The Bipolar Bear Blog

He wakes from his bed that has become his womb, oblivious to what happened before. He fumbles around trying to get up, but every sense has been reset, as if he himself had been reborn. A few days pass, and he finally throws himself out of the bed. What to do now? He wants to use these limbs, but they won’t respond to any of his attempts at communication. Eventually, after a lot of work, he manages to move a finger. Fantastic- his finger is moving! He twitches it back, something impossible just hours earlier. After hours that roll into days in which he hones his techniques, he can finally climb up to his knees. A bit more used to this unwieldy vehicle, he makes the brave attempt to get back onto his feet.

At first he simply falls and bruises his arms. He repeats and repeats, sometimes giving up and watching the days go by. Other times trying, really trying, so hard to get onto his feet again. As the time passes like an eternity, all the while with him trapped in this living prison, eventually he takes a step! Then another step! Before falling back into his face. More time passes; and eventually he can make it down his stairs.

When he gets to his kitchen, even the thought of making himself breakfast seems like too much effort. Instead he goes straight to check his e-mails- but he sits down and realises he doesn’t even know to how switch it on. Frustrated, he goes outside.

The entire world is making no sense to him. Now and again he sees faces he recognises, some people who attempt to talk to him, but his mind drifts at the pace of his steps.

He eventually stumbles into a meeting. Great work, young man! They loved the video you created; think you could do another one? Feeling more confident in himself, he accepts, and after saying goodbye, makes his way back home.

Now he switches on his computer, and does more work than he has ever done in months. He creates all sorts of videos, some informational, some for a laugh. He designs the best posters the world has ever seen, creates the best music he has ever heard, and generally feels fantastic. He feels so fantastic that he no longer sleeps- weeks and months pass, he has created his own multi-million pound company, he has become his own legal expert, he has become admin assistant, technician, head designer, runner, everything. Business is going great.

Fantastic, he thinks. I can go to sleep now.

He doesn’t wake for 30 days and 30 nights. He curls into a foetal position, being nourished by natures womb. His mind breaks down from lack of use.

Finally, he wakes up from this bed that has become his womb. It’s like learning t crawl all over again.

Those who have read my previous posts will be familiar with my Bipolar and my struggles getting what’s in my head down on paper 99% of the time. I really just wanted to elaborate on what is going through my mind right now.

Right now, my mind has 99 different goals with 5-6 strands of thought. Focusing on one thing is pretty much like trying to do 500mph down a country road; there’s no way I can control the bloody thing, and by the time I’ve got going it’s impossible to see where I’ve started.

Not only that, but the disabling feeling of a low period is coming my way… I don’t mean low as in feeling gloomy. I mean low as in physically ill. Feeling like I have run a marathon every day, when in fact I have barely got out of bed. But the worst part is, while I am physically drained, my mind is still ticking as fast as ever… there are so many things I want to accomplish, yet I can barely make it to the damned kitchen to get something to eat. Everything I have signed myself up for or supposed to have done while I was high, I end up cancelling, and feeling extremely guilty for it. Then within months I am back to having the energy of an olympic runner. Repeat till fade.

At the moment I am in the middle period between high and low. And the worst bloody part of it is I have so many stories I want to get done, so many images in my head I want to get out, that I can’t get a single thing out of my head. The fact I’ve got this down is obviously a step in the right direction. Readers of my DeviantArt profile (which in all fairness is a joke; I don’t deserve to even bother trying to get the art in my head out because it is all crap) will have already read the massive mind block which really has been going on for a very long time. I have 2 stories I really want to at least get written and published through some cheap online pay-by-the-book publishing company before I die. And even that seems a struggle at the best of times.

I just wish I had someone I could really collaborate with. The problem is I’m rarely around when I’m well. When I am unwell I trust the average person about as much as I could throw them (which in my state of unfitness is not very far at all). I guess this is my own personal ad for a collaborator. Once I’m going I don’t stop until a project is done; half the time the battle is getting started.

I was so understandably pissed off with what can only be described as the NHS giving itself another blowjob infront of a mirror at the expense of all other members of the “public” (all 5 of them) at the meeting, I decided to do an angry podcast rather than the usual blog post. Click here to enjoy.

Avid is apparently the industry standard for film production software, and costs so many thousands of pounds. However, in my 6 years of video editing, it is by far the most buggy and least user-friendly piece of editing software I use.

Maybe it’s the configuration at the university; I’d be stuffed if I know. But I have only had Adobe Premiere crash on me twice in my life. And Final Cut Pro has never crashed when I’ve used it.

However, every time I have used Avid at the university and at home, at some point in a 3 hour editing session the whole system crumbles in a sea of error messages resulting in a restart. Which is a shame, because it’s spartan-but-feature-filled interface could appeal to me if I had more time for it. And then all of a sudden, after a restart, it all sounds fine.

Now, purists may argue I’m not using it correctly and that is what’s breaking it. However, if I were to set up a media company (something that is very likely to happen with my mental health media company in the works), do you think I would go for the industry “gold” standard, or the rapidly competing Adobe Premiere? Maybe it’s because I’m a dumb fuck that I need the “simpler” interface. But, along with After Effects, it gets me professional results I can use in the marketplace.

Could people comment with their suggestions on the topic? If I am seeing Avid in the wrong light I’d really like to know, so I can learn (or re-learn?) it correctly.

I thought I’d share with you some of the beautiful sights just 5 minutes walk away from my house, especially of the cathedral. Not that I am Christian or anything; I’d say I’m more atheist with spiritual tendencies. But anyway.

They are not by any standards my best photographs; they were taken on my phone!! Although I would like to invest in some decent (second hand?) photography gear when I get the time (and money). Not that I am ungrateful of the wonderful Christmas present of my parents’ (a nice looking silver Sony digital camera), although I hope you understand it isn’t the best kind of camera for night time photography et al!

