Mix and Match

This is the first time I have started writing a post without a title. I guess I don’t know exactly what I want to write about, but I know I need to write. This will be a mix and match no exact direction kind of post. Actually, that will be the title – mix and match. brb.

Going by all financial metrics, I am getting broke but I refuse to think about it because to think about it is certain death. I think Hozier is such a beautiful soul. Anyways, it appears I am having some sort of year end blues/birthday blues/sad memories from this period last year blues. Whatever kind of blue it is, I am feeling blue, really blue, cold blue, death blue.

Do I have a big nose or a moderately sized nose? I started watching or should I say re-watching Industry 2 days ago and I am loving it. I think I miss swimming. I am certain I miss having a purpose to my days. I want to get that back. Everyone says that better days are coming, everything will be alright, I’m doing okay, I’m making progress, soon these days will be behind me, etc etc. I wish I believed it.

I went to a couple of social gatherings over the last couple of weeks – Insert Nights, Group Therapy, Activity Records summer beach party. I had fun at all of them to varying degrees. But I have over exerted myself socially/night life wise and I am hanging up my boots until December. Oh shit, I have a wedding in a couple of weeks, we’ll see how that goes.

How am I? I dunno, I really dunno but I will try to explain as clearly as I can. I am scared, because I don’t know what to do money wise. I am frustrated family wise.

This is a one month update to this draft. I have kinda hacked the blues, now I feel beige which is equally bad tbh. I have no new year plans cos honestly new year is something we say to give some direction to our lives.

Anyways, I didn’t go for many outings in December as I planned to. Because I am now more sensitive to the workings of my brain waves.

It’s boxing day. I have cramps. There is mad harmattan.

Why do babies cry #99

I have insomnia temporarily sadly, which means I sleep in shorts and not deeply. Anyways, I hear a cat crying. I pick up my phone, it 3.40am – it appears I have managed to sleep for 4 hours which is great on these streets. I hear the cat crying again, it’s not loud but I can hear it all the same. I start to wonder when my neighbor bought a cat, then I remember my brother and his family came on Christmas night and the cat is  indeed my 10 week old nephew – Asher.

I go upstairs to their room – my room really which I have temporarily vacated and I see this young human giving his best attempt at a cry, his parents look defeated, frustrated and sleepy all in one. I don’t know how to fix his bottle so I tell my sister in law to fix his bottle and I’ll take him with me.

First things first, I check his diaper, it’s wet. I get it, I tell Asher, I’d scream if I have to wear wet panties, I take off his diaper, but I’m too slow because he aims a fresh stream of pee at my face. You met me on this earth I tell him, I dodge just in time.

His bottle is ready. I pick up his bottle, say goodbye to his exhausted parents and take him downstairs with me. He is clearly inpatient as I wait for the milk to cool down a bit, he calms himself down by scratching me, me his loving aunty, this life.

He burps, he smiles at me. It is now 4.20am, for some reason I’m feeling really sleepy , which is normal I guess, so I estimate in the next 20 minutes he’d be asleep.

Asher says nope, in this club, we all fammmmm aunty, I dance, I sing , I place him on my chest which is arguably one of the most comfortable dwelling places for a human, I play with him, I bless him with the beauty of my face and clearly nothing impresses him. 

I think babies cry as a form of protest. They are maybe here against their will, we will never know truly really . So they cry to let us know, I don’t want to be here, but I’m here.

It is now 5.44am, I can’t do this. I carry him upstairs to my mother’s room, maybe a much older human will soothe him. Now I can sleep.

Before I close my eyes, I remember again why I don’t want one of these. 

mirrors #100

Preamble – I’m starting a 100 days of writing experience…so we are going to do a countdown okay? Cool.

Mirror Mirror on the wall…who’s the flyest of them all?

Mirrors can be good or bad, depends on what you see. You see, the amazing thing about a mirror is that it shows you  exactly what you show it. It’s give and take in a sense.

Another thing I figured about mirrors recently is that they don’t just reflect what’s easily apparent, they reflect the state of your mind, your soul if you will. You see what is within, you process what is without from what is within. In simple english, you will see yourself as more beautiful on days that you feel good.

Your life, my dear friend, is one big mirror of how you feel within.

