I wish I could tell you that having a mental illness does not take over your life. I wish I could tell you that I see myself as just like anyone else. That I don’t think of myself as damaged goods. But that would all be a lie. The fact is I can never escape being aware of it. As much as I would like to forget. Every night when I am faced with those pill bottles I have to accept it. I have a terminal illness. That’s what bipolar is classified as. One out of three people diagnosed with the disease will die by suicide. That’s a heavy statistic to have hanging over your head. To know that there is that high a chance that you will die by your own hand.
Now you might say to me, “You don’t have to be that statistic. You are stronger than that!”
And yes I would LOVE to believe that. I truly would. But here is the thing. Being suicidal is a SYMPTOM of my illness. I have been forced to come to terms with that. Even now when I am at the most healthy I have been in a long time I have to acknowledge that there will be times when I am in the darkest pit of depression. When even an act as small as brushing my teeth will seem like an impossible task. When it hurts so badly that I can barely breath. I will wake up with bruises all over my body because I cling to myself in my sleep, because I feel like if I let go I will fall to pieces. I cannot begin to describe this pain to you; I don’t think anyone can truly understand it unless they have gone through depression. I don’t mean that you have been depressed as in sad over something, which is a deep pain in itself. I mean clinically depressed.
The worst part of the pain is knowing that it has no cause. That there is no logical reason for you to be in such agony. No reason for all hope to be gone from your life. It is simply your mind playing tricks on you. But that doesn’t make the pain any less real. In that place sometimes it feels as if the only option is to end it all. To choose not to be. I have made that choice before. Luckily my actions never ended in success. But that does not change the fact that at the time I truly wanted to die. I wanted the hurting to stop.
And I have to realize that because of my illness I will be there again. I will go through those dark spells. I will contemplate ending my own life. Suicide will always be a risk for me. But I do not think that I am weak because of that. That says nothing about my character. It is a symptom of my illness. Not a fault in my person.
All of that said, I hate that I know I am capable of that. I hate to know that there is a fundamental flaw in my mind that can turn off any sense of self-preservation. That I am as people in high school called me behind my back a “suicide girl” and not the sexy alternative model kind of suicide girl. I do hate the illness. I hate what it turns me into. But I am trying to learn not to hate myself. Trying to learn to see myself as a girl who HAS bipolar, not a girl who IS bipolar. And that is really hard to do when living with an illness that has such a massive impact on all areas of your life. It effects my very thoughts, my emotions, and my creativity. All that I am is tied up in it and pulling apart the threads to see which strings lie with me and which are tangled bits of the illness is a difficult task, perhaps an impossible task.
I don’t want to blame it on the illness when I get easily irritated and snap at people, when I blow through money in wasteful spending sprees, when I hide in my room and ignore phone calls, alienating friends so much that I may lose them forever. But the fact is all of those things are related to the illness. Or they might be me. Even I am never quite sure just how my actions are affected by the illness. I wish I could tell you that I knew. I wish I could say that I knew myself that well. I wish that I knew my own mind to have that awareness. But I don’t.
I should also admit to the other side of the coin. The pleasure that I sometimes get out of my illness. The high that comes with the mania. It can feel wonderful. Before it gets out of control. When it starts I feel as though I can do ANYTHING! I feel intensely creative, I think in beautiful tangential patterns. I see in brighter colors, hear music in a whole new way. I don’t need to sleep. I can stay up all night long writing or reading or pursuing some creative endeavor. And at first I am very productive. I actually do some of my best work in the first stages of mania. But then it gets out of control. Everything is too fast and too bright. Too much goes on in my head at once. It all hurts. Colors are too bright, the smallest noise echoes in my head till I want to cry in pain. I see horrifying creatures climbing up the walls. Things chase me down the halls. The world spins and I just want the shit to stop. And that’s when I crash. That’s when the depression hits. That’s when I fall down hard. That’s when I start asking “To be or not to be?”
There is a lot more to it than that. I’m writing a far more detailed piece on what is like in my head during both depressive and manic episodes for my prose forms class and I will likely post that here at some point. But back to my original point.
My illness does take over my life in many ways. As much as I wish that was not true. It has a very deep impact on pretty much every facet of who I am. But it is not who I am. Who I am is much more than bipolar. I could tell you about how much I love reading, I could go on for ages about Victorian literature and history, about history in general, about fairy tales, burlesque and horror movies. About horses and what a huge part they have played in my life, about animals in general. About my obsessions with unicorns and all things glittery, about musicals and Shakespeare, about tea and vegan baking. About feminism and women’s rights. About all of the hundreds and thousands of things that make up who I am. Yes I have bipolar. It is not something I will ever escape. In the end there is always the chance that it may kill me, that one day they pain will be too much to bare. I accept that as a grim possibility. One that I intend to fight as anyone with a terminal illness fights his or her disease. But the possibility is one that must be acknowledged. But I am more than bipolar. But I’m Christa, or Muse or whatever name I go by to you. That’s who I am.
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