Manic Depression and Me: A Bipolar Primer

I was thinking about my barrage of Facebook posts yesterday. Tirades, jokes, rants, and silliness—all in the span of an afternoon. It’s called bipolar. It’s called rapid cycling.

It’s not a matter of being in a good mood one day and down the next. It’s much more intense, sometimes more rapid and always exhausting.

For me, the ups can feel like you’re in the spin cycle of a washing machine with a pair of tennis shoes thrown in to beat you even harder. Spin, spin, spin. Throw in the noise from Chuck E. Cheese and a carousel turned up to 11 and you may start to get the idea. It gets so bad that you just want your claw your way out of your body to escape.

The downs are crushing, like the weight of a thousand cement bags being placed upon you one by one. You feel like crying for no reason at all. You’re paralyzed. There is no sound. Death can’t come soon enough.

Both of these moods can happen in succession over the span of a month or a week—even an afternoon.

Mania can result in all sorts of crazy behavior. Heavy drinking, drugs, maniacal laughter, risky sex, lots of shopping, crazy racing thoughts (good or bad), delusions of grandeur,  or just skittering from one direction to another getting absolutely nothing done.

Depressive behavior doesn’t result in much of anything—just isolation, despair, sometimes even feeling too down to cry.

For me, a regimen of drugs has helped (60 pounds later), so has therapy, but I still have my moments when nothing or no one can snap me out of it. I just have to wait for the insanity to pass. I crawl into bed or sit in a chair clutching onto the arms for dear life. It can take an entire day or more of just sitting and breathing to recuperate from one of these episodes. I’m doing that today, as a matter of fact. As I said before—it’s exhausting.

I was diagnosed as bipolar 20 years ago. I had a one-sided crush on a guy that sent me over the edge. I was suicidal and shopping myself into a frenzied debt. I was the life of the party by day and curled up in a ball at night. One night while bowling I was in all of my hysterical glory. I had my whole team laughing. I went to roll the ball. After I did, I turned around and hated every one of my teammates and just wanted to go home.

This is my life as a Jeckyll and Hyde.

People toss around the terms bipolar and manic-depressive flippantly when referring to their or others’ ups and downs. This cavalier attitude drives me nuts. They don’t toss around cancer or diabetes with so much nonchalance. This is a real disease, folks, a life threatening one.

So please do me a favor. Next time you see me and I’m down, don’t tell me to smile. Give me a hug instead. Next time you remind me how funny I used to be, know that I was probably being tortured from the inside. These days, I’m doing better. The extremes are gone but I still have my moments and probably always will.

Anyway, I hope this post isn’t a downer. That it isn’t isn’t a funny, wistful walk down memory lane. I just wanted to show you another side (or two) of me.

Thanks for your time.