The Future as Bright and Promising

Well, I improved my grade in that graduate class that I had gotten a C on the first exam. From a mediocre, failing C to a perfect score on my second exam! Now my grade is an 85%, up 15%. I got a perfect score! I am still proud of this. My future in the graduate program seems to be promising.

Also, I inquired to my Department of Rehabilitation counselor, my out-patient service providers, and my therapist, if a 5150 or a 5250 appears on a background check. They all said no, it is part of my confidential medical records. I was so scared before, thinking that my chances of employment were marginal, at best. Thank goodness for that one medical legislative measure that ensured our privacy! God bless the USA!!

The only thing I cannot do is serve in a position that requires a firearm. I accept this. I do not want a firearm anyways, those things are dangerous. I do not mind not being allowed to work for the police department, that is alright.

I am so grateful that I can be a teacher! I will take my medicine as prescribed, no missing, and I will monitor my mild symptoms. I vow to keep up with my regiment. :)

I am very happy. Only criminal charges show up on background checks, and I have no criminal record whatsoever. I do not even have a single speeding ticket on my driving record, and I worked as a delivery driver for around 3 years.

I now have a car I bought used. I spent hundreds of loan dollars fixing it up, but it runs reliably and more importantly, it is a Kia that is good on gas.

Yay! 

Doing Well in Graduate School

I am getting good to excellent grades thus far. I have studied so much I barely have to time to fit in my exercise regiment of walking and using my stationary bike at least 3 times a week. It has paid off, though! I am doing good. I just need to keep up with my readings and work on my term papers. So far, I have had a positive experience in the graduate program.

I feel like I am doing something noble by continuing with my higher education. Not only am I a first-generation Mexican-American to finish a B.A. in my extended family, I am also a person who lives with a genetic mental illness. This makes me sort of a double minority in Academia. I try not to see this as a thing to feel bad about, but rather something that I can be proud of---I am paving new ground!

One of my heroes, Elyn R. Saks, a schizophrenic who completed her law degree at a prestigious University, was featured on "TED." If you have not heard of TED, it is a program that you can download to your cell phone or tablet. It is a database that is filled with geniuses talking on various subjects, from the law to the internet. It includes many leaders in various fields (i.e. techno-geniuses and others). Elyn R. Saks is video taped on TED giving a speech on her struggle with mental illness, her success as a lawyer and professor, and how this relates to our policies and views on people with a mental illness. I highly recommend this talk!

Thanks for reading!

Controlling Symptoms on a Daily Basis

For anybody, graduate school and financial strife is stressful. For me, someone who has bipolar disorder with severe manic episodes (my schizo side of schizo-affective), stress takes on new meaning. Yet even this double amount of stress is possible to manage.

First, it is crucial to develop social skills required for college and life in general. This means learning to read people's body language, backing off when they turn away, smiling in return to a smile, and knowing how to understand a social boundary and where the boundary is drawn for different people. This can be a chore. It can also be embarrassing. When I am manic, I tend to be very extroverted, gushing over everybody, texting everyone on my cell phone, and generally being obnoxiously cheerful. When severely manic (read: psychotic) I withdraw completely, too afraid of being hurt that I retreat into the private domain of my bedroom. I dive into the intricate internal world of madness, denying the existence of real people in the process. When depressed, I also retreat into my bedroom, only to mull over the hopelessness of everything in general. As you can see, this affects my social life.

Learning to manage symptoms related to social skills is critical for well-being and a healthy recovery. I have to consciously remind myself that I must not raise my hand at every question when I am manic, or stare at the floor during an hour and a half lecture with a pained look on my face while depressed. It is all about moderation. Learning to compartamentalize the struggle of having a mental illness is important because it allows for appropriate social interaction. I understand that I am different and I try to "box" the parts of me that are illness-related. So, when I am manic, I put half my enthusiasm into a "box" and tape the lid down, mentally. When depressed, I put the sadness into the box and make infrequent eye contact with people around me, as I would normally do when in a neutral state.

I am still learning how to navigate around the world. My therapist says I have good social skills but I am still very nervous about my social skills. I like to practice on them by periodically taking up a conversation with someone I am not familiar with. I tend to smile and greet them, then ask them how they are doing in our classes. Then I back off a little or pretend like I need to go to the bathroom in order to make my escape.

So, I have found that with medication, a supportive network (I am lucky to have a great therapist and this blog), it is totally feasible to live a healthy life with friends and mentors. Thanks for reading!

