One thing that has always made my life difficult has been the fight with my brain to maintain some form of sanity. Racing thoughts and intrusive thoughts often band together to make an incredibly difficult inner dialog to shake off. Thoughts are skittering all over the place, often negative and out of nowhere, and it’s very nearly impossible to capture them, squash them, and shove them out of mind. Even though they’re supposedly mainly tied with manic and hypomanic episodes, I have problems with them more often than not. Often, it will feed on my ‘natural’ anxiety and turn into all-out warring arguments in my head; these are conversations that will never happen and have no reason to ever occur, but yet, part of my brain insists on drilling ‘just in case’. Just in case what, I lose all control and start picking fights with every person I know?!

As the Wikipedia articles indicate, these sorts of thoughts are not only intrusive and distressing, they truly are out of nowhere. And even using things like cognitive behaviour therapy can go so far; while you can try various things to deter your mind from following these destructive patterns, there’s not a way to break a chain at the start when there is no normalized start place. And because they are so distressing and distracting, the damage is done even if you do manage to clear them out of your mind. It’s like a sneaky punching ninja; it slides it, clubs you over the head, and runs off before you can tie it up and tell it to be good. No, instead you’re left with the sting of the punch and no guarantee that the sneaky punching ninja is gone. Is it any wonder so many people turn to drink and drug to try and silence these thoughts, or to soften the blow of their impact? I’ve been there, done that, got the shirt, so obviously, I’d not recommend it all in all.

If it wasn’t clear enough, I’ve been having a really bad spell of racing/intrusive thoughts in the past week. That’s actually part of the reason I’m not up to chatting to friends yet; my head has been making up battles royale with them, and until I can fight down that crap, I don’t have the energy to make nice-nice; that was all stolen in the Battle for Sanity. But all things must end, if only for a little bit, so as long as I can hold it together until those moments where my head isn’t trying to drive me even more insane… it’ll be worth it.

Anyhoos, have yourselves a good weekend, folks!

<3