Getting Back to Normal - Routine

I was High Functioning.

Every day I woke up and went about business as usual. Usually that meant waking up the kids and getting them out the door and on their way to school, going to work myself, coming home and making dinner, running the kids to various sports/clubs and coming home again to spend some time with my husband. It was chaotic and there was no stability. There was no routine and yet I stormed through it, functioning as best as I could at the time.

It wasn’t all roses though. My moods, especially at home were up, down, and volatile. I went through periods of deep depression while continuing to go through life on autopilot and then I would bounce up into a more manic state, with endless energy and plans and hopes and dreams and hobbies. Sometimes my mood would shift suddenly and I would pick fights with my husband, and either act out (argue, yell and manipulate him) or act in (hurt myself or threaten suicide). A

nd occasionally – very rarely, I would have a level mood.

For years we operated this way. We knew about my bipolar diagnosis years ago and I went on and off meds, never happy with the side-effects and not knowing about the available therapies out there to help me cope.

On the inside I was an absolute mess of emotion and instability. On the outside I wore a mask.

Unfortunately, mental illness has a habit of throwing you curve balls, taking your high functioning, normal appearance of a life and twisting it into something almost completely unrecognisable. For me, that happened last July/August and it started with something that should have been a happy event for our family, but instead it became a trigger.

My husband changed careers. It was a good move for him as he was unhappy in his job and the new position would allow him to work in an area that he had been trying to get into for a while. The only problem was that it required us to move nearly three hours away… and I didn’t want to.

At the time, I was employed full time, I was involved in a sports team that I absolutely loved, and I was happy with our house, our location, our friends, the kids school, etc… I had spent the past several years making the area and everything around it home.

Three hours doesn’t seem like that far though… at least not until you are in a new town, with a new, very part-time job, no friends and suffering from social anxiety. Then you feel trapped and isolated and lost and very very betrayed and hurt to have been forced into the move. For someone with Bipolar Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder it is enough to trigger a major episode. When the snow starts to fall and you are literally isolated in your house while the kids are at school and the husband is at work and you miss your home and your life – it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

And that is exactly what happened last November.

I mentioned in my last post that I’m now in recovery mode.

Now my daily routine is much different.

First of all, people know that I have been sick. My boss at work knows, my one friend I have managed to make up here knows, and the group of people at the support group I attended all know. And knowing that other people know - it makes it easier to drop the mask. I don’t have to look like I have it all together. I don’t have to be high functioning to the point of breaking down again.

I can just heal.

Now my daily routine is simple.

I don’t work full-time. I couldn’t handle it right now.

I wake up at 7 am every morning. I get the kids up and get myself showered and dressed. When the kids leave for school and my husband leaves for work, I also leave the house and I generally go walking. (Unless I’m working that morning). My husband comes home for lunch every day and I try to make something for us to eat. In the afternoons, I do housework, I read or bake or go to a support group, I greet the kids when they get home from school and I make dinner. My husband and I share the running around in the evenings and we have down time before I go to bed at 10pm.

Routine is much more important to me now than it has ever been. It helps me to feel in control and force myself through the ups and downs and even helps to regulate them a bit. Some days my routine gets slightly disrupted – yesterday I took a self-care afternoon where I sat and drank tea because my mood had dipped down.

Things are slowly getting better. I’m feeling more level and I know that the better I feel, the more the routine will need to be kept up. It isn’t always easy, but nothing with Mental Illness is. I cannot stress enough though how helpful routine is. It’s something that I can control no matter what my mood is doing, no matter how I feel. It’s also something that is stable when everything going on inside me is chaotic and out of control.

Routine can help. Even if it’s just the routine of getting out of bed and showered by a certain time. Every step of my routine has been taken one at a time and even though some days I still struggle with the routine, it has made recovery much easier.