The Measure of Moods

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

I made a tool for myself that changed my bipolar management from ineffectual to possible. It coupled with coping mechanisms and brought me out of the years full of chaos. I found a way to measure my emotions.

Before it, I barely managed to exert some measure of control upon my episodes. My first ten years were tumultuous, and the next four weren’t a whole lot better. I lived, yes, but it was either in pain, chaos, or fear of the previous two.

I didn’t feel it was much of a life.

During my last hospitalization, I pledged to do more than I had been doing. I wasn’t even sure it was possible, but I saw the dream of management.

I always wanted to be better, so I worked to do everything I was told up until that point. There was a sense or feeling that I could be doing something more, though.

There had to be something more.

I struggled when I got home.

The high optimism that carried me out of the hospital faded quickly when I left those walls. The intention of managing my condition sounded awesome, but I had no idea of how to get there.

I couldn’t even figure out what management meant for me.

There was one thing I knew I could do, though.

I focused intently on the therapeutic angle of management.

I took notes of how I felt and what I thought between sessions and took them along to my session. I would read them in the waiting room and come prepared to discuss events that might have been forgotten.

I wrote down the coping strategies and thought processes we discussed during therapy and took them home to study.

I strove to apply those strategies during my day to day life. When they didn’t work, I started modifying them as I could to make them work better for me.

How I Got the Most Out of Therapy

Therapy itself wasn’t enough.

Work was being done, but my cycles were still coming with a vengeance. They came and ravaged my mind. They wrecked my life as I clawed around trying to gain some semblance of control.

For me, the most frustrating moments of mental illness are those when you are struggling your hardest to improve and only seem to regress. Those feelings coursed through me then. There was no justice.

I found myself continuously sidelined and unable to tell rational thoughts from diseased.

It occurred to me that being able to identify the emotional responses that were being caused by my bipolar disorder might allow me to fight more effectively.

The question was, how was I supposed to do that?

To see the bad, I reasoned that I had to have some frame of reference.

I had to know what was normal. I had to know myself.

It sounds so simple. The idea seems like something that we should all have already. We are us, so we should know ourselves.

It’s only natural.

It wasn’t that easy for me.

I couldn’t readily tell who I was and what emotions were mine. They seemed so entwined with my disorder that they were impossible to separate. My emotions were my emotions. I was the source of both.

How could I find me in the face of all this emotion?

I tried to sit down and do it in one sitting. I had a pen, some paper, and the determination to heal. I stared at that paper for nearly an hour without ever picking up the pen.

I had nothing to write other than some meaningless labels that would do me no good.

I realized then that this would be something I would have to do over time. I would need to strip the emotions that rang clearly as mine from day to day interactions and put them all together to form the emotional me.

I built it piece by piece.

I took the emotions from playing with my children. I took the feeling of a kiss from my wife. I took the laughter during a time with friends.

There were a loving hug and a scornful gaze.

I found the best and worst of myself and pulled them all together.

I found it to be a prolonged process. It took me six months to assemble something worth calling a part of me, and I found myself identifying new things since then. I could tell it wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.

I thought I had found myself. I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. What I had found was purely a thing of emotion. There were no thoughts or actions involved.

There were no convictions or ideas that made things so. It was very much a part of me and forms who I am, but it was pure emotion. I have come to call it my “emotional ruler.”

I created a golden rule against which I could judge all emotional responses I could apply it to.

It could tell me if I was reacting outside of my normal range and allow me to know when my thoughts betrayed me.

I could identify the unhealthy emotions and the actions they incited by judging their difference from what I know to be my range.

It was liberating.

I may not have been able to stop the thoughts with this knowledge, but I could at least identify that they were out of line.

I could see the wrongs of my mania and the lies of my depression. It was as if a blindfold had been lifted from my sight.

I experienced a break between episodes not long after I finally pulled things together, and when it came time to start again, I knew before it started.

I continued to monitor my emotions and found that I could tell the episode was coming days before the crushing weight fully descended.

I was prepared.

This time, I reviewed coping strategies and met depression with knowledge, tools from therapy, and foresight, and the battle was glorious. Did I win? We’ll call that one a stalemate.

This emotional ruler changed the entire course of my bipolar disorder. Now I have warning and can better apply the strategies I have been given and developed throughout my life.

It isn’t the only key to my management of bipolar. The most significant components are robust coping mechanisms and medication, but this helps me use those mechanisms and handle the episodes that come through the medication.

How did I develop my ruler?

I watched myself and my reactions overtime, listening for emotional responses that sung:

This is me.

I then stored them tightly in my memory. I took it slowly, collecting one piece a day, sometimes one a week, or one only when my disorder allowed it. It was hard not to rush it, but it did no good to try that approach.

It seemed to me to be an arduous task, but in the end, it was worth it. I can see inside of my episodes, and I have a good idea of when they may come.

I call that a victory.