I keep looking at my life like it is somehow supposed to make sense. Like portions of it can be added up to equal something greater than its parts. Like these intense impulses that have controlled so much of my life will eventually lead me somewhere with greater understanding than where I was before. Although my symptoms have decreased in intensity over the past few weeks, my days continue to pass through phases that end with some form of despair or agitation brought on by my behavior and/or overactive imagination being fueled by my mood and bending my mind into mental discontentment with parts of my life. One week I am fine with something and the next week I despise the same thing. It’s sometimes so difficult to see what is real and what is not when your mind is possessed by your mood. Mood is like the light that illuminates objects and thoughts, and when it becomes distorted so do the objects and thoughts that it illuminates. You change and so does your world.
The difficulty in all of this is how real your mood driven behavior and thoughts become. You don’t see them as mood driven behavior or thoughts because you become them and you can’t see through their influence because you become the influence. It’s not until your mood shifts along the spectrum and pauses somewhere where a different perspective can take place that you realize that you’ve been deluded once again. The scary thing though is that most of the behavior that happens during these mood driven phases is far from passive and usually has far reaching impacts on your life and the people close to you, which inevitably increases your stress and anxiety once you’ve realized that you lost control once again and have to deal with the consequences, which usually sets you off once again.
Now making sense of it all is so difficult because of the way we’ve been taught to rationalize and understand our world. My behavior and thoughts don’t make sense all the time in a logical linear fashion. They don’t always neatly add up in a rational way. My behavior and thoughts are filled with contradictions and opposing view points. One month the world will reveal itself one way and I will attempt to derive conclusions and insights from it and the next month it will appear in another way that opposes the conclusions and insights formed from the month before and I never really know which view point best represents the world around me because the feelings behind the view points keeps changing so dramatically. I can only imagine how confusing it must be for the people in my life to comprehend and predict who I am.
I guess I am making some progress though in understanding and making sense of it all because I am able to occasionally separate myself from these extremes and see things in a more overall context that includes the extremes and everything in between. I sometimes feel blessed by my disorder because it allows me to have access to these extreme realms of human experience that I don’t think everyone has access to, but once again I also feel cursed by my disorder because this access can also lead you into the most horrible places imaginable or places where you really shouldn’t have been. I guess all the parts of my life don’t neatly add up to something that creates an easily understandable conclusion, I don’t think anyones life does, but I do think I am beginning to accept what life includes for me and I’m trying to find ways to channel these extremes into elements of my life where I think they can be more useful. The catch now is to remember this perspective once an extreme takes hold of my mind.
All i can say is thank you so much for writing this. It is as if you took everything i have been struggling to put into words or even understand myself and wrote it down for me to see as a separate person. This helps so much, when i am in one of my moods all i have to do is read this to remind me i will eventually get back to my normal state.
Being able to say you sometimes feel blessed by bipolar is, in my opinion, one of the biggest steps to take in living with it. For sure, the horrible lows and aggressive highs I’d sooner do without, but the power of the bipolar brain is quite astounding.
Best Wishes,
Zathyn