Okay, imagine, if you will, a room.

Now imagine the room has a door, a door that is locked. You know the door is locked for a very good reason since it was you who locked it and you have the key. At least you did have, because you decided it would be in your best interests to throw the key away.

How you doing?

Okay, my guess is you are imagining that this room is a dark and horrible place where you don’t want to be.

Good.

And that you have locked it because you don’t want to go inside.

Still good, but you’re completely missing the point.

Step up that wonderful imagination of yours and imagine that you are not on the outside of the dark room with the door that you locked, with the key you have thrown away…

No… you’re on the inside.

You’re inside this room not through choice, but because your brain isn’t working and has put you in here. You can’t just “pull yourself together” or “play some happy music”.

The room is dark because there are no windows, only the door, which you locked, which means of course for the length of time you’re in this place (and only your brain knows how long that will be) there is only one way out.

But you’ve locked the door; oh and did I mention you threw away the key?

Well, the key you threw away is in the room with you, on the floor, somewhere; but it’s dark and you can’t find it.

But do you really want to find it?

Now this room is relatively small, about six foot square; so, hunting around for the key isn’t going to be that difficult even if it is dark and the air’s running out.

How’s that imagination of yours? Still with me?

The problem is, there’s really nothing else to do but look for the key so you can open the door you locked. Unless of course you spend your time thinking about the bad stuff, or sleeping so you don’t have to think about it.

In fact, it’s really just a matter of time, right? I mean, you will find it, if you really want to, and believe me, half of you wants to find it because what could possibly be worse than suffocating in a cold dark locked room with nothing to do but think about how useless you are stuck in such an awful place?

Okay, if your imagination is half-way decent, and I’m sure it is, you’re probably screaming at me and shouting: Just find the bloody key, you idiot, and why the fuck did you lock the sodding door in the first place?

Well, assuming your imagination is up to it, perhaps you’d care to imagine that this room is actually in a skyscraper, and if there were any windows in this room, then you’d have a great view of the city one hundred and one stories below you.

So, let me recap, for the sake of your sanity, if not for mine….

You are locked in a room, a dark cold room six foot square with no windows and one door, in a skyscraper one hundred and one stories up in the air. The door is locked because you locked it and you have thrown away the key which now lies somewhere on the floor in the darkness.

The air is running out and it’s hell. Real hell. There is nothing to do but think, and think, and think, about how awful it is and whether perhaps you should really be looking for the key.

And when you’ve done all that horrible thinking, and taken up as much time as you can, you pray that you can fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.

Somewhere pleasant, where the sun shines.

When you do fall asleep and wake up in the dark room again for the umpteenth time with nothing but your thoughts, oh and the shiny key, somewhere on the floor, in the darkness, do you start looking for the key?

How many days can you survive in this room before you start looking? (Feeling actually, now I come to think about it!)

A day? A week? How about a whole month maybe… or two?

Are you forgetting that it was you who locked the door in the first place?

Wondering why?

Well, there’s one last thing for your imagination: That door opens with the key you have thrown away hoping that you’ll get out in some other way before you have to start looking for the key; hoping that you never get the opportunity to find it even if you do give in and start looking for it.

You see, you need to imagine the door doesn’t open onto a corridor in the building, imagine the door opens onto the outside of the skyscraper one hundred and one stories up.

Now you know why you locked it.

–

I’ve been in that room for about month now. A few days ago I had to start looking for the key.

And last night I found it.

Welcome to my world. Boy, your imagination is good.

I unlocked the door and opened it. I let the light in so I could see again. I let the air in so I could breath again. I stood there and thought about how beautiful the city looked bathed in sunshine. I could hear the traffic in the streets far below me and watched the birds as they flew past in odd formations.

Then I knew I just had to lock the door again… and throw away the key.

I eventually went to sleep and woke up this morning. Somewhat annoyingly I am still in that room. But at least I have some fresh air now and hopefully my brain will allow me the pleasure of waking up somewhere else before I find myself on my hands and knees in the darkness searching for the key again.

Texts

Doing rather a lot of this now. Never used too. Couldn’t see the point.

I have recently discoved the benefits of predictive text and now have extended conversations with friends over a period of days. I send a text one day, then they reply a couple of days later, then I reply a couple of days after that. Cool.

Some texts make me laugh. I go to great lengths using all my characters in a text to my brother (160 - I have to get my 10p’s worth!), and then he generally sends one back using one word!

