I have bipolar disorder. While it often makes me suffer greatly, I have also learned to live and flow with it, instead of fighting against the natural being of my brain, and this has improved my life immensely.
I want you to understand that though I am on meds, and use meds to keep my diagnosis under control, the meds don’t fully control the symptoms. I still get a bit manic, and a lot depressed. Without meds I am out of control and I have an illness instead of a diagnosis. But on meds, I have strengths from my diagnosis, as I am in control of it instead of it controlling me.
I live my life like a deciduous tree.
When I am manic, it is like spring for me. I am in absolute flowering bloom with ideas of projects I want to start, people I want to meet, goals I want to achieve. I have sap flowing in my veins that is sweet and nimble and I grow practically overnight, at an exponential rate. I start new things in my life, with exuberance and vigor. I have the energy and the confidence to do things thazt I otherwise can’t do, and my mania thus allows me to dream of an achieve things that I otherwise would lack the ability to do.
Then comes summer, when growth slows but is steady and I’m at a baseline. I’m successful at things and my projects bear sweet fruit.
But it never lasts. That’s the nature of bipolar. The storms come back, the environment grows cold, and I feel the pain of my change in seasons. My autumn hits. My attendance at work suffers and I find my energy receding and shutting down. I find myself overburdened with projects- all the new branches I grew and all the tasks that hang off them like leaves. I can’t help but have to drop them. I try to do it with grace, apologizing and putting on a show of pretty colors, but it is now fall and fall is a time to prioritize, prune, cut back. I take a breath of the crisp air and consider the upcoming depressive winter’s hardships, and decide what projects are most fulfilling, what people are most supportive and healthy, what growth needs to continue or at least be maintained, and I gracefully drop the rest to the ground. Anything unhealthy or unsupportive I let go of so I can focus on what matters most.
I then appear skeletal, but I have my core, the frameworks of what matter to me, and this core is always bigger and stronger from all the spring and summer’s growth than it was before. It is not a loss or a failure; it is a prioritization that keeps me focused on those core values and core relationships in my life, so that I don’t overgrow and tip over.
Did you know that roots grow in the winter? In my depressive phase, I shut down, withdraw and grow roots. I take time to introspect and heal with therapy, with self-help books, with reevaluating my life and planning for my next growth phase. I deepen my relationships with those close to me instead of starting new ones. I deepen my learning, my writing, my self-care and physical health. Winter’s depressions force me to look inward and the project becomes me instead of outer growth, and from this I get stronger and deeper for the next growth cycle. And, I rest, I recover, I heal, I slumber.
And then the cycle begins again.
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