Congrats! You're a Dumbass!

I have bipolar disorder. The exact diagnosis is Bipolar Disorder, Type I, exhibiting rapid cycling. I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Depression, and Anxiety Disorder. I am overweight, possibly obese—it’s been a while since I have actually seen a primary care physician, so I don’t know exactly where my weight/height ratio falls. I know that I am outside what would be considered healthy, even with my wider frame to support it. I have high blood sugar—again, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a PCP, so I’m not actually diagnosed as diabetic. However, my fasting blood sugar is typically around 280-290 when I don’t have any of my ill-gotten medication in me. With the Metformin, I normally run around 180-200. But I only had a little bit from an ex-roommate and I’m out of it now. I’m lactose intolerant. I’m post-menopausal, despite not being thirty yet. There’s the possibility of there being a thyroid issue that isn’t being helped by my medications.

I am very stressed. I took a test in my psychology textbook that gives you a number based on ten questions. Normally a person in my age range and marital status runs at about 12-14 points. I scored a 33. I feel very swamped under it and not at all comforted about having identified that I am under a lot of stress. Maybe if I could see some way out from under it all, I could feel better, but there’s no end in sight.

I know that there are certain steps that I could take, but I can’t seem to bring myself to do them, at least not on my own or even with just a doctor’s recommendation/orders. Fear is the primary thing stopping me.

I don’t want to walk alone. I don’t feel safe doing it. But I can’t find anyone who wants to walk with me. Mostly this is a matter of time and availability. I was walking every day with Dad, but between school and work and moving out to the Farm, that ended. It just became infeasible for him to drive all the way out there every day. I was going to walk with Alex every day that we put the girls on the bus, but that deteriorated almost as soon as it was thought up. Jeanette wanted him working every day from the time the girls left on the bus until they got home in the afternoon. Then Luna was supposed to join me, but Luna didn’t want to get up that early…I don’t think she cared for the idea of spending time with me anyway. Now that I’m here at Mother’s, I’m not likely going to be able to attempt to get back to my walking either, as none of my family wants to be active and there’s no longer a convenient walking trail. Not that they were eager to walk with me the last time that I lived with them and there was a walking trail across the street. They would speed-walk away from me at a pace that I couldn’t keep up with and talk at the same time. I like walking and talking at the same time. It helps past the time and makes the exercise fun, rather than a chore. Alone isn’t fun. Alone is also very scary, between catcalls and stray animals and cars that rush by too close or out of nowhere. I can’t walk alone. Even the thought of doing so is bringing a hitch to my breathing and tears to my eyes.

I suppose that I could always go back to the idea of working out to the Yoga DVDs that have to be around here somewhere. I would just have to find a time when Mother or my siblings aren’t here/asleep. They don’t restrain themselves from making mocking comments when I work through the video. It doesn’t help that I already feel a bit ridiculous as I try to do certain things and can’t because I’m not that in shape or my belly (where most of my weight is centered) gets in the way. Or I have to stop because I’m winded or dizzy.

I don’t always take my meds like I’m supposed to, either. Sometimes, it’s just that I get caught up in the hustle and bustle of everything that I am trying to juggle or I get too tired to remember to take them before I go to bed. Other times, I just don’t want to mess with them. I know that’s bad thinking, but I think that things were better when I wasn’t trying to be something that I can never really be. I read these books about bipolar disorder and they talk about how there is a period of “normality” between the poles that everyone forgets about all the time. Well, isn’t that interesting? Because I really don’t remember this period, it seems. Maybe once upon a time I had a normal period, but it certainly wasn’t recently. I just go from cycle to cycle with various peaking points. They don’t always get as bad as this last manic cycle got, but then I was basically told that I would be losing my home in a matter of days for nothing. Then I was told that I wasn’t going to be a part of the girls’ lives anymore—never mind that Alex says that he didn’t realize that was what he was doing when he allowed his mother to talk him into that plan of action; that’s what it was doing.

