About My Mental Illness
Perhaps, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have gone back looking at my birthday pictures and remembering about that night I look perfectly normal like everyone else. This tricked my brain in believing I am no longer sick feeling so much better and decided now is a good time for me return to work. I was so excited, but my doctors disagreed. I reacted very negative and felt helpless because I didn’t choose for myself that I can’t work. Wanting to go back to work. It gives me a sense of normalcy as well validating that I am okay. I am on the right path to recovery. However, it is not easy to sit back, let time heal me because during this process I always get focus on learning my triggers while stressing and overthinking on other things. I know you have your own stress and struggling with yourself too. God bless you for being so kind to me and even thru your own difficulties you still find time to put aside your own issues to read what I'm writing.
Do you
believe I’m constantly trying to figure out what a “normal” and “reasonable”
thought process and reaction would be in any given situation? Is it normal I'm
constantly trying to overcome how my bipolar brain naturally thinks? Do you do
what I do constantly trying to deal with the extremeness of my thoughts
internally, so I can maintain the normalcy of my behaviors externally? Believe me
this is beyond difficult because sometimes I can't control myself when I strongly
overreact and not in my right mind I unintentionally get caught up in all the
bipolar stuff -- I will not sleep, I will write about what’s happening for hours, I will send irrational
email, and I will not stop texting a barrage of irate messages to you.
Is it
me? No, it’s the bipolar. I can't control it. Bipolar
is very predictable. The bipolar behaviors and actions are always the same. The
cycle doesn’t change -- this is the mental illness. I have to monitor myself or I become destructive.
You think I should stop fighting and stop trying to justify this vicious cycle because there’s no rhyme or reason to it and leave it to the specialist to “make sense’’ of it? I can make sense of my experiences a lot quicker than leaving it solely for my doctors to do. I'm taking charge to get faster results. I am very hard on myself to take ownership of my body, mind, and soul.
I am aware what I'm doing is insane and I know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result, but expecting a different one to happen. I can't be put in a box. I'm still doing the same thing and the impossible is possible something different is happening right now and things are changing that I’m sure it has to do with the new injectable medication given to me by the psychiatrist in her office every two weeks. If I relapsed the best option next to do is to get myself checked into a psychiatric center. If it comes down to this — I’m very afraid. I don’t like to shelter my kids but I’m torn to tell them mommy need to be hospitalized because this will affect them greatly.
In what sense do I need to get everyone to see what I see but maybe this is not what I need. All the way up to this point, everything is so exhausting and I’m so tired of pretending I’m normal. I feel like I have to completely shut down from all aspects, start over, and find my new happiness.
I want you to know that you’re being on the receiving end of it all, and there when I need a sympathetic ear, encouragement, it does make me feel better. Sometimes I am reluctant to seek help because I don’t want to be a burden, so to have you reminding that you care and that you’ll do whatever you can to help, I am going to be okay. Aside from offering emotional support, the best way to help me with bipolar disorder is by encouraging and supporting treatment. Often, that can be more of a challenge than it sounds. I tend to lack insight into my condition, it’s not always easy to get me to a doctor. When I am manic, I feel great and don’t realize there’s a problem. When I am depressed, I may recognize something is wrong, but often lack the energy to seek help. I become unusually silent, very quiet, and withdrawn.
Also, please don’t take my bipolar symptoms personally. When in the midst of a bipolar episode, I often say, texting nonstop, or do things that are bizarre, hurtful or embarrassing. When manic, I may be reckless, cruel, critical, aggressive, talk fast making everything all about me, and oversharing. When depressed, I may be super paranoid, irritable, hostile, and moody. It’s hard not to take such behaviors personally, but try to remember that they’re symptoms of my mental illness, not the result of selfishness or immaturity or being a drama queen.
Why I'm trying too hard to prove something to myself? Because I simply think there's nothing wrong trying to prove that I am right and I am not insane. I'm feeling more confident and I found clarity to believe that these changes I’m experiencing only I can make sense of it. When I’m feeling well there is nothing more important for me to do than dwell on this. I feel so overcome with the sense of realization of my true self is evolving in different ways, it compel me to dig deeper breaking these illusions I convinced myself with.
Can I share something else with you what is standing in my way of recovery? I’m being touched by the Holy Spirit.
But the fact of the matter is that my own mind is closed, resistant to alternative explanations. I create RESISTANCE in my mind because I have lots of questions, and my questions seemed to be forcing me to chose one side or the other -- either spirituality or psychiatry. If I'm honest with myself, a major sign of my mania is increased spirituality, but at the same time, a major sign of my depression is a lack of spiritual significance. Finding balance in recovery will take more than medication, it means that I am able to seek both spiritual and clinical solutions to my bipolar symptoms without uncertainty, fear, and judgement.
I know God wants me to let go but it will take me awhile to integrate both truths and find some peace around my manic episodes. In this sense, mania was indeed a spiritual experience, although an unmanageable one.This didn't mean my bipolar diagnosis was bogus, and I'm not saying all psychotic episodes are spiritual. But I do feel it is more easy telling you that my experiences were both spiritual and bipolar.
It is imperative I must continue to learn the triggers and know what caused it; for me to believe I can change, find answers to my own questions, get that doubt out of me, feeling no more frustrated, stop myself from being extremely guilty, and be content knowing that God loves me and he has the power to heal. To assert is not to prove. Dogma is not proof.
I hope that by sharing my story, you and others going through the same or similar difficulties might not take so long to make sense of your own experiences. I realized now it is time to question my assumptions and be frank about it. I’m speaking to you to open myself up to new ways of looking at the world. In order to acquire new information, you and I needed to become open-minded and have a dialogue about stigma of the spiritual experiences and the difference between mental illness and enlightenment. Talking to you, it may offer an alternative explanation for me not satisfied by medical explanations.
