Spring has arrived once again and like most years I am beginning to return to a temperament/mood that I enjoy and that I look forward to. I am always surprised at how much influence the seasons can have on my experience of everything. The transition is always subtle, but the impact is never mistaken and is always huge. The longer days, the warmer weather and the newfound energy that touches everything and brings forth a buzz that radiates to the core. Spring, I’m glad you are here!

A period of stability has passed and I have fallen into a late winter depression once again. Damn these cold dark days and the misery they bring on. The doctor has shaken up the combination of medications and has advised some time off work to relieve stress and provide some rest.  I pray these days will pass soon!

You never see these periods coming, when they come. The overwhelming sensations that flood your mind from every direction as you try you’re hardest to stand firm and continue functioning as usual and not to drown in the onslaught of normal responsibilities that now have transformed into giant weights that are holding your head under water and preventing you from breathing.  You try your hardest, but what was once an easy task has become impossibility.  The naturalness of your character and associated behaviours have become dislodged, distorted and broken, and you are vividly aware of how lost you feel as you desperately try to find something that you recognize in yourself that will bring you back.

There is a hopelessness that envelopes your existence. Thoughts flood your mind about how you are incapable of continuing like you have for so long. You ask yourself what you are going to do, but this question just piles more pressure on you, as you slowly retract into yourself.

Indecisiveness takes over and even small decisions feel like they are impossible to make. The mental paralysis towards decision making is excruciating and quickly becomes a form of physical paralysis as you give up on decision making and instead sit and watch time pass by moment by moment, until it is once again time to sleep.

You come to realize during these periods how empty existence can really become and how it is a state of mind that ultimately shapes the vacuum of existence into something other than itself. All these textures, shadows, shapes and sounds scattered in every direction creating something rather than nothing, but only becoming knowable and meaningful through the mind. The contents of mind I don’t think have changed, it is my experience of mind that has changed, but in changing it has transformed all appearances to take on its overpowering state of being. The contents I think are still the same, but their influence, meaning, value, importance and impact have changed in accent, personal interpretation and significance, which inevitably brings me back to questioning whether the contents are still the same, leaving me unsure of the true state of things. All I can do now is sit and wait for that morning when everything suddenly lifts and my mind returns to its non-depressed state and my relationship to the contents of my mind change once again.

I’ve had many discussions over the past year on bipolar disorder forums with newly diagnosed members searching for answers as to why they ended up getting bipolar disorder in the first place or what was now in store for them looking forward. The questions definitely had an undertone of denial in the diagnoses and seemed to be stemming from a fear of not knowing what to expect or what to do. I remember asking myself the same questions when I was diagnosed and I remember the denial that I initially went through as well, but I assure you that the diagnosis was a positive event.

I remember the day I was diagnosed like it was yesterday. I was deep into a dark October depression, the sky was overcast and I hated my life. I was just coming off a rollercoaster summer of pure mania and I was now in the crash. I walked into my psychiatrist’s office that morning, sat in the big comfy chair and he dropped it on me like an atomic bomb, “I am convinced based on your history and everything that we have discussed that you without a doubt have bipolar disorder”. I felt my peripheral vision sink back into my head and everything took on a very foreign hollow feeling. My only experience with bipolar disorder up to this point in my life was an ex-neighbour who committed suicide. My mind started racing with thoughts about what this meant as I left my doctor’s office and drifted down the street. Do I really have bipolar disorder? What is bipolar disorder? Do I have to take medication for the rest of my life? Is this diagnosis right? Am I crazy? My world was spinning and I was afraid.

In the weeks following my diagnosis, I read everything I could get my hands on to better understand my diagnosis and potentially disprove my doctor’s diagnosis, but the more I read the more I began to realise that indeed my doctor was right, I had bipolar disorder. Little did I know, this diagnosis would be the best thing that could have ever happened to me. My diagnosis was my important first step in finding a more stable and enjoyable life.

Although diagnosis reveals what some would consider a negative scenario, diagnosis is actually a positive one. Diagnosis shows you that much of your past behaviour, that you thought was being driven by you, was in fact being uncontrollably driven by a chemical imbalance in your brain. It gives you answers as to why the reoccurring, mad socializing, drinking, partying, spending and acting reckless happens and why this suddenly ends unannounced and you now can’t leave your house or talk to anyone for months because you are so depressed. All those unexplainable and irrational past experiences and decisions now have an answer that makes sense.

Along with revealing the motives behind your past actions, your diagnosis also gives you the opportunity to actively start a new life so to speak. It’s the wake up call that says, “Hey, you can’t live like that anymore!” Your diagnosis shifts new responsibilities onto your shoulders that didn’t exist before, and of which you now must be very aware for your own good. These new responsibilities help bring balance and stability to the chaos that existed before and usually include medication, therapy, eating habits, sleeping patterns, mood tracking, stress management, etc., but most importantly they include a new self awareness that didn’t exist before. These new responsibilities at first can seem daunting, but once you get used to them they are very rewarding with the new gift of consistency that they help bring about. No longer are you imprisoned by the instability of your mood and associated behaviours. You can now plan six months in advance and have an idea of the person who is going to be there. Things won’t always be perfect with your mood even when following a treatment plan, but things will be more consistent than if you were not.

So along with discovering the explanation for the chaos of your past and finding new techniques to manage your life into the future, your diagnosis is an important and positive catalyst that helps bring the past and future into the present moment where clarity and direction can be found. One thing must be stressed though: diagnosis is only an event and is nothing in itself. It is what you do with the diagnosis that means everything!

To tell or not to tell, that is the question.  Over the last few weeks I’ve had a few discussions surrounding the topic of informing people in my life about my diagnosis and whether it is beneficial or not, so I thought I would write about it because I wrestle with this question daily and I have also shared my situation with a few people so far in my life.

