My Bipolar Story: Prelude ii
Since this has, timidly, become a series, you can read the other installments here:
My Bipolar Story: Careers, Blazing Successes, Burnouts, Disabilities, & Leeching Off Society
I did some thinking this morning, and I decided this will be a series. That’s a big commitment for me, for a couple of reasons.
The first being that I am reliably unreliable. It’s difficult at this point for me to say to anyone ‘Yes, I promise to show up at 9am every day and complete these 10 tasks for you’ and be able to make good on that promise. I may be able to do it like a rockstar, under-promising and over-delivering, for two months and then boom!, the ground gets shaky, my brain gets wonky, and everything goes sideways. So to say ‘I’m going to make this a series’ is a big commitment, indeed. I’m not even sure what all that entails.
Which brings me to my next reason. I’m not a writer. Well, allow me to amend that. Your reading words, so dur, I am a writer, but I’m not a Writer with a capital W. That would be my husband. I’m a visual artist. So I make visual things. I used to do it for the Benjamins, now I do it sometimes because I must, sometimes for fun, and sometimes because other people ask me to. But what kind!?! I know, boxes…Ok, the money-maker part was UX, UI, IA, IXD, Product Design, Digital Design, Visual Design, Graphic Design, and Print Design over a span of many moons throughout the space-time continuum. Happy now? For now, just call me visual artist. I like that.
I’m comfortable writing about bipolar the way that I do, I’m just not so sure people are comfortable reading the way I write about it. I’ve read so much that’s like lyrical poetry from the Horchow catalog (In olden times, when I worked in media, I knew those people. I felt inadequate.). I read what I write and it’s like gross nurses’ humor. But I like nurses. And I like the humor of grunts in the military. And the humor of the people who do the real work in tech (That would be the humble coders, engineers, and designers. The people who never get rich or famous.) I like really anyone who has to serve time slogging through the muck. I feel like we have a lot in common.
My experience of my illness is just that — slogging through the muck. It doesn’t feel lyrical or transcendent or fanciful or anything like that. It feels weird and gross and strange and alien and sometimes funny. I mean, it is me, but it isn’t me. Every time I enter a mood state it’s like I’m being called to war, or to the ER, or woken up in the middle of the fucking night to fix a broken server.
I didn’t fucking ask for this, but here we go again. It’s the same bullshit, and I’ll endure it, and I’ll do the best I can to fix it with the tools I have at my disposal, but fuck me can this please be the last fucking time this happens?
So I guess the reason I talk about it the way that I do is the same reason nurses and soldiers and disgruntled designers talk to each other the way they do…gallows humor. I don’t really find many people in the mental health community that do talk about things that way. Maybe Maria Bamford. I like her. If you can make light about thinking about chopping up your family into little pieces, then I will definitely be your fan. I mean, if you have the crazies, other people are already afraid of you AND making fun of you, so you should have an opportunity to have some fun too, yeah?
This is also a warning and perhaps an apology. I write exactly the way I speak. What you are reading on your screen is me. I am portraying myself exactly how I am in person. I’m not trying to offend you, nor make light of your struggles, your feelings, your situation. I am blunt. This is what you can expect more of. If you are offended by bluntness, candid descriptions of gross things, talk of drugs, talk of feels, weird, wonderful and horrible incidents, and strong opinions on various things, you should probably not read anything further. I don’t engage in back and forth over hurt feelings because someone didn’t like my opinion. I’m 43. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I came back because I forgot something. I don’t think this should be necessary because, well, we’re all adults, right? But because I’m not a writer, I forget about audience. As a Designer, I’m acutely aware of audience and how what I design impacts their lives. As a writer, I don’t have that same awareness. So it dawned on me that words might have the same type of impact on someone that a product/app/experience does.
Ok. Listen. I am one person with Bipolar I with psychotic features with life experiences and physiology specific to me, got it? Psych meds interact with my physiology uniquely. My psychiatrist is one dude of out I don’t know how many people practicing in the world. My opinions have been formed based on 43 years worth of life lived. The point in saying this is that my POV is valid for me. It may not be valid for anyone else on this planet. Parts of it may be valid for some. All of it may be valid for maybe for just one other 19 year old dude in Bangladesh and an 80 year old woman in Paris and that’s it. I just think it’s important that you know that your experiences with this illness are valid, no matter what they look like. Just because they don’t look like that person’s or that person’s or that person’s doesn’t mean they aren’t valid.
My psychiatrist had this to say when I asked him point blank if he thought I actually had Bipolar instead of something else:
‘There is a long spectrum between Bipolar and Schizophrenia. But I’m pretty confident you have Bipolar.’
He also said:
‘There are many different types of manias. You have one type.’
He’s a man of few words. I’ll talk about him later. But I’ve been seeing him for 8 years, and he’s by far the best psychiatrist I’ve ever known. The context was I’ve been very worried I don’t actually have Bipolar. That is another recurring thing. I’ve been trying to convince myself for years I have anything but this. That is also another post.
If you continue reading these posts you’ll notice I have a problem getting to the point, which I suppose also makes me not a writer. Or it just makes me Steven King. Bob this bitch. Despite what Dr. Google says, good psychiatrists agree:
There is a continuum on which Bipolar is experienced. Don’t you dare go judging your experiences against someone else’s experiences and declare yourself not valid. Your experiences are your own.
So, on with the show! Next up, do I work a 9–5 like normal ‘Muricans, or am I one of those daytime TV-watching leeches on Mick Mulvaney’s hit list?
