World Bipolar Day: Living Between Waves and Episodes
The first moment of healing was found when wandering in the outside world. Wondering what life was for, I was lost and emotionless. The rules and regulations were no more, the unpredicted catastrophe had calmed over, but I could not see suffering’s end. The world had stopped just for me, but it had kept going for all else. Life had continued, and so I felt peace. Peace was light and it was still. Peace’s presence taught me that my suffering was profound but that there should be more to living than escaping turmoil. I found peace on a hill and as I looked out, I saw the lives of others.
My connection to the world is a gift that cannot be rescinded, it does not perish when I cannot think, and it does not diminish when my sanity slips. I live between upsets and despite falls. My life with bipolar is a tide that attempts to break my small steps but my life outside of bipolar is a leisurely and long stroll. I channel much greater strength than an illness of the mind, as the inside world of chaos, self-hatred, recklessness, numbness, and sorrow fails to measure up to nature’s gorgeous visage of a person you cherish, who you meet again. I broke down again, I think to myself uncaringly, but you always get back up, says another. All will go mad if looking into a mirror without respite, staring into one’s soul without flinching, and your mind will burst if your manic self-reflection is not sullied. You feel your mind swell with mania and reality constrict.
Depression feels like having all the emotions, all the clothes hanging in the closet and being unable to get to them, until one day you simply pick up a new outfit. Depression is like forgetting you exist only to remember misery. Depression is like having a first love that you love to hate, that you want to escape but are too tired to send away. Depression drowns with an invisible force, an aftermath which feels without a trace, until it comes again. Depression slowly devastates.
Mania felt like the strongest, most certain pull of my life, the deepest most soaring wave, two cliffs colliding. Crushing my hopes, sweeping my body. The doors opening and being closed, as I swallowed fantasises and gulped down delusional nightmares. Swept up with no room to breathe, I am knocked out not by mania but by human necessity. Alone I would have drifted up, sleepless, but together I survived. I grasped on to human hands and was saved.
That feeling of dependency on a doctor, washes away our differences. The pandemic introduced several waves of suffering; situational sadness growing into dark depressions, families and loved one separated, the restrictions on the vulnerable, the deaths and the mourning. The pandemic brought terrible changes to society with consequences such as the mental health crisis particularly affecting children, causing mass societal hurt. Mental health will take time to heal despite the incredible feeling of normality already, rebounding.
Britain’s poor mental and physical health reflects our country’s deplorable inequality. People with bipolar are affected by disparity and face a life brutally defined only by their condition if they live without access to sustained, high-quality, and humane medical treatment. One lesson from the pandemic is that in order to have a full life and to have a chance at freedom, the vulnerable always need a safety net where they can recover with their needs met. People with bipolar in crisis are locked down, often without choice, and face their lockdowns alone. The two years of the pandemic have developed individual resilience and should also advance our compassion towards those who will continue to face illness, locked down but now more understood.
Learning about the condition and yourself, is a beautiful form of healing. Education, the building blocks of recovery, settling and slotting calm rationality in the disturbed mind. Learning is defensive when you become more informed to advocate for yourself, and all the effort exerted when preparing the next episode is never lost. You gain knowledge, skills, and insight which compact each time until you can materially grab it for your own use. Self-awareness and planning results in a horrible situation being decidedly less worse.
The discoveries which have taken place, and will in the future take place, about bipolar provide hope that more and more people will continue to experience improved life outcomes. The legacy of scientists, of medics and of medical health advocates is shown in the scores of people with bipolar who establish stability, who subvert low expectations, and who find peace. When you lose your ability to feel, to regulate your thoughts, and to say what you mean when you need to speak the most, you still have value. I felt like I could never learn again. Learning is also about letting go of what is old to make way for new discoveries. As I age, I grow stronger, wiser and I grow upwards. I keep finding happiness.
Depression returning feels like noticing the shadow, which was always there, the screaming negative voice begging for attention, viciously quick and silencing. Depression’s shadow is so large that it blocks out the current day, the day after and your whole future is unseeable. You take every day at a time, and you fight through every moment to get to the other side, perpetually there clear and untroubled.
Depression unfolds, crashes but then it subsides. It is the same old sickness each time. Depression is stubborn, repeating, but it is a known illness. Depression affects so many people with causes from bipolarity to the trauma of the pandemic, that humanity would constantly be under lockdown if it was a virus. Learning to ‘live with the depression’ is the convenient thing to say. Depression realistically will forever exist. However, the same time for all its devastation, whenever depression recedes it should be exalted that it was powerless and that it has lost, not you. Depression comes in circles; it may never be fully broken but perhaps meeting it again shows you came round it from the other side and can do so once again.
There is something so much deeper than bipolar and yourself, that when you feel it, you know you were supposed to be alive. Finding meaning is not finding the solution to life’s and bipolar’s infinite number of problems, but it is finding the inner strength that you can deal with whatever you are handed.
I had bipolar before the pandemic, and I will have bipolar after the pandemic. This was the belief I clung to when the coronavirus pandemic began, and it has served me well. The stronger belief underneath this, which kept so many going regardless of diagnoses, is that life will always be difficult, but troubles pass and can be overcome. Life is between the waves and episodes, and it is glorious.
For more information regarding World Bipolar Day please visit: https://www.rethink.org/get-involved/awareness-days-and-events/world-bipolar-day/
Header Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