So much caffeine it now puts me to sleep

I haven't pulled an all-nighter in grad school---yet. I did try. I pumped my body full of caffeine through various methods: Red Bull, Monster, iced coffee with a shot of espresso, and over-the-counter headache medicine that is mostly caffeine. I did all this so I could memorize a short story in a foreign language. It did not work. I must be building up a tolerance to caffeine. As soon as the caffeine kicked in, my anxiety let up and it felt perfectly natural to put my head down on the bed and fall asleep until 9:30 a.m the next day. How late did I stay up? Barely midnight. It was alright though, in a state of panic I managed to memorize 10 sentences and regurgitate them for my oral exam.

My doctor has added a mood stabilizer to my med cocktail. It made me grumpy the first few days. I was working on installing car speakers into the used car I recently purchased, and every so often I would get totally irritated, throw my hands up, and retreat into the quiet domain of my room. Usually I have a lot more patience than that. Then, about four days into the new treatment, I felt wonderfully enthusiastic about life. It finally kicked in!

I really needed that boost because I got a horrible grade on the first exam for one of my grad classes, a C!!! Yes, that's right, I failed miserably and got a C. In graduate school, a C is like a D-, maybe even an F.  The feedback said I should write in a more organized manner but that my arguments were convincing.

I cannot help but wonder if my schizo-affective thought pattern surfaces when I am writing essays. Maybe my thoughts come out out of sync with logic and that is what ends up in my essays. For the next class exam, I am more prepared. This time, I started early (she is letting us do a take-home exam so long as we do not communicate with our classmates). If I start early I can re-read it before submitting it in order to catch the little slips of disorganization. This is just part of my cognitive disability---leaps of ideas, from topic to topic, without clear associations. It is a notorious symptom of both my bipolar disorder and my psychosis. I really have to watch myself. I am going to request a piece of scratch paper for my upcoming in-class midterm in another grad class. I will need it to sort my thoughts prior to scribbling my answers.

Anyways, I feel much better. Some jerk's comments about obese people does not send my into conniptions anymore (see :Trolls on youtube suck). I feel more balanced, more mellow, and a little sleepy. So it goes (to quote Kurt Vonnegut Jr.).

In other news, I highly recommend that series "Homeland." NAMI nominated the cable show for a NAMI award for its touching portrait of a C*A officer with bipolar disorder. It is a little interesting to me that the character is only on an anti-psychotic, or at least that's what was said during one episode. Usually, bipolar people get cocktails of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, or mood stabilizers. They go up, they go down. Treating only one end of the continuum can cause the other end to spiral out of control. But mental illness comes in all shades, in all manners, so maybe taking just an anti-psychotic makes sense.

Watch it!       :)

Need More Coffee

Graduate school is a new experience for me. It requires stamina, endurance, mental prowess, and a lot of caffeine.

I have decided I prefer to call myself bipolar with psychotic features rather than schizo-affective. Why? Because, for the last two years, I have not had schizophrenic symptoms. I have had slight manic and depressive episodes. That is more how I would characterize myself, as a bipolar person who risks becoming schizophrenic if I go without sleep for more than two days. Unfortunately, it is really common that I do not sleep for extended periods once my mania sets in. However, I have been free of schizophrenic symptoms for the last two to three years. My bipolarity, on the other hand, seems to come more frequently.

For example, any time I miss a dose of Zoloft I feel sad, hopeless, and like my efforts in academia are futile. Of course, once the doctor pumps me full of refills, this tends to go away rather quickly (as in, within two hours!). Sometimes, if I drink too much coffee followed by energy drinks and diet Cokes, I can become too extroverted. It is not just the caffeine, it is how my brain chemistry responds to caffeine. I can effuse over my peers, insisting that they are magnificent people who can change the world. If that sounds really nice, well, you've never seen me manic. I just cannot shut up! I hear myself talking on and on, sometimes jumping from topic to topic, but I cannot make my mouth shut. I fear how I must come across.

Well, hopefully, I can keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the term papers. :)

Trolls on youtube comment boards suck

So, I was watching a youtube video today. joseph150ish, whoever you are, you are truly a cruel person. This joseph150ish trolled an HBO documentary on the stigma that obese people face and wrote that they should go ahead and kill themselves because they are "useless wastes, oxygen thieves." joseph150ish is likely a sociopath. A sociopath is a person who feels no empathy for anybody. Or maybe somewhere down the line he got punched in the face by a fat person and felt the need to instruct every fat person to commit hara kiri.

Either way, I still recommend the video. Here's the link, please don't write hate speech. I really feel that free speech is not ordering a person to commit suicide. Having actually lost someone to suicide, I find his comment more than offensive, I find it to be akin to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ow1uiWcn4c


Graduate school is alright, I am preparing to do a Powerpoint presentation later this month. I like to relax my walking, listening to music, and/or surfing the net. However, people like joseph150ish make it a very ugly world and someone should really report him for harassment, or just 5150 the f$%^&. But no, he would give 5150's a bad name.

Thanks for reading!