Well here's where I introduce myself. I am Laughing Boy. I am a 23 year old male from Southern California. My dad was Canadian and my Mother American. I grew up between Hollywood California, and Nova Scotia Canada. I finally settled in the Santa Clarita Valley in the mid 90's and spent my adolesence there.
I grew up in the punk rock/hardcore punk scene and played in four bands since I was fourteen. I started out in a progressive protestant church, then became a Mormon when I was 12. After my fallout with them I spent years as an agnostic. I messed around with everything from hedonism, to atheism, to deism, to paganism. I became more involved with the Zen practices, and after a few strange experiences on psychadelic drugs and through psychotic breaks I "found god" and now practice a mix of pantheism, deism, gnosticism, zen buddhism, and ACIM. But don't be so quick to judge. My faith is a complete reinterperation of the bible. I call myself a Heretical Zen-Christian.
After medication didn't work for me, I began using opiates starting with vicodin, then oxycodone and morphine, and eventually winding up a complete heroin/methadone junkie for about four years. I cleaned up and decided not to take my meds anymore. I felt that they had crippled my creativity, spiritual connection, and sense of self. I am not advocating stopping your meds. It's a personal choice for me, and could wind up terribly. It's sort of an experiment.
At the age of seventeen after four years in mental health treatment being diagnosed with generalized anxiety, social anxiety, a.d.h.d., borderline personality disorder and major depression they finally came up with a diagnosis of bipolar. It started with fits of rage which would wind up with everything from holes in the wall (at the least extreme) or having my hand broken two more times before even healing from the first.
I would spend months happy and never tired, writing, reading, making music. And then I would spend months sucidal and depressed, consumed by a strong and irrational fear of death and dying. After a few years I began occasionally hearing voices. Then I began spending weeks or months not sleeping, with an unimaginable amount of energy and tensity. I would talk so fast, and for such extended amounts of time I would literally throw up.
After a few years of this I had my first true psychotic break when I thought I was the cop from that T.V. show "Life on Mars" where the cop goes back in time to the 1970s. The next morning I had my second psychotic break and had a long series of delusions involving the Alaskan wilderness, Sarah Palin, a Pile of bloody deer antlers, the mexican ocean, and being in the army.
I then went for a period where I was convinced that god had a constant "ticker" of information going into my mind. I couldn't stop reading and writing. I was obsessed with the idea that I had a calling from god himself to bring all the faiths and political ideologies together. But then it stopped one day and I began to believe that god had given up and me, and the devil had taken over. I couldn't look in the mirror because I saw the devil's eyes in my eye sockets.
Then the love of my life came out of a coma after two weeks and I was then convinced god was still there for me, so I baptized myself in the shower, cut off all my hair, shaved, then burned all the hair. Soon after this I had my third psychotic break involving listening to the radio through a broken television, and my mom calling me...but not really being there. This break sent me to the hospital.
Ever since I have been clean of both street drugs and my prescriptions and feel great.
This blog will include my daily life and it's obstacles and troubles, current status of my mood and overall mental health, as well as my ramblings on everything from politics to god to media gossip...I know...weird huh? If you like what you read, please follow this blog.
My overall mission for this blog is to give a real life, real time chronicle of a severe manic depressive. I want to give people afflicted with this so called "illness" to maybe get a little courage from this blog, and say "Yeah...Damn straight I'm a manic depressive! What are you gonna do about it?". I would like to show the world that this "disease" doesn't have to be a negative thing in people's lives.
On a final note, if you know anyone with a severe mental illness such as bipolar I, bipolar II, or Schizo affective disorder please direct them to the blog. Thank you.
-laughing boy
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