The Icarus Project: Navigating The Space Between Brilliance and Madness.

I am DS4 - not my birth name, my parents were more conventional, nor is it a name I've changed to as I really don't care much what I'm called. I made it up, it made sense to me on a whim, and it serves to protect my personal identity here in the public domain. So , DS4.

I am a manic depressive, or bipolar. That is my particular 'madness'. What I will do in this blog is provide all the madness necessary and allow you, the reader, to identify any (as if) flashes of brilliance and hopefully all the while Icarus will navigate you through the space between.

That said, let's start with a basic background check. I was diagnosed with "something" at the age of 15 or so, but I'm not sure what. I spent quite a bit of time with a school psychologist smoking cigarettes and telling lies. I was diagnosed with the littany of substance abuse problems, major depression episodes, and borderline personality disorder at the age of 20. I was briefly institutionalized, lightly medicated, and thrown back into the world. At the age of 38, I became helplessly suicidal once again, re-diagnosed as manic-depressive, lightly medicated, and thrown back into the world. Now I'm 40.

I've been clean and sober since 1988 (almost 19 years), but that in itself does not solve the larger, deeper, more horrifying issues that separate DS4 from all the Who's in Whoville.. In all these years of recovery, I stand alone amongst my peers as the one condemned to some ceaseless doom. I live in a shadow under a rock beneath a cloud. For all that's good in my life, for all the fortune and blessings, for all the wonder, I cannot see any of it for more than plain old bowl of vanilla ice cream that will only yield bodyfat at the end of the rainbow. I know when others are happy, I know when I ought to be happy, but the feelings don't seem to settle in and take my heart as they might do normally with others. It's a cold, flat, rim existance. The opposite of "euphoria", where pleasures are exagerated, mine is "dysphoria", where pleasures are dramatically nullified.

I live in this shit, and it is indeed difficult to become enthused about much. I really need crazy action to get on a wave and keep riding it. Life has never had that much to offer once I cleaned up. Drugs gave me a false sense of action, now I have a true sense of grim. This is the depression.

The mania for me, as I age, is very infrequently of a term longer than several weeks or months and the episodes are few and far between. Thet are cycles of high energy, high production, high activity, high interest, high sensitivity. It truly is a great time. I get only as into it as hypomania, which is a lesser degree than most. I am a Type 2 Bipolar with a heavy leaning to the depressed end. Angry energy will cast me out into a mixed state for a moment or two, perhaps even a few days.

I have "managed" mostly on my own, have had very little medical intervention over 25 years of difficulties, have spent maybe a total of 5 months on medications related to the disorder. I did spend one year on medication for what was likely an unrelated panic disorder.

The Borderline Personality diagnosis was trumped by the Bipolar one and duly whisked away. The major depression episodes and the substance abuse problems tie in nicely with the Bipolar diagnosis, and I still attend AA meetings on the odd chance that I have crossed a mystical "line" with my alcohol abuse and can no longer drink like a normal human. I expect this is true.

Today I take a single mood stablizer medication, but I've only just begun with it recently.