Sum of Bipolar

Sum of Bipolar

This post is not meant to diagnose, treat, or save you from mental illness, if you or someone you love is in danger, please get help. You can text HOME to 741741 to be connected with a crisis counselor. I personally have. You can also call or text 988 for suicide and crisis help.

http://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts

The hardest thing for me to wrap my brain around with bipolar is that it never goes away. In fact, it gets worse with age. I can look back at a time in my life before my first psychotic break and think “I was happier, things were easier back then”. But for me, looking back has been a little more toxic lately. Just like looking to the future can be scary. What I am focusing on instead is being in the moment, this moment for example with my fingers stroking the keys and the ideas pouring out of me, like iced tea from a pitcher on a hot summer day.

Bipolar is made up of three different parts: manic, hypomanic, and depression. Who wants to hear that? Who wants to break their life down to those three types of episodes? So you can either run off the rails with mania and possibly go so hard and get so little sleep that you slip into psychosis, or you can go to a completely dark place and not want to do or feel anything, with a dark cloud of sadness hanging over your head and following your every move. It feels like a rain cloud just waiting to break open.

Then there is hypomania, which in the grand scheme of things, for me, is really the lesser of the two evils. When I am in hypo mania, I seem like I want to do things, I just do not have the energy or gusto, if you will, to do the many things I want. I usually can pick one hurdle a day and accomplish it though, unlike when I am in depression. With my hypomania though, comes an irritability like no other, everything bothers me. It is in hypomania that I have little patience and calm.

So we have three levels that I can be at presently an no real room for “normal”. I think that may be the hardest fact to face for a lot of people, both with a bipolar diagnosis as well as with any other mental health diagnosis: you may never be “normal”. You have to find your own baseline for who you are and what you believe in. What characteristics make you, you and what can you pertain to the illness?

For me, it took a lot of time and soul searching. What do I like to do? What fuels me to be better everyday? What is my love language? What do I find important? What are some positive attributes I can say about myself? It takes a lot of time and work to find out what kind of person you are; a mental health diagnosis can add to that struggle and make finding yourself more difficult.

When I look at all of the things that bipolar makes me, it works best for me to think of all the things in my life that bipolar can’t control. It can’t control that I have a family, two kids and a husband, or that I like pepperoni pizza. Facts about my life that are mine and mine alone help to differentiate, for me, the difference between where I end and bipolar begins. The truth is though, that isn’t always easy. Sometimes you find yourself alone in a room of a mental hospital, pondering all of your life and wondering what is real and what isn’t.

Yes medication is scary, yes it takes years and a lot of journaling and doctor check ins to find the right dosage, type, and variety that works for you. But the other side is much scarier: being unmedicated and walking around thinking you are some kind of magical deity sent to earth to awaken people and find the true meaning of life is dangerous ground to tread. Being so depressed that you can’t find it in you to do anything, be anyone, see anyone, eat anything (or everything) is extremely unhealthy.

What we all want is human connection. We want to find others who are like minded and understand us. As much as introverts and loners want to be alone, if they dig deep enough into themselves, they will find that being with others and connecting with others brings a sense of belonging. It is relieving to find out that you are not the only one who is hurting, or who feels crazy, or who has once wandered out into traffic because they were in psychosis and felt invincible. I can report that group therapy works well for me. Hearing other peoples stories and being able to relate to them, or show them that mental illness isn’t all bad gives me a sense of relief.

What you are going through is not all for nothing. What you have been through is traumatic. What you have experienced can be responsible for the triggers you have and emotions you carry with you. Not all negative things have to stay negative, you can flip the script and turn that scary thing into a coping skill that can carry you through into a much lighter state. But it’s not all butterflies and rainbows, I do understand that. For I feel guilt and shame everyday for needing the people in my life who support me so much. I feel bad that my husband has to go to work everyday and constantly worry about his crazy wife. I worry that I will have passed this down to my children and that they will have to work twice as hard as most people to just survive.

Learning that you can struggle with your mental health and still be a whole person is a journey that I am still on myself. I have not yet found out how to be as inconsistent as I am and still feel like I am contributing to my family, instead of taking away from them. I still can not help but feel tired at all the emotions that pass through my body daily. I find getting up in the morning, to struggle through another day, daunting in the worst form of the word. Sometimes, all I can do is tell myself over and over that I am not a burden, because that is all I can feel. I just recently learned that a panic attack doesn’t have to look like it does in the movies; it can look like calm and complacent on the outside, and feel like screaming, fighting and clawing on the inside.

There are still many parts of bipolar 1, anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, mania, psychosis, and hypomania that I am learning about. Not only do you have to learn the facts of what your diagnosis means, but you also have to relate that back to what that means for you. For example, my “risky behavior” is so mild it is just a split second decision to get a flu shot without thinking about any repercussions. For some, those risky behaviors can be life altering. My “manic spending” looks like a $40 trip to the dollar store. Everyone is different; give yourself time to find out what your illness looks like to/for you.

-A Manic Monday