On Saturday, July 8, I laid screaming and crying in bed while staring alternately at my phone and the ceiling. I lay there weeping uncontrollably, hyperventilating, eventually crawling to lie face down on the floor in a pile of laundry I had been too unmotivated to fold and put away, because the floor felt solid and my bed had felt too soft. The only thought that ran through my mind, the thought that was tearing through my mind and leaving me a puddle of incoherence in it's wake, was this: I want to die. I don't want to be alive. They are better off. I am nothing. I am worthless.
Thankfully, I don't have anything in my apartment that can get the job done. I looked. This was not the first time I had had a breakdown that culminated in suicidal thought, but it was the first time in awhile.
In March, I got too drunk by myself watching Shameless, drinking boxed wine and feeling the incomprehensible weight of just being me. I remember, fuzzily, walking out onto the front porch to smoke a cigarette, and wishing a car would tear up the street so that I could throw myself in front of it. I cried, alone on my porch, clutching a glass of wine, wishing for it to all be over. The next day, the thoughts scared me, and I pushed them to the back of my mind. These thoughts were not a surprise, though.
I've been feeling this way as long as I can remember.
Now, prior to these breakdowns, you'd never have guessed there was anything wrong with me. A little too boisterous, too talkative, but typically the life of the party. Or typically, trying to be. I was not, and do not present, as a "depressed" person. This was the diagnosis I claimed, and had done, for 14 years now. Over time, it's become clear to me and those around me that this initial diagnosis was a mistake.
A week prior to this most recent breakdown, I made a phone call to a psychologist while on my break at work.
"Hello, I'd like to make an appointment for a new patient. Yes, I'd like to be tested for bipolar disorder."
Even the words "bipolar disorder" feel foreign and terrifying when I say them. When you hear "bipolar", you think "crazy". Or at least, I do. My mother was a diagnosed manic depressive, though I didn't really know that until recently. Bipolar isn't just a mental illness, it's an insult you can hurl at anyone who seems slightly unbalanced. It's a death sentence for friendships and relationships. It's a roller coaster of rapid thought, paranoia, intense highs, and devastating lows.
There are seven markers for it, and I have all seven. Upon my first meeting with the psychologist, he told me that I was a "typical bipolar 1 case" and they could "put my picture in the textbook."
I don't know that it's possible to explain the rush of emotion. First, revulsion with myself. Then, relief that I wasn't crazy...I mean, I was definitely crazy, but not for thinking that there was something wrong with me. There WAS something wrong with me. Terror, that I would have to go on something like lithium or some similarly awful drug. And finally, some sort of acceptance that I had been this way my whole life, but that the way I was wasn't actually normal.
When your mother has manic depression and is not regularly treated for it, your definition of normal becomes somewhat skewed. I never considered that the way I flew off the handle when I was a child or teen at little to no provocation could be a "symptom" of a manic episode. Hysteria was just how I handled disappointment. There never has been any such thing as a "middle ground" for me. Since I was a child, people have commented on how my mood changes seemingly immediately with little to no warning. Everything is always the BEST THING or the WORST THING and there is no inbetween.
I dove in and started doing some research. My psychologist recommend I read "An Unquiet Mind", which is a memoir of a clinical psychologist who suffers form severe bipolar 1. I read it in a night. So many parts of that book were like looking in a mirror, or looking at my mother.
I told some of my friends as soon as I found out, and was surprised that some of them did not greet the news with support, but with denial.
"You don't seem depressed."
"You just have anxiety, you don't have bipolar disorder"
"I've never seen you be manic"
"You should get a second opinion"
This sucked, mostly because I felt like I finally had found something that made sense, and that explained the way that my brain worked. Maybe I have just been really good at hiding my crazy.
The thing I've learned is that bipolar disorder isn't just periods of highs and lows...it's things that become associated with those highs and lows. Mania can be everything from euphoria and spending 600 dollars in my savings account in a day to being incredibly irritable and paranoid. When I'm manic, I can be the light in a room, or I can be a black hole of negative energy. I have a compulsion to speak that I cannot control. This includes text messages. If I don't get an answer, I keep going. I say things I don't mean and don't remember saying them. Paranoia becomes the very air I breathe. Everyone is talking about me. Everyone thinks I'm awful to be around. No one likes me. No one is actually my friend. They're all conspiring against me. They pity me. They think I'm awful. They'd be happier if I weren't around.When I am manic, I am obsessive. I am impulsive and do things and say things without thinking. The part of my brain that checks myself before I wreck myself is g-o-n-e.
