Hello Friends!

Well, I am still doing very well. To the friend who commented in the last post, worried that I was in a manic state: fear not. I have an entire team of psychiatric professionals with whom I meet many times a month, in one permutation or another. In fact, at one point in the last few weeks I asked my therapist if I might be manic. She said "There is mania, and there is happiness. I have seen you manic. Right now, you are happy."

There is no cure, let alone a "miracle cure" for being bipolar. As of right now my disease is well controlled by medications, but it is still present and it is still a part of my personality. It always will be. When I am happy, it is likely that I will feel it more intensely and display it more passionately that the average happy person. When I am sad, it is likely that I will be more depressed and take things harder than your average sad person. This is part of my disease, but also a part of who I am. This is how I move in the world.

In the past week, I've had some elated times and some very hard times. It can be scary to navigate though emotionally intense times for the most emotionally well-adjusted person, but when you've been made necessarily aware of your slightest shift in mood, it can be quite frightening. There is a stigma to any mental illness, and the self-inflicted stigma can be the most devastating. For every shift in mood there is a corresponding shift in self-observation: is this an emotion, or is this a symptom? Am I reacting to the world, or am I getting ready to be locked up again?

It has the potential to be paralyzing, when faced alone. How is one to navigate the very human world of stimuli and responses when you cannot trust your own perception of stimuli, nor your ability to respond in a non-pathological way?

If it is possible at all, it is possible only with a great (very great) deal of training and experience. As of this writing, I am never quite sure, when I experience an emotion, if I am having a genuine emotional experience or a pathological expression of that experience. My intellect and reasoning and if/then mental flowcharts can only take me so far. I have been (mightily) wrong before. I might (probably, likely) will be wrong again. To be blunt: that sucks.

But I am not alone. I have doctors, I have therapists, I have friends, I have family. If my personal barometer is off (and sometimes it is, though increasingly less so) then I can count on them to let me know. So far, the most brilliant and rewarding moments of my recovery have been the reactions of these dear people around me. Friends notice how much healthier I look. My family has not seen me so relaxed since infancy. My therapist is calmly elated at the difference between the shrinking, shy, self-hating, depressed and manically anxious girl who scuttled into her office and then tried to kill herself, and the tall, calm, gentle and observant (if intense and often overly emotional and overly analytical) woman who comes to see her now.

It is often difficult to extract the “disorder” or “disease” from the fundamental personality traits of the patients. I always have been and I always will be intense. I always have been and I always will be prone to unreasonable flights of fantasy that cannot necessarily be grounded in reality. I always have been and I always will be easy prey to debilitating depressions in response to seemingly minor provocations. It is part of my disease. It is part of my disorder. It is part of who I am. With medication, with therapy, and with time, it will become easier for me to discard and control the parts of this phenomenon that are not “me.” As my brain chemistry is corrected, and as the corrupted thinking patterns and deep-seated wounds in my self esteem and my vision of the world are healed, I will be able to embrace with more and more confidence and peace the passion and intensity that makes being Amanda worth while. It is already happening, and though it may not be a “miracle cure” it is none the less a miracle.

If I sound manic in my posts, it is necessary to know where I came from. I have poured out my soul on this blog, but only so far. Even though I am bipolar, for a long, long time, the only symptom I displayed was depression. It was a depression so profound, sunk so deep in my bones, that I had been carrying the desire to die from an obscenely early age. My mania never announced itself in elation or joy or grandiosity. When I was “manic” my symptoms mimicked a major anxiety disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, or obsessive compulsive disorder. Even manic, I was never happy, at least not for more than a moment or two at a time.In my depressions, which would last years (interrupted only by "manic" sessions of obsession and fear) I could not bathe, I could not eat or I ate too much, I could not leave the house, and when I left the house I felt that around every corner lay someone ready to despise me. I sometimes could not go to work and when I went to work the burden of my own perceived incompetence crushed out any ability I might have had to prove my competency. There was a deep sense of doom clouding almost every waking moment. I lost jobs, friends, and relationships to this unspeakable sadness. Compared to the bone-crushing, heart-breaking, soul-smashing intensity of the depression I carried before, any glimpse of happiness would seem positively manic and obscene. And of course, when I express it, I am going to express it even more loudly and obscenely than my gentle non-mentally ill bretheren.

But I don't just have a glimpse, I have whole vista of happiness. And even with the many distressing and tragic and painful worries that remain in my life, I am full of joy and thanksgiving. I am so, so happy that even without a comparision to my earlier miserable state, it might seem unreasonable.

For a long time, it has hurt. It has hurt to be. It has hurt to be me. And though I still feel hurt (sometimes deeply), it no longer hurts to exist. And beyond that, the hurts that I have carried so long have given birth to the happiness I hold now.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.

— Rumi