Take me as i am whoever i am

I first watched Modern Love S1 E3 on Sunday October 20, 2019. The episode basically showed Lexi (Anne Hathaway) and her struggles with bipolar disorder, especially with relation to work and her career. I very weirdly vividly remember watching this episode and being so sad, I even cried, thinking life must be so hard for a person like this. But I couldn’t relate, big lmao coming right up, but I really empathised with this real life person (ML episodes are true life stories of an eponymous New York Times Column).

Life is funny. It is also either very coincidental or we are truly living in a multiverse with everything everywhere all at once. This episode was released on October 17, 2019 which coincidentally happened to be my 24th birthday and the beginning of the first hypomanic episode I can remember clearly. I suspect I had been having episodes before this date, I just didn’t log them in my brain archives.

As you may know, as I am now an erudite researcher of the bipolar experience, there is a common theme of hypomanic/manic and depressive triggers being activated around birthdays. Do not ask me why, I do not know yet. I may mess around and make it my PhD thesis lol.

I will go ahead to describe the events of October 18, 2019. I remember being very euphoric, and I had this brilliant idea to loc my hair. And I had to loc it that same day or else I was going to perish. I am not kidding, that was the urgency with which my brain communicated it to me. So on a Friday afternoon at 3pm precisely (I remember because I journal lol, so I checked my journal entry of that day, I do not have a magnetic brain yet). I left my office knowing that I had a lot of work to do, because I hadn’t gotten much done the previous day being my birthday.

I left Victoria Island and went to Ogba which was such a stupid decision because I was stuck in traffic as expected for a Friday afternoon, Island to Mainland drive. I got to Ogba by about 5.30pm which is again an irrational time to start making my hair. For context I have a forest of hair, the stylists had to take out the extensions I had on before they could start locking my hair. We finished at 11.20pm and I got back home at almost midnight. At the time none of these actions or decision making seemed strange to me. Even though sanity dictated that I could very easily have gone to do my hair the next morning which was a Saturday.

One week after this, I had my first ever prolonged depressive episode that I have a very clear recollection of which did not end until late December. In later therapy sessions, this is what I would recollect as the beginning of my depression. I took no note of the hypomania because it never ever crossed my mind that I was acting very irrationally. I also didn’t even know what hypomania was.

I remember when watching that Modern Love episode, I didn’t even recognise the portrayal of mania in the scenes , I just thought oh this is a very depressed person. I also did not google bipolar disorder after watching it because again in 2019 I had no idea of what bipolar disorder was.

Now to the big lmao I mentioned in paragraph one. Exactly 5 years later, on Sunday, October 20, 2024 when I returned from my birthday vacation (I got my diagnosis for bipolar 2 shortly before my birthday), I rewatched that same episode and I had such a big aha moment! I was watching my life on amazon prime in HD. The dancing in supermarket aisles and singing to fruits, the absenteeism (when i resigned, I was owing my office 11 leave days, do not ask me how) and high performance at work that made my absenteeism to be overlooked to an extent , the short lived romantic relationships, the endless episodes curled up on the toilet floor (omg, that one hit so close to home man).

So happy 5th year anniversary to me of Modern Love S1 E3. We are apparently living in a multiverse, everything is truly everywhere all at once.

Twenty Nine

Hi there, i am too (what is a word for when you can’t be bothered) to stick to the proper rules of grammar in this post. so it is either i write with errors and break my writing dry spell or i keep writing these posts in my head and i do not think that thinking of a post however well detailed constitutes writing.

anyways almost a month ago, precisely on the 17th of October in the year of our lord 2024, i turned 29. happy birthday to me. it was a mixed celebration tbh but i am glad i celebrated myself cos if i don’t who will lol. Thanks to the benevolence of a good friend, I went to Jara Beach Resort for three days and I had such a good time! From the ambience of the place to the friends I made, the staff, the food, the experiences I had! It was such a lovely birthday.

however, my birthday was also twinged with sadness, confusion, pain, lotssssssssssss of tears, carry over insomnia lol, 6am walks on the beach to scream with the crashing waves and cry. why the tears you ask, why not i ask. sooooooooooo let’s take it back…year 28 was arguably one of the worst of my life…ozoemena.

