The Blessing of Forgetting

I just walked out of the apartment and ran into my super on the sidewalk. He looked at me, confused, like I was some kind of puzzle he couldn’t figure out.

“Do you remember what happened?”

I nodded because I knew what he was talking about, not because I remembered.

He, like the others, had seen me turn into a different person a few weeks ago. A manic person who, in a state of psychosis, believed I was privy to some kind of governmental conspiracy. A person who got into an ambulance and asked the driver for his gun. A person who, once hospitalized, punched nurses and threw furniture and screamed at everyone.

“I was sick,” I told him. “I have bipolar disorder.”

“Oh,” he said. “You really scared me. I was holding a package and you were grabbing it from me, telling me it was yours.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shook his head and dismissed the apology as not needed.

“Are you OK now?”

I told him that I was. I thanked him. I turned the corner.

And then, as I was walking down Broadway, I thought about how lucky we are that there are some things our minds won’t let us remember. At least for now, my mind is protecting me by forgetting. It’s called motivated forgetting. Critics say that this kind of repression may not be healthy. I’m not sure I care.

Right now, I am feeling blessed to have an illness that can be treated by Lithium.

And right now, I’m blessed to have forgotten.

The Blue in the Rainbow

My two-year-old nephew tantrums, and my sister does everything she can to quiet him. I know I shouldn’t judge her because I’m not a mom, but I can’t help but think, let him cry and calm himself down.

On NPR last week, I heard someone talking about how we can’t experience true happiness—what he called the full rainbow —unless we have some blue in our life.

I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the interview, but this simple comment stuck with me.

If we’re in the midst of depression or sadness, it’s impossible to appreciate the darkness. And I’m not suggesting we should. But, once we’ve moved on to brighter days, it’s helpful to look back and realize that before we felt joy, contentment, ease, we were ever-so-familiar with darkness.

Without the blue, there’s no fiery red or giddy yellow. The rainbow, arched across the sky, astonishes us because it bands all of those colors together into one, beautiful whole.

On Quelling Obsessive Thoughts

All too often, I obsess.

If I could get paid for the time I’ve spent ruminating over conversations and wondering what’s going to happen next, I’d be a billionaire.

Tonight, I’m fixated on a date I had last night. I went out downtown. The date went well: good conversation, a bit of flirtation. We walked outside and I expected this guy to say, “I’d love to see you again.” Or something like that. Instead he sad, “Let me know if you want to hang out again.”

Um…OK. Not exactly sure what to do with that kind of ending. Today I thought, maybe he’ll text. He didn’t. Work distracted me, but tonight that text-I-never-received is all I can think about.

I know these are common post-date worries.

But my brain seems to take the concern and heat it up until the boiling obsession bubbles into every single one of my brain cells. I do stupid things like google “should a woman text a guy after the first date?” and read websites that advocate rules I don’t believe in.

Years ago, I would have kept going. Kept riding “the crazy train” as my friend L call is– reading websites about the scenario, texting friends, replaying scenes in my head.

Now, I work on shutting it down with the following tactics:

1. Notice that I’m obsessing.
2. Accept what I’m doing–it’s OK. No need to beat myself up.
3. Write about it. Journaling always helps me.
4. Redirect the neuroses. Find a distraction. Anything–doodling, cooking, napping.
5. Forgive myself if I start up again.

Related articles

• 7 Ways to Stop Obsessing (psychcentral.com)
• Obsession (loveletterstoaghost.wordpress.com)

Resolution: Learning to Live in the Grey

I’ve been known to live a life of extremes. You can probably relate: happy or sad; energetic or sluggish; in love or out of love.

For many years, I bounced back and forth between these states of mind as my mood shifted from mania to depression and back again. Always, I was on medication to keep me from going too far in either direction. Still, I wavered, back and forth like an all too flimsy flag blown about every which way.

These days, life is more balanced. Age has something to do with it: I am 34, and I’m more centered. I sense when a manic mood is taking hold of me, and I can go sleep it off. In a depression, history offers the glimmer of hope that, like every time before, I’ll rise up out of it again.

But still, I have work to do.

I have many days when I feel like a complete and utter failure.  And others when I feel like a success. My inner dialogue can shift from “You are stupid” one day to “You are smart” the next. These inner mantras inform my mood, my actions, and the person I project to the world.

For the past few months, I have been fortunate enough to work with a life coach in addition to therapy. At first I wrote life coaches off as silly, but she’s helped me a great deal. One of the things we have talked about is how draining it can be to live a life of extremes, of black and white.

There is a place in the middle of the extremes. She calls this “living in the grey.”

Here’s to a 2014 focused on finding more grey in my life. I hope you will too.

My Grey Resolutions:

• Embrace life’s ambiguities.
• Stop striving for perfection.
• Accept and love myself completely.
• Practice gratitude for the things I have.
• Let go of regrets that keep me caught in my past.

You can be bipolar and healthy. That’s a fact.

I’ve given this blog a new subtitle related to “living well.”

Why?

