“What colour is it? Pinot noir or Shiraz?” said the ambo trying to assess how much blood I’d lost.
Six years ago today, my life changed trajectory, a hook turn rather than a u-turn. Who knows where it would have gone if that night didn’t happen? Maybe I’d have kept being miserable sometimes, and then what everyone thought was normal would follow.
For the first five years I wrote about depression. In January this year I was told that bipolar disorder type II (I still don’t really know the right order for those words) was actually what I was dealing with. Usually, it takes between 5–10 years for a correct diagnosis of bipolar. In retrospect that impulsive suicide attempt was probably a hypomanic episode. Since learning more about bipolar it feels a little obvious that it was the problem all along.
Depression isn’t necessarily a life long illness, it can be managed, and there was always a chance, a slim hope that I’d get to a point of remission. Bipolar means that treatment never ends, I carry the disorder with me for life. A daily tablet will be required until the day I die.
Now that I’ve gotten to the point where my medication has levelled, I am beginning to find more days where I feel alright. The bad days are definitely still there, and on ‘up’ days I’m not necessarily happy, they can also include a fair amount irritability. I’ve had to learn a new illness, the depression part of it is old hat. Realising that when I have a great day, the next day is likely to be low is new. There are a few other quirks too, things I thought that everyone else thinks and feels but are part of bipolar. I am obsessive about learning more about the illness, and understanding what my experience of bipolar is.
This year I’m feeling different about the anniversary, usually when I write about it the words just fall out. I’m not sure why it’s harder to write today. Maybe it’s because for 5 years I thought I had depression, I thought that night was purely down to hopelessness and despair. Now I know it was something else. I heard someone talk about bipolar and say, ‘the up days just mean you have the energy to kill yourself’. That’s the part that scares me the most, that the low days aren’t the ones to be scared about, the high ones are dangerous too.
It is another year further away from that day. Each year this date serves as a reminder of what that act did to the people I love. For those that weren’t in my life then, there is still an impact, they know that it happened, and that there is always a chance that could happen again. They live in that fear just as much as the people who lived through it with me. I hate that. I hate that people are scared about it, that they worry that they could be responsible for something happening.
Happy anniversary to me, I guess.
Here’s what I’ve written on this in the past:
2012: The day I didn’t die
2013: 100 days of strength
2014: A funeral in my brain
2015: Four years of wishing
2016: A resurrection
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