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Bipolar in my heart

September 8, 2014 – 11:22 pm
Posted in Bioplar Disorder, Christianity and bipolar, Depression, Mania, Mindfulness
Tagged bipolar, Bipolar Christians, bipolar disorder, depression, emotional, fear, intolerance, life, mania, manic, manic-depressive, mental health, mental illness, mindfulness, optimism, philosophy
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These earrings personify the bipolar experience for me. When I am manic, I am like the skeletor face and when I am depressed I am the personification of the drooping mask…even though we are required to wear masks in our day-to-day life I don’t know about you, but it is nearly impossible for me to wear a happy face in all arenas.

For the longest time I was reluctant to wear these earrings because I thought they were too weird and Aztec pagan, but recently I realized they are the perfect expression of my personality. Someone from outside could look at these and think they are weird or cool. But no one but myself will know what they truly signify. And I don’t know about you but sadly being bipolar is part of my identity.

I think, from DBT class and a lot of other blogs, that bipolar shouldn’t define a person. You can use your social and behavioral skills to mask it and not rock the boat for anyone else. But, right or wrong, being bipolar is part of who I am. I cannot escape from this, no matter how acceptably I behave; no matter what positive philosophy I adopt.

And I truly do believe that these positive philosophies are the way to go. Bipolar DOES NOT own you. But for my part, though it doesn’t own me, it is still a part of who I am and I do get sick of all the “positivity” and “cheerleading”. Does that make me a person who gives up? I don’t think so. Being aware is OK. It keeps a person ready to think a moment before reacting to something.

Because you are aware. Awareness isn’t a failing. Acknowledgement is not a failing. Acknowledgement is important and really the best way to help yourself.

Acknowledgement is not the same thing as characterizing oneself. I have been guilty of this. Acknowledgement does not give the disorder its power. Its power comes from characterizing yourself.

You are more than your bipolar disorder. But acknowledging it, even gaining personal power from the knowledge and experience, are good things, in my opinion as a person who has struggled with self-hatred and inferiority from this disease.

So I do like my earrings. They don’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Nothing does.

There is power in personal symbols.

Hunted

April 13, 2012 – 8:15 pm
Posted in Bioplar Disorder, Fiction, Getting the crazy out
Tagged bipolar, depression, dreams, fantasy, fear, fiction, spirit
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A loud thump startled him out of sleep. Not loud enough to relieve the darkness of his dreams with waking fears, but more to give a kind of substance to their stalking, nameless shapes. A sound of heavy treading, a clomp upon a stair.

He tensed, his heart beginning to race, but the sound faded even as he sought to identify it.

It was gone. No one had come. It mattered little. He had nothing to offer.

He began to drift, downward, deeper, beneath the sightless rock pools to shelter from the shadow walkers. They circled him, and began to merge. He smelled the dank green moss beneath his hands. He felt the cool breath of the beginnings of despair. And the sound came again, this time with a shriek, and a roar that drowned all dreaming.

It was the wind, he realized, coming awake, a storm wind lurching in fierce gusts from across forever. It beat the crumbling keep with angry fists, careened shrieking around corners and through cracks in the stone, roared overhead like a great beast with a cymbal-crash of battering wings.

A moment of respite, a settling, and then another gust slammed the wall, crushing the mortar like an enormous boulder from God’s own catapult, if such a thing could exist.

The surface against which he pressed himself, he could feel it shake, and heard a quiet voice nearby, almost a whisper, as if in prayer.

He thought himself awake at last, but the darkness remained as it had been. Except for the shadow stalker, which had either vanished or come fully upon him, in tides of pressure that squeezed and bent and twisted him, to flatten, mold or break him; unrelenting as the wind in all its myriad shapes.

All that sound, compressed in his head. Wind crashing skirl…silence.

No sound of whispered prayer. No one there, at all.

Only a grating and grinding behind his heart, the swells of wind, and the cancerous pressure of darkness.

Something about it…he had been here before. He had a decision to make, and quickly. To yield, or to fight it. To brace, or allow it to embrace and crush him.

But not to name it. Absolutely, no.