(By the way, if you ever tell someone something and they become inconsolably upset, you shouldn’t just walk away from them like you don’t care. You should hold them and ask them why they are upset. If they can’t get an answer out at first or their answer doesn’t make sense, you don’t walk away like you don’t care—and that is the message you are sending if you do. You stay with them and maybe rub their back and help them breathe until they are calmer. Then you ask why again. This is especially true if the person goes from inconsolably upset to inexplicably calm enough to begin to plan their demise—when you had discussed with them just the day before how they were haunted by the knowledge that their death would bring in enough money to end the financial hardship that their family was under and they couldn’t believe that they were being so selfish as to not do it. By walking away from someone who is in that mindset, you are telling them that you don’t care enough to stay, that in a way, you wished they were dead. This is especially true if in every fight that you had been having with this person up until this point—and the ones that another person in the household had been having with them, as well—you had called the person selfish several times or self-centered—which is the very thing that they thought they were being by not helping in every way that they could. Walking away when someone is in crisis is a bad thing, especially when you don’t come back.)

Going back to how I’m bipolar with rapid cycling for a moment:

That night, I had a breaking point. It’s called crisis. It’s a point when a person literally cannot take any more upon themselves. Never mind broken, I was shattered. I wasn’t having suicidal thoughts. I was making a plan. Do you know what that means for most people? It means that it’s box time. You remove all objects from a person, including their clothes, because you know, they don’t deserve dignity anymore, and you put them into a little box with no windows and a door the locks from the outside. You leave them in there until they learn their lesson about thinking so silly thoughts. That’s a terrible place to be—not just that claustrophobic box, but that mental place where it becomes painfully obvious that the best and only option is your own death.

Now some of you are scoffing, I know, and I even know why: you’ve never been there. Others of you are nodding and going “I know that feeling”, because you have been there. You know that there reaches a point when the old survival instinct starts to kick in and like a drowning person, you start grabbing onto anything that comes close just so you can not feel like that anymore. And once you find that feeling, all that depth of emotion that had gone into the crisis boils over into it and fills you up because it is at least somewhat better than dying. Most people on the outside will tell you that the crisis is over—the person isn’t seeking to kill themselves anymore, so it must be right?

Wrong.

You see, the break is still there. You aren’t healthy and you are most certainly not put back together again. You are still a danger to yourself, but now also others. You see, most of the time, after you have reached that dark depth, you move onto anger. The form this anger takes can be many, but most of the time, you begin by lash out—usually at the source of the final straw before the break, the “cause” of your crisis. Any little thing becomes a huge sign of their betrayal, and instinctually you see them as having almost killed you. So you want to hurt them, just as much as they hurt you, never mind if that hurts you too or people completely innocent of the whole thing. Most of the time, this person is a partner, a best friend, or a parent, so you will know exactly what would hurt them the most, because these are people that we are vulnerable with.

And guess what? That breaking point was with reality as well, so it doesn’t even have to be a real problem that exists anywhere outside of your own head—not that you know this, because you are convinced to the core of your being that it’s true and breaking a psychosis—fancy word that describes your thought process at this point in time—is not something that can be done at one time, or even only once and be done with it. No, that takes time, time that you may not get because you basically attacked someone who is usually your greatest support and who may not even realize why you are attacking them. Let’s face it: you are psychotic.

You are also now a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are the bipolar who cannot be consistent, who destroys themselves because they couldn’t not do so. You are alone because you abused the one person who has tried to be there through everything—who put up with all your immature shit and wild delusions. You forced the one person who promised you forever to break his promise and you have no one to blame but yourself.

It doesn’t matter if you would change it if you could…because you can’t change it, can you? Even if you get your shit together and take the meds perfectly and lose the extra weight and get over being depressed, there will always be that inconsistency there, lingering in the background, circling like a shark, and just waiting for something to happen. And you know it will, because you’ve been there before, haven’t you? You’ll be fine for years, able to cope just fine, maybe not perfectly, but you can get by—then something will happen…late night out with friends, maybe, or a move, a change in job: you know, the little instabilities that are just a part of life, but that you can’t handle because of something that you were born with and for which there is no cure; hell, there’s not even such a thing as remission despite what you’ve read in a few places because that wasn’t your Type of Bipolar, now was it?

Well, congratulations. You fucked up the one good thing that you had going for you.

Don’t you feel fucking fabulous?