I am manic most of the time.
I have destroyed relationships because I can't stop talking or harping on one thing. I have destroyed friendships because I need constant reassurance that I am not the thing everyone is talking about. My brain is usually firing 1,000 thoughts per minute and I don't know how to slow it down or make it stop.
The most terrifying thing about all of this is that bipolar cannot usually be controlled with therapy alone, though my psychologist has been incredible in the 6 weeks I've been seeing him. Bipolar 1 is characterized by the manic episodes, but here lies the rub: my mania can be so incredibly productive. Before it goes up in flames, I want to create things. I have fun with my friends. I am social and fun and I don't need sleep, because sleep is for the weak. I can sleep less than three hours in a night and still want to clean the whole house. I want to write jokes, I want to perform, I want to start new hobbies and plan new endeavors.
When they medicate me, who says I won't disappear? Who says all of the things that make me who I am, that make me funny and sharp witted, all of those things, who says they won't just disappear in a haze of lithium or seizure medication or a combination of any number of drugs?
When they medicate me, who says I won't lose all of the things that make people like me in the first place?
I'm struggling hard through a peak of paranoia and as I typed that, I thought to myself, who says they like me at all, in the first place?
Bipolar disorder has a 19 percent suicide rate, so the choice for me is clear. I am going to seek out medication and a psychiatrist. I am going to continue seeing my psychologist. I am going to research and try to understand exactly what is going on in my head so that I can try to control it as best I know how, in the interim. It is a difficult thing to wrap my brain around, but I know I cannot continue in the way I have been doing. I cannot destroy any more relationships. I can't push away any more friends. I can't miss any more work because my mania breaks and I can't physically remove myself from my bed or my floor or make myself eat. I cannot continue hiding the things that I am struggling with because they are frightening to myself and to others when the most terrifying thing is that 19 percent of people lose this battle and their own hand casts the killing blow.
I've been thinking about writing something to this effect since I had that break over a month ago, but I couldn't put the words together to say what I wanted to say. I know I want to destigmatize mental illness. I know that my disease and who I am are not the same, when I am clear headed enough to think about them logically and separate myself. I know that I am scared a lot of the time, and that I loathe being lumped into a category of "crazy" people. I crave understanding and acceptance and for people to be patient with me, and with other people with mood disorders, as we navigate our way back to a "normal" we haven't ever actually known.
Ultimately, though, I know this:I can't push away any more friends. I can't miss any more work because my mania breaks and I can't physically remove myself from my bed or my floor or make myself eat. I cannot continue hiding the things that I am struggling with because they are frightening to myself and to others when the most terrifying truth is that 19 percent of people lose this battle and their own hand casts the killing blow.
Recovery is a process, as is understanding. Since receiving my diagnosis, I have been hyper aware of all of my moods, and questioning everything I know about myself. I have been more paranoid, felt my mania more distinctly, and let myself succumb more deeply to the throes of depression. They say that after a diagnosis of bipolar, patients report more severe symptoms, but I think they just become more aware of them. Our normal isn't "normal" at all.
So I write all this to say, be patient with me. Be patient with us.
I firmly believe there is a light, and in my darkest days, my biggest mood swings, I'm clinging to that, for whatever strength gets me through the day.
In "An Unquiet Mind", the author discusses her experience when she tells her lover at the time that she has bipolar disorder (though it was then called manic depression). He holds her in his arms, and only says to her one thing:
"Rotten luck."
And it is. It's a rotten spin in the genetic lottery. I didn't choose this. I never would have chosen this. The choice is what I do with the information. And I am here to say I am choosing to fight. And I'm choosing to be open with the struggle, so that hopefully others experiencing what I experience, or even close to it, won't feel so alone.
As Aragorn once said, "there is a day when the courage of Men fails...but it is not this day....this day, we fight."
So, I'm going to fight.
