Tomorrow I’m having a scan on the lymph nodes that have been swollen for months. So today I cleaned my kitchen as a distraction and thought about time, selfhood, personality and Muse. You know – normal things.

See you in Time.

My mental health hasn’t been great for just over a week. When I’m not well, I still try to keep on top of everyday life – including chores. I’ve learned that disappearing under my duvet, which is all my brain and body want, only creates more mountains. The longer the episode lasts, the more those little piles of dishes and laundry grow into Everest. Anyone would struggle with that.

So today I cleaned my kitchen.
During an episode it too quickly becomes a disaster, but I never let it get too far. I framed it as self-care for my tomorrow-self: when I get home from the scan, I can make dinner easily because the space is clean and the dishes are done. It makes eating less of an ordeal. I’m in ED recovery, and my brain will use literally anything – including “no clean plates” – as an excuse to procrastinate or skip a meal.

But cleaning a mess your mental illness made while you’re still mentally ill is… irritating. Somewhere between wiping counters and loading the dishwasher (again), I realised that I experience time differently during an episode.

It felt like I had cleaned the kitchen yesterday – spotless, everything put away – and then I “woke up” to chaos, confused and annoyed: How has it got like this in a day?

My son will say, “You cleaned it three days ago. Yesterday you forgot to turn the dishwasher on three times, remember?” And yes, I do remember… but I’m still convinced I cleaned it yesterday. Time moves differently. It’s slower and faster at the same time.

I clean, and then suddenly everything has collapsed into entropy overnight – peanut-butter spoons, yoghurt smudges, apparently every plate I own. Except it wasn’t overnight. It was three days. I just can’t feel that. This past week has felt like two months and a few days simultaneously. My scan has been coming too fast and too slow. How is it already November 4th? How is it nearly my birthday? It was Halloween yesterday

Time is slipping. Or stretching. Or both. I can’t tell. Maybe the black hole I’ve been infected by is wobbling, distorting time and causing collapse of my kitchen into chaos.
But I am going to return the chaos of entropy into order for future-me, because she deserves one small mercy tomorrow.

Unsustainable Personality

While I was cleaning, I listened to Muse. I’d posted a Muse track on my last blog too. Muse are the soundtrack to my hypomania and mixed states – I naturally gravitate to them depending on my mood. I started thinking about that while listening to Unsustainable.

I am not bipolar – I have bipolar. That’s important. Separating the human from the diagnosis matters. I’ve spent most of my life proving that my identity is not my illnesses.

“I have an eating disorder, BUT I collect Jellycats.”
“I have bipolar, BUT I make realism art.”
“I have really bad anxiety, BUT I love physics.”
The BUTs say more about me than anything written in the DSM.

However, there’s no clear language to describe how different bipolar episodes alter my personality. Am I still me? Absolutely. My core identity feels stable. Episodes are just me dialled up to 9000.

Unless psychosis is involved, I’m still myself to the point that I often don’t notice I’m becoming unwell until something tiny breaks through – I snap uncharacteristically, I’m suddenly euphoric, anxious, or irritable – and I get this flash of:

“WAIT – is this fully me?
Or unwell-me wearing my skin?”

Episodes shift my preferences – music, food, even how filtered or unfiltered I am. Usually I care deeply about other people’s feelings; during episodes, that goes quiet. I feel like everything I’m saying is true, accurate and IMPORTANT. I’m still me, but different. That’s hard to explain – how I remain myself, but skewed.

During hypomania and mixed states, Muse sets my nerves on fire. Especially Isolated System, Unsustainable, and – fittingly – Madness and Dead Inside. I’ll repeat them for the buzz, the electric feeling under my skin. Depressed episodes? Linkin Park. Neutral? Other music – usually for meaningful lyrics, video game soundtracks or nostalgia. (My 00s Pretty Green Eyes playlist says hi.)

Music just feels wrong if I’m in the wrong mental state. My preferences shift. I am still me – the preferences are still genuinely mine – but they feel different. It made me wonder what it means to have a “self.” If changes in brain chemistry can shift preferences, then what does that mean about the “self” inside mental illness?

Sometimes I imagine myself in my own brain. My “true” self is the one saying,
“WAIT – is this me?”
She’s surrounded by a storm of noise – rapid, overlapping voices trying to be heard over one another.

There’s the self-critical voice screaming I’m worthless. The anxious voice replaying the worst-case scenarios about the bedbug letter and the scan tomorrow. The ED voice, still angling for attention. The impulsive voice that teams up with the ED one, trying to escape through control or collapse. The one that repeats trauma, the less said about that one the better.

And then there’s my true self – standing on a chair in the middle of this chaotic room full of frightening characters, trying to get my attention, whispering what’s real… but she’s drowned out by the noise.

The cleaning was supposed to be a distraction, but here I am overthinking what a self is.

The Constant Scan of Anxiety

The anxiety about tomorrow’s scan keeps interrupting me mid–dishwash and even mid–“What is a self?” spiral. My thoughts clump together like hairs in a drain, tangling into a mess I don’t want to touch. I’ve told myself for months that it’s probably nothing. I even half-believe that. But my “What if?” anxiety does not care. It’s clever in how it eventually brainwashes me into, “You have a point, I guess,” despite my logical brain calmly explaining that it is probably nothing.
The fact I’m writing about it proves I think it’s probably nothing – and yet, the worst-case scenarios won’t shut up.

When I found a fibroadenoma a few years ago – a lump in my breast that turned out to be benign – I didn’t tell a soul until I knew. I went through months of biopsies and waiting lists alone, because back then I believed it could be something. My best friend had just died of breast cancer. She was only 40. I was the same age she was when she first found hers.

When I was told my lump was benign, I cried – not from relief, but heartbreak.
“Why me? Why did I get the news she never got?”
Only after that did I talk about it, knowing I was okay.

I think my anxiety now has everything to do with my son. It’s not “What will happen to me?”
It’s “What will happen to him if something happens to me?” I don’t want him to go through anything else. I don’t want him to have to care for me in worst-case scenarios my brain keeps inventing. If it happens, it happens. I’ll deal with it like I deal with everything – moaning, dark humour, declaring I can’t cope, and then somehow coping anyway.
But what about my son? I’m terrified of being a burden.

Honestly, the hospital itself feels like the worst part – going in like this. No filter. Overly anxious. Dialled up to over 9000. The relief of it being over might send me upward, or spiralling downward if I over-analyse the sonographer’s facial expression as a secret verdict. Everything feels that heightened.

We do have a plan for afterwards: my son and I are getting coffee. Probably Greggs, maybe further into town depending on how our bodies hold up. We’re both still dealing with fatigue and breathlessness since Covid. I have the lung capacity of a two-pack-a-day smoker without the benefit of actually smoking because I gave that up nearly 10 years ago. My activity levels still haven’t returned to my already-low baseline thanks to chronic fatigue.

But the coffee should help.
Being with my son always does.

The Metaphorical Mountains.

After a bath that made me spiral even more (more about that at another time) I ate my burrito in my clean kitchen, then curled up with YouTube and my Jellycat bear, Biscoff – hoping the videos didn’t drag me into another spiral about life, identity, and everything else my brain likes to catastrophise at 2am.

The scan will probably be fine.
It’s my brain I don’t trust.

But tonight, I cared for now-me and future-me, even if my thoughts were messy about it.

When this episode finally loosens its grip, at least I won’t return to a mountain of tasks.
The metaphorical mountains are already high enough.

The song I was cleaning my kitchen to :-