Tag Archives: euphoria

The Confused Mood

Have you ever had one of those moods where you couldn’t tell exactly how you were feeling? The sort of mood where you felt neither up or down but weird, or up and down at the same time?

This morning I’m heading into my third day in a mixed episode. It really stumped me for the first day because when I have mixed episodes they tend to be dysphoric (aggressive, angry, wild, agitated moods). The state I’ve been in the last couple days isn’t anything like that, which is something of an anomaly for me.

This mood is more detached, more like having a place where good and bad feelings are all sitting in a hot tub together having peace talks. I can feel everything at once, but there is also an absence of feeling… like they are simply too busy talking to be taking up space in my brain.

It has come with a sort of detachment I usually only reserve for mania, a tingly-floaty feeling in my body where I feel like I’m trapped in a bubble. Everything feels far away and fuzzy and like it just quite doesn’t have anything to do with me.

The biggest issue I’ve seen is one with memory. It has pretty much just shut off, and I find myself confused, digging through my purse looking for something that isn’t there or asking people to repeat themselves because everything just went in one ear and out the other.

The change in mood has come at a change in dosage in my ramping up of Tegretol so I am pretty sure they are entwined (especially since this mood is so rare for me). As it is a euphoric mixed episode I don’t particularly feel the need to panic though, I am just going to keep close tabs on things and alert my psychiatrist if it moves into the realm of full mania. After all, I’ve already given him the anxious false alarm twice about Tegretol, alerting him to side effects he claims have nothing to do with the drug.

I guess there is one other issue I have with this mixed state, and it is that feeling so detached has left me feeling difficulty connecting with others. Corey’s homecoming from his trip Wednesday was a little weird because of it, but once I explained the situation he seemed to shrug it off.

I don’t know how much longer this will last, but I am trying to take as close of a look at this state as possible. Everything about the symptoms feel elusive, and if I look at any of them directly they seem to disappear. It isn’t often that I “feel crazy” but trying to figure out what has been going on in my head the last couple days would definitely do it!