first post of my blog!

hi, ok, so i'm finally doing this. i've been thinking about it ever since i quit therapy almost a year ago. and that was way before i stopped taking my medications.

let me just start by saying, no i am not a crazy bipolar person stopping my meds so i can get good and manic and write the great american novel. my psychiatrist (different person from my former therapist) has been following me all along. i stopped my meds at the beginning of march (the perfect month for a mad tea party, my favorite book ever is alice in wonderland and through the looking glass, technically i guess that is two books.)

ok, so i stopped my meds so i could get pregnant. in case you do not know much about bipolar "disorder", a lot of the meds cause severe birth defects.

ok, so please allow me to introduce myself, now that you have an idea of what is motivating me to create this blog:

my name is marlena rivers. yeah, sounds like a fake name or porn star name, and it is. no i'm not a porn actress, but i had to create a name for this blog. because i'm not OUT at work about the bipolar thing...

so some of this blog is about the dual identity thing. because it is a trip and i feel like a double agent, posing at work as a "normal" person and then out to my family and close friends who have even seen my at my most psychotic moments... so i'm hoping someone out there will read this and identify with the whole double agent tightrope i walk as a "manic depressive" because it's different from certain other mental illnesses or whatever you want to call them. we bipolar people are your next door neighbors, personal trainers, teachers and co-workers whom you think are normal until they take a sick leave from work or disappear every couple of months...

so, anyway, to continue the introduction. my name is marlena rivers and i have struggled with bipolar disorder (i like calling it dis-order, my manic mind enjoys the kind of pun, because my mind is constantly in disorder but has a magic order to me, it's just in disorder as far as other people are concerned.) for about 17 years or so. before that it was a lot of depression in high school. i had my first major manic leading to psychotic episode when i was twenty years old and another one about six or so months after that. those were the two hospitalizations. and since then i've managed to avoid being hospitalized though i've had plenty of extreme episodes. the magic of extra meds, especially seroquel. ok, so i guess you figured out my age, 37. i'm an aquarius.

so some of this blog will be slightly untrue, only things that will protect my identity and i will probably point them out to you, like my fake name and my age. i'm around that age anyway. i won't tell you what my job is for the reason i already mentioned. i'm very paranoid (or maybe that's an extreme word as i have real reasons to need to protect my identity because i don't want anyone knowing at work about this stuff.) and probably the names of the people i write about will be fake too to protect them and my identity. but the stuff about struggles with bipolar disorder will be true. i'm not a pathological liar, in fact i'm a terrible liar...

so i'm also a closet writer. i write mostly in my journals and hardly ever show what i write to anybody, so this blog is a first for me. writing is what keeps me going, i guess it's my passion... but i'm not too secure about it and have never published anything until this blog i guess it's a form of publishing. i mean someone out there whom i don't know might actually be reading this. tell me if you are. i want to know what you think about all this and why the hell you're reading this... please introduce yourself and tell me.

i'll tell you how i got the idea to do this blog. my therapist suggested it when i quit therapy with her. she's an art therapist and she even got me started writing a graphic novel, which is a major miracle because i don't know how to draw, not anything recognizable anyway. she suggested i write in comic book form about my struggles with mania, depression, mixed states, psychosis, anxiety, etc. so i started. it's a work in progress. when i quit therapy she suggested that i try a blog like this; she thought it would be therapeutic and might help me connect to other people going through similar struggles. that was after she suggested a group therapy, but i'd been there, done that, and really wanted a vacation from therapy. and this was way before i thought about going off meds.

so it has taken me a year almost to get up the courage to try this out. i really have no idea who will read this. i guess my readers will be divided between a few people who know me really in real life and then whoever out there happens upon this blog. like you.

i dont know much about blogs or blogging but it seems like a good medium for me since i mostly write journal entries anyway. i confess i struggled with the idea of writing all this in my journal and then posting it in handwriting to make it more like a journal but then i got paranoid someone would recognize my handwriting, so i thought of faking my handwriting and inventing a new handwriting for every entry, but that seemed too exhausting.

so you can see why this is called notes from underground (off meds). actually i should have put that in parentheses...

ok so, hi, i'm marlena rivers, 37, closet writer and closet manic depressive. here are some other facts about me that i'm telling you the truth about: i was born in new york city, manhattan. i'm an aquarius. i'm the youngest of three, older brother then older sister then me, the baby. i'm a total baby and i'm trying to get pregnant. i live near the world trade center (i can't call it ground zero, i've lived down here a long time, way before sept. 11 2001.) with my boyfriend denzel (that's a fake name, of course, but he is not fake), my life partner and future father of our non existent at the moment baby and with my very real little dog elvis (that's not his name but he is a real live little dog and he is male and his birthday is in two weeks and his very real age will be fourteen)...

bye for now. i'll be back soon.