Because I want to play whatever part I can in making sure the world starts to realize that those of us diagnosed with a mental illness are not necessarily “ill.” Who is everyone? I don’t know: maybe the news media who talk about mental health and gun control in the same breath so often you’d think we are all–god forbid–violent; maybe people who say bipolar when they mean ‘crazy,’ maybe my ex-boyfriend.

What a strange concept: that you can have a mental illness and not be ill.

But it’s the truth.

I live a healthy life. And I have bipolar disorder.

This is possible: for me, for you, for anyone who has access to support and treatment.

Can you relate? If so, that’s fantastic. If you are suffering: know this: it gets better.

It Gets Better for Us Too

I have so much admiration for the It Gets Better Project. If for some reason you’ve been living under a rock and have missed it, this is the viral video-turned-movement from Dan Savage meant to educate LGBT youth on all they have to look forward to beyond any bullying, questioning, or suffering they may be experiencing now.

When you have a mental health condition like bipolar disorder, this issues are different, but the mantra still applies.

As I think back tonight on the hospitalizations and the shifting medication regimen and all of the pain and uncertainty in my life and compare to now–I have to say that it does get better. Or, I’ll qualify that statement to say: with the right resources and support, it gets better. Of course, statistics still reveal difficult truths about how more than 25 percent of us will try to commit suicide in our lifetimes; about how it reduces the lifespan by 9 years.

But you are more than a statistic. And so am I. Today, and for over a decade, I have been a healthy person who manages moods. And with that, I can without hesitation tell anyone who is suffering right now as I once did:

it gets better.

Do You Feel Like a Version of Yourself?

I turn to this blog when I am feeling lonely. I wish I could nurture it at other times. But so often, when life is motoring along a steady course, I don’t exactly feel bipolar. I take my medication; I get enough sleep every night; I live my life. And so I forget about this blog.

I oftentimes log on with the intention of deleting the blog altogether: but then–in the same way I can’t ever destroy a journal or a letter that once meant anything to me–I leave it alone.

It’s without warning (don’t you hate that it oftentimes feels like it just hits you?), that my depression sets in. I mean, if I’m being honest, the depression I’m feeling right now was probably triggered by the terrible break up I went through a few months ago. Still, for a while, I was handling my life with a kind of grace that made friends say to me, “Wow–you are doing so well.”

But now I’m not.

Now, with my depressive brain, I am thinking all of the things I always think when I get depressed: you are a failure; you are stupid; you must have driven your ex-boyfriend away; you have a terrible job.  The only nice thing about these thoughts is that I’m experienced in living this life of a medicated yet still moody manic-depressive, and I know that they’re fleeting. I know that I will feel better soon. If I didn’t have that to hold on to, it would be hard to get through the day.

And so that’s how I live. Always a version of myself, not quite sure when this person I am is going to disappear into something happier, sadder, angrier, more energetic. And for this reason, I’m never exactly sure who I ever was in the first place.

Finding the Courage to Continue the Blog

Tonight, all of a sudden, I started to freak out about this blog. It seemed like such a good idea a few days ago. But, as had happened to me before, I was feeling immensely paranoid that blogging about bipolar disorder could be somehow detrimental to my life, so instead of keeping the fear bottled up inside me, I thought, hey, why not write about it? The thing is that to actually blog really and truly “anonymously,” you have to go through all sorts of crazy technical hoops that I started to read about online. So I started to second guess things, partially because I’m doing this stealthily in my apartment.

As of tonight, I haven’t told anyone that I’m doing this. Most notably, not even my boyfriend, who’s sitting across the room and, I think, wondering why I am all of a sudden so much more prolific with my writing  … lately I have been trying to write creative nonfiction, and that process is much more slow and painful for me than this has been.

What I’m realizing as I write this, though, is that maybe my fear is not just about blogging about bipolar disorder specifically, but about all the things I’m always afraid of: being judged, not being good enough, failing. Maybe my doubts about this blog are something I need to push through. I need to listen to my own advice from earlier today and adapt the growth mindset. God, I wrote that post a few hours ago and still need reminding to think that way!

I need to remind myself that I know I will make mistakes along the way here, but the reason why I want to blog about my life and about bipolar disorder is not to convey anything perfectly. It’s to connect with others who can share my experiences. It’s to illuminate some of the things I’ve learned about managing this disease for others who may be just starting out on the journey of managing. And then I hope that we can, as a community, begin to alleviate the stigma we all feel.

And so I have to say that with the commencement of this blog (again), I feel as if I am crossing over some imaginary line. This time, I hope to stay on this side of that line and not go back to my old ways of not expressing what I want to say about myself and the illness because of, well, fear.

When Bipolar Disorder Meets PMS

Yesterday, I cried on the platform of Metro North a few minutes before the train arrived to pick up me and my boyfriend and bring us to meet my parents and sisters for dinner. There wasn’t anything terribly wrong, except I’d bought my sisters presents and he had forgotten to bring the shopping bag with him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m such a dummy.”

“It’s fine,” I told him.

