Angry At Everything


I need to vent.



I am angry.



















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Sometimes I Can Only Sit And Feel Hard Things

Since my mental illnesses presented 12 years ago, I haven’t been able to do much. This website is the largest thing I’ve accomplished since I was 19, and I’ve only been able to do this by building it slowly, little by little. It has taken me over a year. There are whole weeks when I make no progress. The past year has been more productive than I’ve been in a long time and has been the easiest year to handle since I was diagnosed. For that, I am incredibly grateful. Living well with mental illness takes skills, and I’m working on mine every day. I am making progress.Sunflower CC

In college, I abandoned school in the middle of spring semester four out of four years. Springtime always makes my symptoms more intense and sometimes even unbearable. Most of my time at Oberlin I couldn’t do simple self-care tasks like laundry, or go to class or parties; I basically could do nothing but stay in my room, sit, and try to cope. Sometimes I’d use an episode to make a painting, and god, those paintings born of episodes are the darkest ones I’ve made. None of them are on this site yet, and I burned many of them one night during a manic episode. I thought it would be cleansing. It was just destructive. I get a lot of “great” ideas when I’m manic, and Continue reading

Staying In A Psychiatric Hospital: A Story In First Person


It starts out scary and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to go to the psychiatric hospital. I didn’t want to be there. I was already suicidal, and here I was voluntarily giving up every comforting thing I had in my life: people, places, and things, in order to commit myself to not dying.

Fuck. I should have killed myself, this is going to be unbearable. My soul is on fire and we haven’t even completed the intake interview. Yes, I am suicidal. Yes, I do have a plan. No, I’m not on any medication. Please make my mother my emergency contact. Yes, I understand that I will not be released until the doctor determines that I am no longer in danger.

I’m on the ward itself, and I hurt all over. I’m in a mixed-state episode: irritable, hopeless, suicidal, full of energy, thoughts racing, sad beyond measure. I’ve never felt these things before; it’s one of my first mixed state episodes and I have zero in terms of coping skills, as well as zero self-knowledge of what is happening to me. I pace the hallway for a while, splash my face in the bathroom, spy at other patients from my bedroom door, lay on the bed, try to read a book my mom brought for me. My soul is still on fire.

I’ve been here for three hours, and I’m in agony. I can’t take one more minute of this. I have to get out. NOW. I take my phone charger, tie it as tight as I can around my neck, making sure I can’t breathe, get up on a chair next to the tall bathroom door and wrap the other end of the charger around the hinge. I kick the chair out from under me. Continue reading

It Is Possible to Lose Weight While on Psychiatric Drugs, and I Believe in You!

Three years ago, I weighed 270 pounds and I was miserable. Now down to 155, I get terrified when I see fat people because I know I could go back to that weight if I’m not careful.

Medicine for psychiatric conditions makes weight control very difficult. It’s another one of those things about mental illness that’s not fair. On Seroquel, my first antipsychotic, I never felt full. Ever. I’d go to the school cafeteria and go back for seconds, thirds, dessert, and, of course, second dessert. My stomach would hurt badly, and I still didn’t feel full. It was like being hungry all the time for two years. Eventually, I leveled out on the Seroquel and could feel full again, but by then I’d put on a lot of weight. As a student at the time, exercise was not part of my routine. I was mostly in survival mode, just trying to keep my head above water.

Over the next few years, I continued to slowly and steadily put on weight. I wasn’t overeating the way I had been before, but I was making a lot of poor choices about what I ate and how much, and I wasn’t physically active. Finally, in 2014, my mom sat across the table from me, watching me eat dessert, and said: “If you’re not careful, you’ll be over three hundred pounds soon.” That struck terror into my heart. I’d gone too far, and I had to find a way to reel myself back in. Continue reading


My favorite hallucination I’ve ever had was a flock of black angels flying over the highway. I leaned out my window to look as we drove under them. I was severely sleep deprived, manic, and on a medication that I hadn’t yet figured out was affecting me badly, so I didn’t know right away that it wasn’t real. Usually, I can fact-check and try to reason through the situation if something comes up that doesn’t make sense. These angels felt very real to me. I got to watch them for about 45 seconds before they were gone, and because they disappeared, I could confirm that it had been a hallucination.