Mind you he did manage a few more words on Shrove Tuesday. He wanted to know if I was free for a charity pancake race that evening. Apparently, they had the pancakes and the pans; all they wanted was a tosser!

Drugs

I came back up again Sunday after a 10 day down, so not as long as the last one. I thought it would prehaps be a good idea to contact my GP and was able to see her yesterday.

I haven’t seen her for a while as she has been on maternity leave having had a baby girl. I like my GP, she’s very good; my ten minute appointment lasted a full half an hour!

I have been prescribed some meds by my Psychiatrist and I had to see my GP to pick up the prescription. To be honest, I am really fed up with having been down for long periods recently and so decided I should at least try them; though I do have an aversion to medication as nothing has yet worked for me and one anti-depressant put me in hospital a few years ago when I had an illergic reaction to it.

“I’ve seen your notes,” said my GP yesterday whilst discussing my new medication’s alarmingly similar side-effects. “Did you know you very nearly died?”

My Psychiatrist has prescribed Lamictal (Lamotigine) which is drug used by patients with epilepsy. It isn’t yet licensed for BiPolar Affective Disorder in this country though does appear to have had major success in a few trials.

The drug regulates the build up of sodium in the nerve cells in our brains. Sodium is needed by the nerves to release electrical signals - too much or too little electrical activity and the brain can’t function properly.

It’ll be a while before I can report on any difference these make. I’m only on a 25mg dose and will have to up this to 150mg by increasing the dose 25mg at a time every two weeks. By my calculations this will be in 10 weeks time!

Rock’n'Roll

And finally for today’s post, I’ve discovered a new hobby. Well sort of.

I have a singer/songwriter friend with an electric guitar and I’ve started writing lyrics for him. Great fun.

Because I think in a creative character/storytelling sort of way (useful for a playwright!) I have found it very interesting to channel this into short bursts - ie: using the limited number of words needed in a song to tell a story and develop the character of the story-teller.

I love finding new rhymes and have a penchant for illiteration too. I also have an interest in music (though I don’t play and can’t sing) and would dearly love to own a grand piano, but that’s another post.

Very early days yet as I’ve only written four songs in the last couple of weeks, but we’ll see what comes of it. If it works out I may well publish a few here.

1. Spend all day and all night Monday not doing anything apart from sitting/sleeping in a dark room and only communicating (when absolutely necessary) with one person because that’s what a bi-polar disorder can do to you.

2. Ditto for Tuesday.

3. Spend all day and all night on Wednesday standing/walking in the Venue restaurant at Wembley Stadium communicating verbally and non-verbally with upwards of 1000 England v Switzerland guests hoping nobody notices how useless you feel because you promised you’d do it two weeks earlier when you were feeling fine and you really need the money.

4. Spend all day and all night Thursday with a migraine, recovering.

I woke up in a fog this morning.

It took me two and a half hours to get out of bed, and now, twelve hours later after a long day of feeling that whatever I did, said, or thought was completely and utterly wrong and I’m completely and utterly useless, I’m ready to go back to bed.

The fog has been getting gradually thicker all day. This evening it was so dense I can’t remember how I drove home from Southampton. One hour and 60 miles of the M3 just went somewhere and all I could do was to tell myself it’ll pass; The fog will clear. It always does.

I’ve had ten days of sun and now it’s foggy again. Let’s hope this episode won’t be as long as the last one.

I’ve decided I’m going to write myself out of it… Or at least try… Be warned.

Yes, I’m back. Not that I ever went away you understand, but for me it’s important to say that I’m back.

I have had a prolonged depressive episode (about two months) which has been horrible, but on Monday morning I woke up feeling completely different as if a dense fog has cleared in my brain. (It’s like that with me. I have no known triggers which is what makes my BiPolar so frustrating.)

I was able to instantly concentrate, which for me is amazing. I spent most of the day writing, which I haven’t done for ages and feel completely alive again.

During the last couple of days I have been mainly updating this blog. For those of you that keep your own blogs you will know that this can at times be hard work (not to mention time consuming) and for me it’s impossible while I’m down, however with WordPress I can cheat!

I keep a hand written daily (well almost) mood journal as a record of how things are going and also so I can look back when I am depressed and see that I have been there before and I did come out the other end. In this journal I also keep a record of the things that have happened that would also make an interesting read for a blog post. I usually then type them up, edit them, proof read them and then post them. Well over the last couple of months the last thing I’ve felt like doing is typing, editing, proofing and posting. My brain just can’t concentrate for long enough. I might get as far as typing something but that would be about it.