But then I looked away, and I just started to well up with sadness. I’m not normally one to get mad about something as insignificant as a shopping bag left at the apartment, but all of a sudden, there on the platform yesterday, his forgetting of the gift was in my mind indicative of a larger problem in our relationship. I was irrationally angry at him. And even though I knew the anger was irrational, I felt it as deeply as any anger I’ve ever felt. I also felt a clawing sadness inside my chest because everything felt wrong. I didn’t want to go to dinner. I hated my job. My co-workers, for the most part, were completely incompetent. Let’s face it: my whole life was a disaster.

One thing I did know, and I knew this yesterday–in the back of my mind– when I wrote a post about moods and bipolar disorder (though I wasn’t really admitting it), was that I was about to get my period.

Back when I was too young to understand what a period really was, I remember my mother standing in front of the sink washing dishes in a state of sadness, telling me that she was going to feel fine “the minute she got her period.” I think I was around ten years old at the time, and I sort of knew what a period was, but not really. It had something to do with going to the bathroom and blood. But I couldn’t fathom what it had to do with making her feel better. Years later, after my late-bloomer body decided to finally deliver my period to me months after I earned my driver’s license, I still didn’t understand what she meant.

It wasn’t until I was out of college that I began to suffer from PMS and experience the strange feeling of overwhelming relief, as if the heavens had opened up and delivered me into this hallowed hall of happiness, where my pulse quickened with creative energy and the cobwebs in my mind cleared away, that I understood what she meant. Life sucked, and then I got my period and it was better again. My other bipolar mood swings felt unpredictable, but this was one I could count on.

By the time I was in my early 20s, I was managing as best I could with medication. With the help of a patient boyfriend, I got enough sleep to not let my flights into hypomania get so out of hand that I lost my job or did something really stupid. But we had very loud, overblown fights in the first year of that relationship. At one point, as I flew into a rage about something insignificant, he said, “Have you noticed we almost break up every month, right before you get your period?”

What he said hit me right in the gut because I’d never considered breaking up. But he was clearly suffering as much as I was.

With the help of a good gynecologist, I went on a birth control pill that worked for a number of years to calm down my previously stormy PMS. And with the help of my psychiatrist, extra Wellbutrin in the morning the week before my period helped boost my mood and keep the PMS at bay. That worked for a while. But since then I’ve switched birth control.

About a year ago, I tried the NuvaRing. It worked like a charm for a while, and then it didn’t. I found myself sobbing for no reason, wanting to pick fights with everyone, right before it was time to take the ring out at the end of my cycle.

The funny thing about living with bipolar disorder and PMS is that, like cousins raised in separate countries, the two disorders, syndromes–whatever you want to call them– are related, yet so different. When I’m in a depression, I slow down and feel a kind of existential pain that makes it hard to understand how anyone even makes it from one day to the next because life is so dark and meaningless. When I have PMS, it’s like depression, spiked with mania. I’m angry and sad. And it’s a different kind of sadness, a sadness that’s so close to the surface, it bubbles up at a moment’s notice.

The smallest incident–a shopping bag left at home–leads to sobbing.

And so last month I switched from NuvaRing to a birth control pill called Loestrin. This is only my first month on the new pill. The specialist doctor I saw who prescribed this told me the end of the month might be rough like this, and that if it proved to be this way for a couple months, we could start a routine where I just skip the placebos all together so I don’t have any hormone dip at all.

For now, here I am, this morning, able to write this with a feeling of relief. Because as it turns out–and I know this is too much information, but I think it’s relevant– I got my period this morning.

Finding Solace in a Blog Post

I neglect this blog. I forget about it. Sometimes for a few months. Sometimes for close to a year. I wish I maintained it, and I’m at a point once again where I really want to begin posting on here regularly. Because every few months, without fail, there’s something that happens to make me feel so deeply trapped inside myself that there is nowhere else to turn other than this blog. I know that no one is actively “listening” to me, but there’s some small chance that someone will hear me and understand, and that’s solace. My diary, well, that’s something that my boyfriend might find so it’s somehow less private than the internet.  He’s as loving as they come, but he doesn’t have the strength to deal with the negativity that seeps into my psyche when I get like this. Part of what makes living with bipolar disorder so hard, even if I have it mostly under control, is that it’s not really OK to talk about it.

And I know, I know. I sound self-serious and dramatic. I can step outside myself, for a moment, and know that in a few days I will probably feel better. But that doesn’t make right now feel much better. I’m at work, sitting at my desk, and I know I’m lucky to have this job and this relatively stable life. But today, I can barely keep it together. Everything and everyone is making me angry. I didn’t sleep well last night. I didn’t eat enough for lunch today.

My boyfriend reminds me when I’m home that I need to take a walk, to do some yoga, to get outside of my head. And he is right. Beyond the medication, the secret to this disease is taking care of yourself. It’s sleep and food and exercise. All of the things you don’t want to do when you’re feeling like you’ve fallen into some deep, dark cavern of your brain and don’t quite know how to find your way out.