"Your love is my turning page."

"Nobody loves anybody as much as I love you."

That Burn

That Burn

By Sophia Bishop

A wise man told me once that the worst thing you can do is shell up, hide all your feelings inside you. Lock them away in a room, cork them into a bottle and leave them there.  Always seemed like a good idea to me, then again isn’t it easier to hide than to fight. He told me that, while yes it did seem like a good idea in the long run the best thing to do is to confront how you feel because that room can only hold so much before the hinges come off the door. That bottle can only store so much before it cracks and everything comes out all at once threatening to knock you over like a tidal wave of emotion.

But such is the life of someone living with manic depressive disorder. And honestly living with it. Many people say they are, claim to suffer from a form of depression but those of us who actually do are able to sit on the side lines and watch these people and be just, amazed at their sheer sense of self righteousness. Let me tell you. 8 times out of 10, you do not suffer with it.  You are sad, everyone gets sad once in a while that doesn’t mean you have some sort of psychological disorder. Let me show you a glimpse of a mind that is plagued with it.

Inside the mind of someone with Manic depressive disorder (MDD) everything that is real seems fake and that which actually isn’t real seems like the single most real thing in your life. You can jump from happy to sad in the space of a millisecond. You will get these waves of over whelming anger from no where that make you want to destroy everything around you.

Someone I loved very much, more than I, him or anyone around us might have realized, died when I was still quite young. That’s what kicked my MDD off, for my older brother (a ray of light in my dark life.) It was being in so much pain for so long with no one wanting to help him. For my mother, probably my best friend in the world, it was her horrific child hood, where as my Aunt hers didn’t kick off until the birth of one of her children. My Doctor told me once that MDD, it is always there beneath the surface but it wont usually show itself until something traumatic enough to make us retreat inside ourselves and be faced with the overwhelming blackness, happens.

That’s what it was for me. For a long time I felt completely lost, like no one around me actually saw me, even though looking back I can tell that they did. My family saw the pain I was in but were at odds how to help me. I cant say I blame them. I think I was at odds on how to help myself as well. But when you suffer with MDD, even with a whole world of people around you, somehow you can still feel so completely alone.

It wasn’t until I met a very special person that I started to feel so less, isolated. And so that person became my whole world. See that’s another aspect of MDD a form of jumping from one extreme to the next to prevent yourself  from looking at probably the only person who honestly needs your attention, yourself. I put everything I had into this one person who to me was on a pedestal so high they might as well have been god. But what I didn’t realize was that while they were up there so was I, and when everything seemed to go wrong, that person got sick, suddenly I wasn’t enough. I slipped.

I hung on the edge of that pedestal looking down at the plummet that would shatter me and stared up at the person I had worked for so long, so hard to save. Yet they didn’t reach out. Didn’t offer me a hand to help me to keep me from falling, they stood and they watched until my fingers bled, my wrists broke and I fell.

The fall seemed to go on forever, it was like one of those movies with the never ending wells, you know the floor is there somewhere something cannot go through the earth, there is a bottom somewhere. But I fell, and I fell and i continued to fall and I didn’t think I would ever hit the floor but eventually…I did. And I shattered.

But this time, those who had surrounded me were so far away and the person who could have picked me up, was no where to be seen. Looking back I realize they were there I just couldn’t see them at the time.  But in my mind, because I couldn’t see them a feeling started to well inside my shattered body that I had not been faced with in a long time, resentment, hate…distaste. I began to loath that person, but really…it was myself I loathed.

There I lay, broken wondering if I would ever be able to put myself back together again….then…there he was.

It was like a ripple effect, one piece, two, three and so on and so forth. But when you have been shattered, sometimes some pieces fall into such tiny fragments that no matter the love, no matter the wish they cant be put back together and you are left with empty parts of you that long to be filled.

That is what someone with MDD is forced to face every day. Overwhelmingly, suffocating feelings of missing parts of yourself. Feelings of being abandoned by people you fought so hard for. Watching them love other people fills you with a sense of disgust, hate unlike anything you have ever felt before. And you come to find yourself sitting alone, because being alone is easier than sitting with that person, being alone is easier than admitting you dont hate them for loving other people, that’s something you love about them but rather admitting that you feel neglected.

Because while you, yourself may love someone else with parts you never thought would be alive again, you always put your own feelings aside for that person and yet feel they cannot do that for you, how do you admit that when to you it seems so selfish.

So you sleep, because your tired but no amount of sleep wakes you up.

You cry because you hurt, but no amount of tears quells that pain.

And you scream, praying someone will hear you, but no one does because you are not screaming on the outside, you are screaming inside the bottomless well that is your mind.

And it is devastating. And confusing all at the same time.

I have to deal with that every day, no one knows because no one gets close enough to see what is behind the face. No one gets close enough because you can’t bring yourself to let someone let you fall again.

And the pain is overwhelming, but you have to live with it. Because giving up is never an option.

“As I was going up the stairs,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish I wish he’d go away.”

Happiness

Happiness.
By Sophia Bishop

Have you ever sat back and tried to remember the first time you felt truly happy, a lot of people will remember years, memories from child hood. Memories of times with parents, grand parents, birthdays, Christmas's so on and so forth

In the mind of someone who suffers from Manic Depressive Disorder (MDD) trying to recall such a memory seems near impossible. Allow me to give you a glimpse into the mind of someone who suffers with MDD when remembering happiness.

I have no memory. I don't actually remember ever being happy. Which might seem like a foolish thing to say. How is it possible for someone to go through life unhappy? Well I suspect at points in my life I was greatly happy, in fact I have seen photographs that prove this fact. The fact is however that when you have had something traumatic happen in your life that has caused you such misery any memory of happiness disappears. All you remember is that misery.

I have a very loving family, parents I love more than life itself but the sad fact is that before that one traumatic experience all I remember in my life is the sad moments. Moments when I felt lonely when my brother was sick, times when I wondered if he would survive a year. I love my brother, I love him more than I think he realizes. When my sister left home. My sister has always been my hero, well a hero of mine. She is beautiful, smart and strong, not to mention she is an amazing mother. So when she moved out even though she didn't go far I remember crying because within moments I missed her.

I can perfectly recall arguments with my best friend. A time when we fell out. A time when we didn't talk for months, months that felt like an eternity. I can honest not recall any happy memories and post the time in my life that scarred me, while there has been some amazingly happy moments, the things I remember are the times that I felt alone and lost.

About 5 years ago I moved a long way away from a support group, my family who I was very close too and whom I loved very much. Its been since I did that I think that I lost a huge part of myself  but not only that its since then that I have grown and started to adapt and become a stronger person and learn to face the days before as well as the days ahead.

In the mind of someone with MDD, the smallest things seem like huge things. And happiness it seems like just a dream, a time in our lives that we imagined. And something that is just beyond the grasp. So telling someone with MDD to smile, to be happy or to laugh and live life with a smile is like telling someone who cannot walk to stop being lazy and get up, someone who cannot see to pass you something. Its pointless, because sometimes, Happiness seems like just a word, something people make up and more often than not it seems like something that we do not deserve.