A young woman asked me recently, “What is it like being bipolar?”
I began by talking about the depressions--how you could think your life was finally on an even track and then be struck without warning, the black smoke of despair seeping into every pore of your body and brain.
I tried to tell her about the sick pleasure I used to get from helping myself spiral downward even further, letting my imagination take me as deep as I could go. But people who haven’t been there don’t get that one.
Depression is not easy to talk about* because it is mostly a lack. A lack of energy. A lack of hope. A lack of will.
There is no willpower left to drag yourself up from that hole. You might be able to drag yourself out of bed or drag yourself to the kitchen. If you’re not too deep, maybe you can even drag yourself to work.
But there’s no amount of willpower that will return the flavor of life. You can’t will yourself into happiness.
The young woman I was explaining all this to said then, “Tell me about the mania.”
Of course, the manic part of being bipolar is the fascinating side of it. That’s where all the stories come from. Mania is the aspect that people sometimes envy—the gift of unlimited energy, creativity, and invincibility.
Energy and creativity are great. But feeling invincible can be a terrible handicap, since none of us are.
While driving my first car, when I had passengers in the back seat I would periodically turn around and talk to them just for the thrill of scaring them to death.
I drove two businesses into the ground because I could only focus on building, growing and expanding. Putting money away for the slowdowns was not in my repertoire.
I would take any illegal drug offered me: shooting up heroin a few times, then smoking pot. Fellow art students shared their Benzedrine and mescaline. I sent away for peyote buttons (lophophora williamsii), which you could get for $40 from a P.O. box in Texas at the time. I kept them in the trunk of my car since I was living with my parents. A friend and I swallowed chunks whole with ginger ale one time, boiled up a mess and drank it another, each time getting sick to our stomachs, but high nonetheless.
You don’t have to be bipolar to take drugs, but having any mental illness makes you prone to self-medicating any way you can.
It’s the prescribed drugs we don’t like to take. They all come with side effects, and even when they’re fine-tuned and working well, we miss the person we were without them.
But I can’t really talk for us. I have my own particular brand of bipolar disorder. Each of us does.
At bipolar support meetings I’ve attended, we share our common experiences and our uncommon experiences. There is enough similarity to create a shared understanding, but enough differences to make each life unique.
I have the milder form of bipolar disorder, so I don’t get to a severe manic state. But I still have to watch out for the hypomania that generates a zillion ideas in my head and gives me the energy to put them all into practice at once.
It comes with an optimism that is the opposite of depressive despair.
Who will I be today?
*William Styron’s Darkness Visible is one of the best accounts I’ve read on depression.