Well over the last couple of days I have typed, edited and proofed all my posts for December and January (so far). On Monday I posted December’s and I’ve now just finished January and posted that lot too! As I was saying, with WordPress I can cheat; I can set my own date-stamp so they will all appear on the correct days making up a journal over time.

And though those of you reading my blog online may not have noticed anything odd, those of you that have been reading via RSS will have found that you’ve just got a big pile of posts from me! Happy reading! (Thanks Pete for pointing this out!)

I had my scheduled quarterly visit to the psychiatrist today. Lucky I was early because the appointment time on my letter was half an hour later than the one she had written on her sheet.

I talked about the three months since my last visit and about how I have been down since the end of November, and, frankly, how annoying this has been.

Admittedly, being permanently down (on about a 2 or a 3 on a good day on a scale of 0-10 where 0 is suicidal, 10 is full blown mania and 5 is what most of the population would consider to be having a normal life) is far better than my weekly rapid cycling between 0 and 8 that I was experiencing in the first half of last year and what put me in ACU for a few days back at the beginning of last July.

I have been struggling, not that anyone would really notice, but there have been some periods of up to four days at a time where I haven’t left the house or spoken to anyone other than Richard. Some days I haven’t even been able to stay out of bed for more than a couple of hours at once. This might sound like lazyiness to you but when your brain shuts down and you can’t even concentrate hard enough to make a decision on wether you want a cup of tea or not, it isn’t much fun I can assure you, and when there really is no let up for a few days and you’re existing in a confussed daze of despair, then, believe me, trying to find some way of ending it all is about as good as it gets.

Luckily for me I know it is a only condition of the chemical imbalance in my brain, and not anything I have done, and that, at some point, it will pass.

My work has suffered over the last couple of months. I haven’t been able to write anywhere near as much as I have wanted and yes my blogging has been affected too. (Today is actually 21st Jan and I’m filling in my blog entries from 3rd December since I’m now back up again. I keep an almost daily record of what’s been going on in my personal hand written journal so I’m able to update this online version.)

I have at least this time been able to keep the few social engagements I’ve had, though at times this has been very difficult as during a depressive episode it can take a good couple of hours for me to get up, shower, shave, get dressed and get in the car to go out. And even then I sometimes run out of time before I’ve even started and have to just get dressed, usually in whatever I was wearing previously because it is too complicated for my brain to choose anything different from the wardrobe. I generally have a minor panic attack as I try and force my brain into gear. It basically tells me it’s not ready to function properly and it can’t cope, and not to go out, which then causes more problems as I try and work out some sort of emergency plan to cover the fact that I am basically a vegetable at times like this. And of course, when you are like that you can’t make decisions anyway. It can soon spiral.

Last year I would often end up in a complete state where the only option was to allow my brain to shut down and recharge. Once I’d given in, usually in tears because of the complete failure I had been–it so demoralising when you can’t work out how to put on a pair of socks–I’d be asleep within thirty seconds and out of it for a good couple of hours. In the last six months though, since my visit to the ACU, I have been able to deal with it a lot better and haven’t had to miss anything. I generally have to take a little time to adjust to the social situation at hand and so am not particularly conversational on arrival, and basically hope no-one has noticed.

My biggest problem in the last couple of months has been sleep - all at the wrong times, far too much of it, and not particularly good sleep either. Aside from the huge lack of motivation, anything I do get round to doing, usually late in the afternoon, be that washing up or just watching the tele, just drains my enery. (I could say Tesco Value batteries last longer, but I won’t.) I end up sleeping. I dream in a depressed way too. It’s horrible when you are being threatened by menacing forces and your only option is to run away, but your legs are too heavy and every movement is an effort. This can go on and on and on. And you can’t wake yourself up because you know you are dreaming anyway. And when you do wake up, you only wake up into another level of the dream. Eventually when you have woken up properly, which by real time is probably only a hour or so later, you are so physically and mentally worn out, that you just fall back to sleep again - if you can call it that. Subsequently I have been very inactive, and thus my metabolism has been low, which means I eat more and have therefore put on an extra stone in weight.

Anyway. I digress…

Back to my psychiatrist who, once again, tried to persuade me to consider taking medication in order to give me some quality of life. Whatever that is - I’ve lived with BiPolar (Type II) since I was in my teens, and don’t know any different from the severe mood swings I endure. I have, in the recent past, been very reluctant to take medication. I’ve tried a lot of different stuff over the years and none has been any good.

