Mental Illness in Four Acts

I have bipolar disorder but I didn’t always call it that.

When I was 15 I first became aware of how my body and brain didn’t always work quite right. Because sometimes I would suddenly become enveloped in a sparkly, colorful, and beautiful swell of euphoria that saved me and swallowed me whole. I later learned to call this act “hypomania” but I didn’t need words back then, I just needed to hold on to this deliriously intoxicating invincibility.

I was only introduced to the name “bipolar” when I was 17 and I felt out of control, agitated, lost, and so overwhelmingly blurry that I was taken to the first of many psychiatrists. I was diagnosed and the doctor told me, this act is “mania.”

At 19 I learned the phrase “mania with psychotic features” when I capsized under the raging torrent of this illness as it obstructed and disrupted my everyday life. I learned to pair that feeling with that name while on the inpatient unit. Psychosis felt like I was on fire and cracking erratically into fragments.

ACT ONE: hypomania, ACT TWO: mania, ACT THREE: psychosis.

But when did I first feel depression? ACT FOUR: depression. I’ve never been in love with, morbidly curious about, or as scared of that state so I always forget ACT FOUR. I forget until it is too late and I feel nothing but its aching hopelessness and I wonder if I will feel this way forever. Or maybe I always feel this way but I am just too easily sidetracked waiting for acts one through three. Living acts one through three. Acting out acts one through three. ACT FOUR robs me of all momentum as I suffocate in the numbness and the nothing that we all call “depression,” a name and feelings I want to forget and never feel again.