Sometimes You Need The Blues
Reflections on living with bipolar disorder
I woke up this morning and immediately recognized that I am in a downswing. I’m lethargic. My jaw is aching from clenching my teeth. My whole body feels run through the ringer and I just want to go back to bed. I’m not sick… I know this well enough by now. At least I’m not sick in the physical, viral, bacterial sort of way. I’m bipolar.
I come from a family riddled with mental disorders, especially on my father’s side, and this was the one that settled in my brain. In my gene pool. But where so many of my predecessors used their illnesses, whether professionally diagnosed or not, as excuses for bad behavior, I see my own as a superpower. How lucky am I to vacillate between extreme highs and lows so drastically that I get to experience the full range of human emotions so absolutely? Most people barely explore the surface of feelings, and yet here I am, combing through every detail of my recent weeks exploring everything I have done and thought and tasted and naming EXACTLY how it made me feel at my core, in order to identify the trigger for today’s downswing.
I do this every time I crash, and it is something I’ve come to look forward to, especially after a long run of manic (but exhausting) energy. This quiet reflective period forces me to really live in my feelings. To notice details I would have overlooked in my younger years. To catch self-sabotaging behavior and weaknesses in my self-care and correct it. To work out issues that have been plaguing my subconscious and argue with my self-doubt. To appreciate all the good choices I made during my mania too.
I don’t medicate my way out of my disorder. If I lived somewhere else or didn’t have the support that I do, I certainly would have to. My blues remind me of that too. That I am a very fortunate lil nutter. I am blessed to live so rurally that I don’t have easy access to vices or bad influences, or self-destructive outlets that would be my undoing in the city. I don’t have access to the kind of money that bipolar binges cause so much damage with. I don’t even have a work schedule that time blindness could get me fired from.
Instead I have a partner who matches my energy, then directs it like a tour guide telling me what landmarks I have to see and experiences I have to try. He keeps me engaged and forward-moving. He indulges my urge to rearrange all the furniture while he stands by with the back pills, takes me to concerts but paces my drinking, works over my body but with loving hands. He met me this way and he has never tried to change me. He knows that if he just keeps me out of my own way, wonderful things can come from manic stretches.
I’ve been high-energy with manic waves for a few months now, and it has been mostly wonderful. I’ve finished projects and gone to shows and socialized and exercised and done all the things that feed that little serotonin gremlin in my head. But my body is tired, and the pace is neither healthy or sustainable. And to be fair, my writing suffers too. Mania can look super-productive on the outside, but it can be hell to process mentally.
I have gone the pharmaceutical route before, playing guinea pig to anti-psychotics and SSRI’s, stimulants and suppressants. I’ve tried the diets and the supplements and have definitely done the therapy. While the pills softened the edges of this swinging axe of emotion, they also left me sedated and without an appetite for life, something I could not abide. Therapy… that’s a different story. It did wonders, and I revisit it now and then for a “top-up” on my mental tool kit, but it’s not part of my regular routine.
So waking up this morning and realizing the serotonin gremlin is full and hibernating was perhaps an early Christmas present to myself. Yes, I will be sad… right now I kind of feel like crying in fact. I will struggle to do my daily tasks, and have to push through. In a few days I’ll be angry at that helpless feeling and want more than anything to be back in that manic space, or anywhere that isn’t the bottom of the well. But today I am grateful to be able to slow down and really feel what life has been like for me, almost like an outside observer fully engrossed in a great story.
Sometimes you need the blues.