One type about six or seven years ago, made me very high and I was so manic I didn’t sleep for 10 days. I spent the time working out a grand plan about how to buy up loads of hotels and have my own airline so I could travel the world and have somewhere different to sleep every night. I’m laughing now, but I was deadly serious at the time and even set up a limited company to start it all off.

Five years ago, another type of medication reacted with my immune system. It started attacking itself, and all my organs swelled up, including my skin, which turned a horrible purple. I was ambulanced to Frimley Park Hospital and spent a week on an isolation ward in my own room with en-suite and a TV while they tried to work out what on earth had gone wrong with me. I had an endless parade of doctors all looking at me. The consultant, who saw me twice day, explained she’d only had one case like mine in her lengthy career. Apparently that poor chap never made it. Luckily I had stopped taking the tablets as soon as the odd and very itchy rash had appeared on my stomache.

There’s now a note written on the cover of my mental health case notes - Allergic to Carbamazepine. (Tegratol)

So, I’m not a fan of medication but being permanently depressed for two months is no way to live a life and so I have to say I reluctantly agreed to try something new. So new, in fact, it hasn’t yet been licensed for BiPolar, but test cases have proved positive. The drug (I forget it’s name) is generally prescribed to treat epilepsy and I’ll need to book an appointment to see my GP so she can prescribe it for me. The word ‘procrastination’ comes to mind.

I have also agreed to be referred for an an eight week intensive group therapy course, which if nothing else will get me back into some sort of a routine.

Oh, and I’m still waiting for my CBT.

Today I paid a return visit to the Abraham Cowley Unit at St Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey. Thankfully this time the visit was a lot more enjoyable.

I’d been asked by the psychiatrists there to be assessed by new doctors taking their psychiatry exams. Great fun, well for me anyway. The poor young woman who had me as her patient to asses and diagnose my BiPolar II in a one hour exam was terrified.

I offered to do it again next year thinking that it must be a real benefit for doctors to do their exams by talking to real patients with conditions they’ll be diagnosing when they’ve qualified.

Sadly, it’s not to be. Next year the NHS will be paying professional actors to act the part of patients with mental health conditions.

Ummm… Can’t quite get my head around that one.

I note from the little box in the bottom right hand corner of my computer screen that today’s date is the tenth. So what happened to the other days at the beginning of September, I wonder?

Not a lot. My life isn’t the most interesting or exciting. In fact the days at present just seem to blend into one long hour. Certainly for the last 3 or 4 days I have done nothing but sleep in the morning and read the final Harry Potter in the afternoon/evening.

And now I’ve come to the end of that quest I feel some what deflated again. Back to the humble world and life of Paul Foster…

Yes I’m down. Can’t seem to get back up at the moment. Hovering at about a 2. (Mood Scale of 0-10 where 0 is suicidal and 10 is hallucinogenic.) Haven’t even been able to write it down in the notebook I’m supposed to be keeping a record of it in. Consequently I have done no writing and it’s been a struggle to plod on through the days with nothing to aim for.

I did manage to attend a wedding, last Friday. My long term friend, another Paul, married on HMS Warrior in Portsmouth, and it was lovely. Luckily for me it was late in the afternoon and so I was able to spend all day gearing up for it. (Shaving and showering is very difficult when you are depressed.) It was great, but sadly I wasn’t able to to really appreciate the splendidness of it all. I had hoped that it would lift me from this darkness, and it did for a while, but as soon as we left around midnight the doom and gloom came tumbling down around me again.

I can see why so many people with bi-polar and other forms of depression resort to alcohol and drugs to blot it all out. If it wasn’t for my innate sense of wanting to be in control of my own brain (I don’t smoke or drink) then I too would probably have succumbed to such desires and be an alcoholic or another kind of addict by now. It seems that my method of escaping from the doom is to sleep - at least I can’t harm myself or others if I just go to sleep. I even have dreams of myself going to sleep too; it’s horrible.

I’m half way through a play I really want to be writing but I haven’t even got the energy to get up before noon and getting dressed seems pointless when I know I’ll probably be back in bed again by two. It’s a constant struggle to do anything when I am down, and people wonder why I don’t answer the phone when they ring.

I know it will lift. I know it will stop raining in my head and I’ll stop drowning and the sun will come out and I will be able to think again, it’s just that I don’t know when. Until that magic day I have to be content with managing to do just one or two un-energetic things in my depleted waking hours (like reading or watching TV) and forgetting about all the other things I should or could be doing (collectively called ‘having a life’) that so many people take for granted…

Well it seems I’m writing again, if only my blog. And that’s a start. Let’s see what the rest of the week will bring…
 

Difficult week. Struggled with being down through most of it. Still not back up properly yet, but OK.