My hallucinations are caused primarily by bipolar episodes and sleep deprivation. Depression can sometimes play a role, and mania is a guaranteed hallucination factory. Sleep deprivation, though, causes the most intense visions, and they last all day. I’ll see smoke billowing in the air everywhere I go, people dressed in black walking up and down stairs, hundreds of birds in the sky, and bugs on my skin. Less often I have auditory or olfactory hallucinations, where I hear or smell things. Least often I have the physical sensation of touch. That one throws me for a loop every time.Meeting Myself CC

There are good, bad, and irrelevant hallucinations. Now that I’m on beneficial medication, most of mine are just irrelevant; they don’t actually impact my life. I count myself lucky for that. Most people who hallucinate don’t know or believe they’re hallucinating at the time it happens. I don’t know immediately, but I can often use logic to determine what’s real and what’s not. Continue reading

Suicide; The Perpetual Question Mark


The truly tempting thing about suicide is that it’s a solution to pretty much everything. Not a constructive solution or a solution other people want you to use, but still a solution. We can opt out. Once you realize you’re strong enough to end your own life, that knowledge will never go away. When you’re happy and engaged in life, that knowledge makes your life better because of the profound meaning there is to be found in the awareness of death and the empowerment of choosing to live. But when you’re feeling awful and you get to feeling awful enough that you think you’d do anything to change the way you feel, the knowledge that you could kill yourself becomes lethally dangerous.

Suicidal ideation is a very dangerous symptom. It can be caused situationally or purely chemically; by life events or medicine and chemical imbalance. If you’re experiencing suicidal ideation, it can be tremendously difficult to ask for help. If you’re past ideation and you’re fully suicidal, seize any moment of doubt in your plan that you find and TELL SOMEONE. There are way worse things than going to a hospital. If you’re strong enough to kill yourself, you’re definitely strong enough for a 3-day hold. Sometimes those three days is all it takes to restart your life. You see a psychiatrist and a therapist, and they prescribe medicine and evaluate you during your stay to make sure the medicine is working and you are safe from self-harm. You go to the hospital to get better.

I’ve had two failed suicide attempts and three psychiatric hospital stays. The first attempt Continue reading

5 Quick Fixes for Panic Symptoms

I’ve learned a few small, quick actions that help me during extreme anxiety, panic attacks, and episodes. They don’t cure, but they help.

  1. Splash your face. Cold water on your face jolts your system and tries to reset your body to a calmer mode. It also gives you a chance to be by yourself for a minute if you’re in a public situation and need to calm down.
  2. Take a mindful shower. Trying to tap into the reality of the present moment is the most powerful tool (outside of medicine and professional help) that I’ve found so far. Finding the present moment is an ancient Buddhist practice that western civilization has appropriated and renamed “mindfulness”. To take a mindful shower, do everything in slow motion and take time to notice everything you see, smell, and feel. Do not rush. Try to be as aware as you can that you are in a moment that leads into the next moment, and the next after that. In those present moments in your shower, the water is a certain temperature and it’s falling onto your skin. Your skin is soft and soapy. The soap has a pleasant smell. You are in the forward flow of time. The moment really can be enough to inspire wonder and ease anxiety.
  3. Read. If your mind is racing, reading will slow you down to one word at a time. This doesn’t always work for me, but if I’m manic I at least try reading before writing it off. When I’m manic I’m soaking up information at half the speed of light, and I’m actually pretty easily engrossed in whatever I read, even though most of the time I can’t concentrate well enough to read for long.
  4. Fidget toys. Play dough, dice, rubber bands, and anything small and tactile is good for fidgeting. Having something to do with your hands helps ease anxiety. My favorite fidget toy is called a Tangle, and you can find one here.
  5. Coloring. I had a friend recommend coloring to me, and I immediately wrote it off as childish and boring. I may have been right about childish, but coloring is very calming, and I’m not above doing something childish to make myself feel better. I recommend buying an adult coloring book and some nice colored pencils, just to have this tool in your arsenal.

Anything that can help me lessen the pain caused by bipolar I will try. I wholeheartedly encourage you to try lots of tactics to help ease your anxiety or pain, and when you find something that helps, keep that thing in mind the next time you feel bad. You are going to be the most help to you.

By Emily Harrington, The Goldfish Painter


My disclaimer:
