LIFE, LOVE AND LITHIUM...

... the former two rely heavily on the latter.

this is for you Sam Dix but it might clarify a few things for the rest of you who know me and have wondered why i am, well, why i am the way that i am.

lithium is a mood stabilizing chemical in your brain that renders one rather paralyzed when you have none.

before it was detected that indeed i had none, i lived my life believing i was a unique individual who had intimate relationships with angels, Jesus and Satan.

it was all quite special until i started seeing less believable things. like balls of hair floating down before my eyes while stepping on the stair-master at the gym.

of course i'd been to, and fired, many psychiatrists - 11 to be exact - finally stabilizing the most i could at that point with a doctor called Kevin Solomons. i think he might've saved my life. he's living in Toronto now. i miss him.

anyway Kevin stuck me on anti-depressants, which helped enormously with my depressive cycles. however they did nothing to curb my manic phases - you can now correctly deduce that with no lithium, your brain hands you into a heavily laden plate of bipolar-ness (bipolarity?), with a little basket of schizophrenia on the side.

i lived like this for years. my manic phases helping me enormously at work, and did wonders for my popularity because i constantly provided live entertainment for all my friends. but at the same time it wreaked havoc with my day to day life as a human being.

with the attention span of a flea, i have no idea what the attention span of a flea actually is but it can't be very long, i consequently suffer from an acute case of boredom. boredom is a weapon of mass destruction where men are concerned and i have a track record of failed relationships that would win gold at the Break-Up Olympics.

of course at the start my manic switch flips and i come off the starting blocks firing on all cylinders! the poor guy is overwhelmed and doesn't quite know what's hit him. it's like taking the deepest breath possible and then exhaling as hard as you can. as you can imagine, this is very satisfying in the beginning, but it becomes rather stressful when you squeeze the last puff of oxygen out of your lungs. i panic and have to escape! it's either that or expire.

so i begin to loathe the person i once 'loved', seeing HIM as the cause for my suffocation and i start to become UNBEARABLE to be around. my mania turns into misery and the me from the beginning of the relationship disappears, never to be seen by THAT individual EVER AGAIN. i have kept ZERO contact with any of my ex-boyfriends and the very thought of bumping into them is making skin crawl up my back and off the top of my head - that's not possible. thank God, because it WOULD be.

in fact, if i was informed that one of my ex's was about to walk through my door right now i think i would have to grab my pen and stick it up my nose. with force!

anyhow moving swiftly along. more recently my symptoms took a dramatic turn for the worse, and with Kevin having emigrated a decade ago i needed to find help. super-fast. warp factor 11.

thank God i had injured myself at the same time and there just happened to be a psychiatrist who's offices were just across the parking lot from my physio. he, by a stroke of wild luck turned out a very switched on man who was REALLY on top of his game. he headed up the psychiatric units in some of the top hospitals in Joburg. what a score THAT was.

to cut a ultra-stressful story ultra-short it's taken an ultra-scary amount of drug experimentation, testing and observation to get me to the point i'm at now, where i am able to sit here and type out this e-mail. i couldn't have done this 6 months ago. really.

it was during this chaos that my physio and i realised that the we, every time we're together, always seemed to run ourselves into the ground, calling ourselves old and damaged and complaining about our aches and pains and the way we used to be when we were young... (orchestra of violins whining in the background). the two of us reminded me of two old cronies sitting on a porch in rocking chairs somewhere in the middle of nowhere. like the geriatrics on a Jack Daniels commercial. what?! what was that?! what did i just say?! like, just YESTERDAY the name 'Jack Daniels' inspired an ENTIRELY different mental process in MY mind! and most certainly led to a different type of behaviour...

so we decided to take ourselves in hand and, between us agreed that whenever we were about to bad-mouth ourselves, and even if we didn't mean it, we would say the opposite! this gives you a clue as to the reason for the name of my blog, SANDYRULZ, and the password - which i'm not allowed to tell you (but it's 'sandyisgr8').

also, being left totally to myself here in Cape Town has strangely turned out to be one of the most liberating experiences i could ever have expected. time in absolute isolation has proved to be the perfect environment for me and i feel peaceful. never lonely or alone.

at this point i must add that had i not had the backing of my parents during this time, and the understanding of my friends, i'm not quite sure down which path this would all have led. Raymond - my doctor - said i'd probably just have dropped into a state of apathy out of the boredom of being me, and died. cause of death: not giving a shit.

but right now i DO give a shit, ok yesterday i only gave HALF a shit but hey, anything's better than nothing right?

so that, i think. just about sums up the story of lithium and my life without it.

as for LOVE, well i hope that anyone who digs me isn't reading this. but ah whatthefuckEVER. if i'm too much for him then he's NEVER going to be enough for me.