Finally got the car back. One of the keys still isn’t working, even though it went back today and they said they couldn’t find anything wrong with it - again. Oh well. As long as one key still works.

I also handed in a ’series of scenes’ for the Guildford Play Writing Festival whilst I was in Guildford with the car this afternoon.

All last week I was doing really well play writing, but last weekend I started going down again, and even though I was still excited about the play I’ve really struggled to do things this week.

One thing I wasn’t expecting; the little One Act of about 25-40 mins that I thought I was writing keeps telling me it wants to be a full length play. I’d already had problems with the title (still undecided - now gone through half a dozen and settled on one of the earlier ones as a working title, though probably won’t use the idiom I chose since Agatha Christie already has - not that you can copyright a title, you understand, but it could cause problems if someone decided to do a play version of her novel since it has already been made into a film - I digress, sorry.) and two characters wrote themselves out (down to six now) though one did sneak back in - just his voice is heard off stage for one short, but important line.

Anyway, I’ve written in first draft about 70 minutes worth of what I fully expect to be a 55 minute first act and a 45 minute second act full length play. Essentially I have written the beginning and end of both acts and am now filling in the middles. Not done it like that before - not that I’ve written a full length play before. (I’m not counting my Pantomime - different genre.)

Sadly, this last week my concentration has only lasted for about two fifteen minute episodes per day. Not good, considering I can easily write without a break for up three hours before I even look at the time. (And managed to spend a full 12 hours not including breaks writing on one particular day the previous week.) Consequently I didn’t get anywhere near as much done as I wanted to this week - I spent most of it in bed. I was getting seriously concerned that I wouldn’t be submitting anything to the Festival, and wasn’t sure I would be able to right up until about midday today. Anyway, I ended up submitting the first 35 mins of Act I.

I’m looking forward to finishing and editing the full play. Will probably end up getting out my Writers and Artists Year Book and finding a theatre to submit it too, if that is I’ve got a decent title by then!

Oh well, we wait and see…

Shortly off to the (wild; wet; windy - take your pick) Witterings for the weekend (I promised Richard we’d go for some long walks as the weather isn’t shaping up to much) and I’ll be back home Sunday for my Monthly Writers’ Circle Breakfast Meeting.

Called the garage yesterday. Yep! The RAC Patrol man was right. Our little purple Nissan needs a brain transplant. Parts, labour and VAT come to £621.71 - more than our R-reg Micra is actually worth. Pity really. Other than the NATS going a couple of years ago, this car has been brilliant and highly reliable. A little hole in the sill led to a bit of welding in order to pass last year’s MOT, but nothing else has ever been a problem in the 6 years we’ve had it. (It’s not a she or a he, since we’ve never named it!) Wouldn’t be able to get another car as good as that one for six hundred quid (especially since ours has only done 70,000 miles) so gave the garage the go ahead. Hope to be driving it again tomorrow.

To be honest, I can’t say I have really missed it. In fact not having the car has forced me to think differently, which is good since I had a brilliant idea for a new play.

I’m entering the Guildford Play Writing Festival, a new part of the Guildford Book Festival. I found out about it through my writer’s group a couple of weeks ago and set about trying to think of something. The judges are looking for “contemporary themes or the exploration of modern issues” and being as none of my work so far fits this criteria, I knew I’d have to come up with something from scratch. Not easy. With me inspiration strikes when it feels like it. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would; the closing date is the end of the month.

Saturday afternoon an idea popped up whilst having afternoon tea with Richard in his studio in the garden. So far it’s had four titles and lost two characters, but it’s shaping up really well, and I’m very, very pleased with it. Spent most of Sunday writing, 12 hours on Monday, and yesterday afternoon and evening. Still a lot of work to do. This play is coming out in a completely different way than the others I’ve written. There are elements of sytle I have used before, but it’s doing it’s own thing. The characters appear much more real to me than in previous pieces. I think it’s something to do with it being the ‘modern issue’ or the ‘contemporary theme’. Or maybe I’m just getting better with practice. I’m loving it. Richard is pleased that I’m writing again. He says I’m much, much happier when I’m writing.

Time I was back in playwright mode…

Oh, nearly forgot. The excellent Stephen Fry programs are being shown again tonight and tomorrow. Well worth a viewing if you didn’t catch them the first time round.

Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. BBC4. Wed & Thurs. 8pm