one week to my birthday, on october 9 precisely, my therapist first shared his suspicions that i was bipolar and more specifically that i had bipolar 2 disorder…(i have 30 separate posts on being bipolar in my head lol. i feel like i owe it to the world, to black people and to nigerians to share my experiences, this will be explained in separate subsequent posts). his suspicions were confirmed over the course of the next three weeks by what i was experiencing and finally able to document because i was actively in therapy with an amazing therapist (sam, if you ever see this, i can never express the depth of my gratitude to you).

so anyways, back to why my birthday was twinged with sadness and loads of it at that. i was 2 days from a 2 week long hypomanic episode (again, this will have a separate post), but honestly medical google is your best friend for this post for now as i realise i am not explaining a lot of terms. i was deeply ashamed, embarrassed, hurt, confused, had spent a lot of money on a lot of shit, had signed up for things that when my high had crashed i knew i couldn’t keep up with. whew! it was a lot fam. as a yoruba girl, there was also family drama on one side, my suicidal thoughts made a brief reappearance as i although fleetingly thought of entering the ocean and being done with this somewhat painful existence of mine.

as life would have it, i met the most precious 8 year old child at the resort who, i don’t know how but this child gave me a reason to fight. and i am still here fighting.

so happy birthday to fisayo the fighter.

DD 1

DD is depression diaries in case you are wondering.

anyway, the question of the day is that is this a new depression or is this the former one that took a two month break and resurfaced.

these are the issues.

Will I make it?

what’s the first thing you thought of when you saw the title/topic (what even is the difference between these two anyway?).

i was actually talking more broadly of being alive. for the past 6 years, i have struggled on and off with the desire to remain on this side of consciousness till the expiration of my allotted time.

i believe in reincarnation and i believe that when i die, i will come back. i hope i come back as a bird. the non edible kind. i just wanna fly and sit on trees all day. the human experience is slightly overhyped.

a question that pops up in my head from time to time is , am i really doing my best, am i giving this fight my all. or, am i doing my best and i cannot even recognise it because i am so used to being high functioning and this is truly the best i can do right now.

in a perfect world¹, without me needing to ask, someone is going to hold my hand from start to finish for a full year. research for me what next steps to take, make needed connections for me , follow me to meet ups, enrol me in academic and extra curricular activities , book therapy and exercise sessions for me, find me a job where i can be handheld, until my brain starts picking up for itself. it’s sort of like jumpstarting a dead car battery with a working one. i need to be jumpstarted by other people. but with the way the world is set up, this scenario will never happen and i will be unreliably relied upon to make the actions to better my quality² of life.

Hence the question, “will I make it?”

1. in a utopian world, this should be a service offered for high performers who seem to have fallen off or people with elongated chronic depression who have withdrawn from life. it will be a service sorta priced like stock futures, where the amount payable when the person’s now engaging themselves with life and being financially rewarded for it will be based on an estimation of their future potential that was carried out and extra time spent over one year. ↩︎
2. i might start a pottery apprenticeship soon. today is 27 june 2024. ↩︎

pick up your phone

how long can you hold space for a friend who is unable to reciprocate even the basic parts of friendship because they are sick. yes, sick. we all admit mental health is a big part of health but we don’t exactly think of someone who is struggling with their mental health as sick. a friend in the hospital with typhoid is sick but not a friend who goes to work everyday but is battling depression.

to simplify it, i think it’s because one sickness is visible and most times with an end date while the other is not. as humans, we relate better to things we can see, that’s why faith is hard.

we also consciously or unconsciously expect that because one has a loving community, one should automatically be able to open up about one’s struggles with this sickness called depression and when they don’t they are silently punished for it. but it doesn’t work that way. there is no template or timeline for dealing with depression. all we have are suggestions. sometimes it works, sometimes it does not work.

if you have a friend or family dealing with depression, whether they open up to you or you simply suspect it, give them grace and give them time, if you can do neither, give them space.

so now that we are here

when is a bad day a good day? i’ll tell you-when you’re alive at the end of it all. life. being alive (biologically). breath. movement. sometimes we don’t fully grasp the gift of it all.

with that said. welcome to my blog. i hope you find a piece of home here.

ijeoma.