I’m really falling in love with Lincoln; it’s got the hustle-bustle I love in a city, but also has the countryside not more than a 15 minute walk from any part of town.

Also, while I’m on the subject of beautiful photographs, I found this wonderful testament to British education, as well as a tribute to this wonderful British culture patriots/racists/conservatives always bang on about. And by conservatives I mean those with a small c (although there’s not a lot of difference compared to the big C noun snobby up-their-own arses ones).

I was pretty frustrated when I received my weekly bank account text message to find that, for the 3rd time in as many months, my account had exceeded its overdraft limit because of a direct debit. This meant yet another £30 charge was going my way.

This had me in absolute outrage; what protection is there for the mentally ill; who could find it difficult to manage their finances at the best of times? Luckily I have been far more on the ball the last few weeks so I could notice it very quickly, but about 90% of the time I wouldn’t have found out until they try to take it out of my other account and try and charge me again.

I want to point out, I’m not at all saying being mentally unwell is a blank cheque for every mistake or bad thing a person has done. What I am saying is:

1. Bank’s should be obliged to encourage more communication with them, especially regarding disabilities and
2. Offer advice on alternative ways of payment or resolving the issue.

After that, if a person still forgets to pay up, the question should be whether a certain bank account/overdraft/loan etc. is really suitable for the particular person. Proof should be provided by their GP, and maybe there should be the requirement to obtain proof of receiving secondary care from a psychiatrist or community psychiatric nurse (as more of a fallback argument for those who say people will just pretend to be depressed to get out of paying for things; as there is a much deeper requirement of need for people in secondary services).

But sod my rant beating for the cause of the mentally ill. What pisses me off most is despite going over the overdraft, my credit card is £30 in credit.

Edit: Sign the petition calling on the government to review the bank charge system (considering they own just about every UK bank) @ http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BankPolicy/

I am trialling my new re-organised PC set up to get things done more efficiently. What this really means is it’s an excuse to install loads of new things and spend forever trying to get them to work exactly right, only to give up and do things the way I’ve already done them.

Whatever; here is a list of programs/lifehacks I am trying in order to get my life back on track:

• Productivity Wallpaper – This is wallpaper for your desktop split into 5 sections for all your icons, based on the idea of Getting Things Done.
• Optimism – A piece of software designed to keep track of your mood. For Bipolar Sufferers such as myself, pretty much a lifesaver. You rate your mood and quality of sleep from 1-10, then tick boxes for the activities/triggers/symptoms you’ve felt each day. Use it for a few weeks, and you can print off a very useful graph of how your mood has changed.
• Google Tasks Shortcut – I have used Google Chrome to create an application shortcut that loads Google Tasks in a small window. I also use Google Tasks on my Nokia E71.
• Mozilla Thunderbird – From the people that brought you Firefox comes a 100% Organic E-mail application with a similar community-oriented ethic. I connect this to my Gmail, and use an E-mail signature linked to my identi.ca account (similar to twitter).
• Mozilla Sunbird – Another piece of community software for organising your calander. There is an extension for integrating this with Thunderbird, but I prefer to keep them both separate. This links to my Google Calendar. Also my Nokia E71 links to my google calendar.
• Ping.fm – Not really productivity software, although it allows me to update my identi.ca, facebook, twitter, myspace and loads of others from one application. I use the Ping.FM Desktop App to do this without loading a single webpage. Meaning less time wasted browsing facebook!!

Well that is all I am using that is new at the minute, I’ll keep you updated with how it goes. Also if anyone has any suggestions or additional ideas please let me know!

>I’ve decided to move my blog to Baywords, which runs Wordpress. My reasons for this are numerous. For a start, Wordpress has many more features than Google’s relatively basic Blogger. Also, attention was drawn to an article regarding a blogger being taken to court to get his identity revealed for slagging of a model. Now, I don’t exactly hold models in the highest regard myself, but it is completely against my values of freedom of speech that Google decided to co-operate with authorities because some guy spoke rudely of a famous figure.

>Mention communism and the majority of people (especially the older generation) think of Stalin, Mao and the millions of atrocities they caused in their dictatorships. Of course commies will forever be put in the same place in history as the Nazi’s and North Korea; but the basic ideas behind communism and socialism were fairly sound. Especially the criticisms of Capitalism.

>

Today I had the “privelidge” of going to an NHS meeting on suicide and self-harm prevention (with myself representing the many sufferers of mental health problems). On my way to the meeting room, I went past another room which has become a make-shift “Swine Flu Crisis Centre”. Which to begin with I thought fair enough, it’s been in the news after all. But then I started to think about it…

How many people have died of Swine Flu so far in Lincolnshire? None. How many people have died of suicide this year in Lincolnshire? At least 20. But you don’t see a lot of suicide prevention “crisis centres” at all.

It kind of goes to show that the government can throw money at something for political reasons and the fact it’s so reported on in the press, but won’t always do the same for those illnesses with maybe a bit more stigma about them, or those illnesses talked about much less.

I could get even more cynical and suggest that the only reason they’re more bothered about Swine Flu is because it might affect younger people; they’re less bothered about the 65,000+ pensioners that might be killed by normal flu in a bad year, aren’t they?

Those with mental illnesses are still discriminated against by paramedics and the police, and because the NHS is not willing to spend more on prevention (evident from the fact most suicides happen in Primary Care, or services accessible from your GP, where sufferers are regularly dropped after 6 weeks of CBT without further assessment) it is costing the public more through A&E or inpatient admissions- not to mention the cost of peoples lives, or losing a loved one.

My only problem is this rant has been planned out and going around in my head since the meeting earlier this afternoon, so it has lost some of its passion!!