Observations of an Illness

I’ve been slacking here quite a bit. I really haven’t had the motivation to write (or do much of anything else for that matter). Even at the present, I don’t feel like I have anything really profound to say. I guess I feel as if a little dose of realism of my life needs to be interjected here….most everything I’ve posted up to this point has just been little glimpses, mostly of the past.

A friend of mine also has a blog where he shares a lot about his life, and recently he’s written about dealing with Bipolar Disorder. After reading some of his recent posts, I felt like its high time I discuss my experience with the disease.

Instead of taking time to talk about how I got to the point of being diagnosed with the mood disorder (some of the poetry here can kind of give you an idea of the things that have plagued my brain for most of my life), I am deciding to talk about the here and now and how I experience life on a daily basis.

A small dose of history: I was diagnosed with Bipolar I, for the third time, about a year and a half ago. I was diagnosed for the first time when I was 17, but couldn’t accept it & didn’t want to take medication. I was diagnosed with depression at about age 16 I guess, but if I think about it, I battled with it for a very long time before that. Anyway, to make this short & sweet, I suppose I finally decided that something had to change. I had to find some way to make life bearable, and I knew I needed help. After the last diagnosis, I think I have finally accepted the fact that this is a disease that I will just have to live with….and if taking medication will truly help, what have I got to lose?

Here are a few observations that Ive obtained while living with being Bipolar:

1. As much as I’d like it to – medicine isn’t going to completely cure me….theres always going to be something weird going on that most normal people don’t have to deal with. There is no cure for Bipolar Disorder…its just something I have to learn to manage with the help of meds.

2. Sometimes mania is really fun & sometimes mania sucks BIGTIME. I think most people think it’d be cool to be manic….its kinda like taking drugs without having to break the law or buy them! When I am manic, lots of times I can get a lot done…work, cleaning, artwork, you name it – Im highly productive. I paint a lot when I am up and for a while its really fun. However, there is a down side….lots of time my attention span isn’t to be envied, I start all sorts of things & never finish them. Also, I suppose there is the sleep issue. When Im up, I don’t sleep much and eventually that makes me pretty dang no fun to be around. I think that most of the time I’m high, it eventually turns to a kind of mixed state where I cant sleep, Im pissed off, and depressed. It feels like Ive taken a boatload of NoDoze or something.

3. Depression Sucks. For me, as someone who has a depressive disorder, one of the hardest things about it is that its hard for a lot of people to understand how you can be depressed about n-o-t-h-i-n-g. Family & friends can ask “whats wrong” and don’t understand that you have no reason to be depressed…no good reason…you just ARE. Thinking constantly that you’d be better off dead SUCKS. There are times when the thought is a constant fixture in my cranium. I don’t want to think like that, I just do. Thankfully, medicine has helped with that a lot.

Anyway, theres my 2 cents for the day. I’ll try to keep up around here. My energy level & motivation haven’t been on the upside for a while now, but Im really going to make an attempt at writing more.