Control Option Command

I was twittering the other day about how the noughties have been a pretty eventful decade for me on a personal level, building up to a crescendo and culminating in a pretty spectacular oh-nine.

I feel it’s worth writing a post about. Whether it’s worth reading a post about it I leave to the discretion of the reader.

The Noughties – A summary

Moving swiftly through the decade up to 2009 I guess there’s nothing for it but to dub the double-O’s the golden years of my bipolar disorder. I’ve had the illness since long before 2000, maybe my whole life, but it really started impacting my life these last ten years. Having lived on a topsy-turvy scale of emotions that was decidedly more topsy than turvy I had my first real clash with depression in 05. I’d felt depressed before that of course, but only in the sense of a hangover. A sort of inevitable down-turn after celebrating a decidedly mostly manic life a bit too hard.

2005 will always mark a personal low-point for me. That doesn’t mean that some important shit didn’t happen that year, but important or not; They were definitely not what you’d call pleasant. After a breakdown that lasted for months I was swept up into the loving arms of the mental ward and put into therapy. I came out of 05 with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a mostly misconstrued idea of what that actually means and a bucket full of denial.

06, 07, 08 passed, and a lot of stuff happened. In 07 I met a girl, and in 08 we broke up (this is what would be called “foreshadowing” if I hadn’t just told you that’s what it was). I butterflied from being an out-of-work designer to an in-demand developer. I spent a month in a mental institution which is a singular experience that I may or may not touch upon someday later. I learned some lessons and left other purposefully unlearned.

I mentioned that I met a girl, and as is wont to happen we broke up. This is what you might file under “it’s complicated”. You see, we broke up, amiably, on a hot monday in june and then we found out, the following hot friday, that she was pregnant. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

We decided, perhaps in a state of befuddlement, that we wanted to stick together through the pregnancy and for the duration of the (m|p)aternity leave. That is; almost two years of living with your ex. Note that when I say “stick together”, I mean “keep living under the same roof in a platonic sense as good friends who happen to be having a baby”. Yeah. It’s weird, but don’t knock it; It works.

Oh Nine

I think I’ll be remembering 2009 for a while, and a lot more fondly than 2005. It didn’t start out that great though. I was in a funk about the whole “going to be a father” thing, the “why am I living with my ex” thing, the “who are all these people that I owe money” thing and the “I’m drunk again?” thing.

I was, as I had been for 10 years or so, drinking too much, in perpetual debt and in an ongoing state of flux between depression and mania. I started the year drunkenly crashing head first into a door handle, splitting my eyebrow open and in need of stitches. To be perfectly honest I quit my habit of nigh on fifteen years of smoking a pack a day in pure embarrassment, as a way to make up for the ungraceful dive into the new year.

In february the single most profound event in my life so far occurred. I had a daughter. And by “had a daughter” I naturally mean “I was there while someone else had her”.

Let me take a second here. Menfolk; If you say you are looking forward to attending the birth and wouldn’t miss it for the world; You are lying, crazy or ill-informed. There wasn’t a moment during that whole operation that I wasn’t scared out of my wits and yearning for the days where my place would be in the waiting room frantically smoking cigarettes. The birth of my daughter was… Let’s just say she arrived with a bang.

So, yeah. Mathilde was born. I wish I could say that from that day on everything changed and I became as harmonic as a barrel full of Zen monks. In reality though, I didn’t really handle my new role as a freshly minted father as well as one might have hoped. I found myself in what is referred to as a “mixed state”; that is depressed and manic at the same time. It’s pretty messed up.
Between being in a creative limbo at work and complete exhaustion from dealing with a colicky baby at home I was sneaking away every chance I got to just sit for an hour or two away from it all in some bar or café. Compulsively drinking and hating myself for it. Heading towards the edge without any brakes. (No, not the edge. An edge. Whatever.)

The problem with bipolar disorder is that when you’re depressed you don’t have the surplus energy or will power to get help, and when you’re manic you think you don’t need it. I guess the mixed state I was in allowed me a moment of clarity, so I finally put my cards on the table and recruited those closest to me to help me get my shit straight. On more than one level.

Giving up alcohol wasn’t a problem for me in the sense of any physical addiction. It was a question of finally mustering up the courage to commit to changing some pretty ingrained destructive habits. Teaching an old dog new tricks, or rather; Getting an old dog to realize that he has no middle gear and should probably lay off the sauce until he can find one, is hard but perfectly doable when the motivation is right. “I can always quit later.” Well, it’s later now.

My therapists started using the word “self-medication” about my excessive drinking years ago, and I never really cared for the expression. I considered the term a pretty cowardly way of saying “drinking too damn much” and rationalized the problem out of existence. In hindsight it’s pretty obvious that the term was pretty much spot on. “Drinking to forget” isn’t quite how I’d describe it. “Drinking to not feel, think or care” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s probably more apt. The repercussions of not being able to block the constant mind-rush of chattering thoughts with a comfortable numbness left me sleepless and exhausted. Luckily I now have all sorts of interesting medication to deal with that sort of thing. Essentially I’ve traded in my unhealthy drinking habits for an addiction to mood stabilizers and sleeping pills. So it goes.

So I gave up smoking, I gave up drinking and I gave up sitting up until the break of dawn coding or gaming or reading. I sucked it up and finally dealt with a ten year backlog of angry creditors. All this is stuff I should have done years ago as part of dealing with my mental interestingness, but better late than never.

The intuitive leap is to say “He gave all that shit up for his daughter.” But that’s not quite right.
Firstly: I don’t believe in hinging my welfare and happiness on anyone else. Not Jesus, not girlfriends and least of all a ten-month baby. Imagine this inner dialogue: “I’m depressed. But I mustn’t be depressed. Think of the baby! Shit. Now I’m feeling guilty about being depressed. I better just smile and deal with it later.” I’ve been playing those games my whole life and it hasn’t done me any good.

Secondly: “He gave that up for his daughter.” sounds like I, out of concern for my child, had to forsake the enjoyable things in life, but that in the end it was worth it because of said munchkins sweet innocent smile. That’s not it at all. I gave that shit up for me. I had to, because the way I was living was making me unhappy.
Ok, so maybe the arrival of my daughter propelled me into finally taking the measures I’d put off for ages, but in the end I needed to do those things for me, not for anyone else.

When all that’s said and done; My kid > Your kid. ;)

So looking back, what have I learned? What inscrutable secret of happiness have I deciphered?
I guess this is where I should bust some knowledge, but what’s applicable for me probably isn’t for you, and you must find your own road, and so forth. Besides I’d probably mess it up and make this whole post even more cheesy than it already is…

Oh what the hell.

If you see a chance to make changes for the better in your life, grab it. If it happens to present itself in form of a birth, a romance or a terrible accident, so be it; But don’t let anything except yourself be the reason for changing, or your changes are likely to be short-lived and ill-fated.

Oh! I also grew a beard!


Happy new year!