To recap, the day prior, I had just taken an increased dosage of my medications. Towards the evening, I started to act a bit unlike myself. At the time, I knew I had a massive headache but I didn\u2019t think it affected my ability to think and be rational. That night, I also texted some strange things to this girl who happened to be a psychiatry resident. When the next day rolls around, I take another increased dosage of my medication believing that I was still thinking rationally.\u00a0 I then texted more uncharacteristic things in an attempt to explain and justify myself. While in my head, I felt like I was being extremely rational, I was probably looking a bit crazy. There is a bit more of this back and forth for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Out of nowhere, I apparently started having manic episodes. This was all new to me so I had no idea that I was behaving in strange ways. It should be noted that I thought it was over between us. So, I justified my behavior by thinking it was okay to do this as if it didn\u2019t matter. I then proceeded to text these long paragraphs of crazy thoughts. Why did I do this? To this day, I don’t really know why. Surely not for any rational reasons. Because I was having these manic episodes, these text messages reflected my mood. I recall the first major shift in mood is when I all of a sudden experienced deep sadness. And suddenly my deep-seated insecurities surfaced. Because I have a natural tendency toward introspection and rumination, it was easy for me to immediately explain my personal baggage through text. Over the course of the next few hours, I would send some random crazy text every hour or so. Eventually, she responded and told me that I was having manic episodes. I was initially in disbelief, but when I thought about the previous day, I realized that she was right. Just to give you an example of how out-of-touch I was, I remember feeling and thinking that my life had somehow been saved because I revealed my manic episodes to her through text. In reality, it was just a side effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the course of the next 3 days, the side effects slowly waned with each day. But the next day was obviously the worst day. Now that I was aware that I was having manic episodes, I thought I would be able to recognize when it happened. In retrospect, a person whose judgment is impaired can\u2019t really recognize it, but I, believing I was rational, thought I could. (To be continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Day To recap, the day prior, I had just taken an increased dosage of my medications. Towards the evening, I started to act a bit unlike myself. At the time, I knew I had a massive headache but I didn\u2019t think it affected my ability to think and be rational. That night, I also… Continue reading Glimpse Into the Abyss (part 2)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11552,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11552"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/achen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}