Like anything that is considered taboo, bipolar disorder holds a perception within its name that when released on the average ear it is feared, misunderstood and bent completely out of context.  For the average person bipolar disorder has no real personal relationship to their lives and the only referral point that these people have to the disorder is social gossip and what the media and movies have indirectly provided them, which in most cases are extreme stories used for selling purposes and not to educate on the actual reality or spectrum of the disorder.  They rarely hear about the million-plus people who have been diagnosed with the disorder that function relatively normally in daily life.  They rarely hear about the benefits that bipolar disorder can bring to an individual’s creativity, insight and drive. They rarely hear about the successful scientists, philosophers, businesspeople, artists and politicians who lived with bipolar disorder, but contributed enormously to the world. Keeping this in mind, you must evaluate your situation carefully and consider what is in your best interests before revealing your disorder to a largely misinformed world.

When considering telling people that you’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder there is no clear answer on whether you should or not.  Everyone’s situation in life is very different and what might be beneficial for one person may be the demise for another.  It is unfortunate that sharing this type of information needs to be considered so carefully, but for your own sake it truly does need to be considered carefully.  Bipolar disorder does have a stigma attached to it and people will see you differently once you tell them. You need to consider the impact that sharing this information may have and decide whether or not that is what you want. Ask yourself how sharing this information will help you and if you can’t find answers to how it might help then maybe it is a better idea not to say anything for now.

In most cases if you are comfortable with your family or close friends, these are the people who are easiest and safest to open up to.  Of course they may be shocked by your diagnosis, but that shock usually turns to unconditional caring and love that is very helpful as a support network to help you manage your disorder. I believe that it is important to have at least a few personal people in your life to talk to about your thoughts and mood because they act as a balancing mechanism when you might be a little off balance.  A good example is when you get into a pattern of negative thinking while depressed, sharing your thoughts with these people can be very beneficial because they can help put things in proper perspective and release some of the built-up tension from the downward spiral of depression.

Telling people outside of your family and close friends is where things become a little more difficult and must be approached cautiously.  The first group of people that comes to mind outside of family and close friends is your employer and co-workers.  This is your bread and butter and damaging your working relationship can not only be devastating for you livelihood, but for your mental health as well.  These people probably already know that something is a little off with you because of your past behavior, but they probably attribute this to your personality and consider it quirky parts of who you are.  Well, they are right.  These are quirky parts of who you are, but for some reason there is a difference in perception of these being quirky parts of who you are and these behaviors stemming from bipolar disorder.  Even though you are the same person before and after, revealing your diagnosis changes everything.  They will now see everything you do stemming from bipolar disorder.  Telling your employer must be calculated very carefully and I would not suggest telling them unless you strongly believe that they will understand and support you.

If you can trust your employer then telling them can have its benefits. This can include a better understanding of your situation during difficult times, sick leave, reduction or balancing of workload to reduce stress and better perspective/understanding of possible inappropriate behavior. Many larger organizations and government offices with human resource departments have included policies and support networks for people suffering from mental health problems, which is a huge step in the right direction.

Anyone outside of the above people need to be evaluated on a case by case basis. It can be useful to tell close co-workers (if they can be trusted) because it can help them have a better understanding and perspective of who you are and what you are sometimes going through. You spend a lot of time with these people and it might be helpful to your situation if they can understand your behavior better.  I know I sometimes go through bouts of depression and become disengaged at work.  Before I informed my close co-workers they were taking my disengagement personally and thought I was upset with them, but now they understand that this has nothing to do with them and will usually pass after a few weeks. Also, you should expect a few possible reactions from people you might tell. I’ve experienced three distinct reactions so far and they include fearfulness, overcompensation and acceptance.  Fearfulness is just that - fearfulness, overcompensation is when they treat you like you cannot do anything for yourself anymore and acceptance, my favorite, is when they empathize with what your going through, but continue to treat you relatively the same as before you told them but with a better understanding.

It is unfortunate that revealing bipolar disorder needs to be considered so carefully, but until it is accepted in the mainstream as just another aspect in the spectrum of being human then it will remain hidden in the shadows of daily life. The reality for reaching this mainstream acceptance is kind of a catch 22 though because in order for bipolar disorder to become mainstream and accepted, people suffering from it need to speak out, but by speaking out you potentially face being persecuted for the natural biological functioning of your brain because it does not function exactly like the brains of the majority.  I’ve personally told my employer, co-workers, close friends and family, but other than that I will remain an anonymous voice of bipolar disorder until the world realizes that the disorder can be managed successfully and that there are huge benefits to having bipolar minds in this world.

I’ve been thinking lately about time and its relationship to bipolar disorder and more specifically on how time, consistency and expectation impact our relationship to ourselves and the perspectives of people who view us from the outside.  In our daily lives consistency seems to be something that is sought after as the foundation that everything else relies upon. In jobs, relationships, self-identification and in social identification, consistency appears to be a key expectation in all facets of life. It seems that the ability to predict the future is almost as important as the ability to anticipate it.  Knowing who we are and why we do the things we do, and finding ways to continue this process of carrying our past into the future, is an essential role of a perceived healthy human being.  However for us bipolars, consistency is one of our most difficult challenges and the world reminds us of this every day.

It sometimes seems like the world isn’t made for us.  Like we don’t fit the mold of what a human being should be.  Employers don’t want workers who will suffer uncontrollable bouts of depression or mania and exhibit associated behaviors.  Friends don’t want the unpredictability of friends who one moment are filled with energy and excitement and the next moment won’t leave their house or talk to anyone because they are so depressed.  They want consistency.  They want reliability.  They want to know that who you are now is who you will be tomorrow and 6 months from now.

The fact is, we would love to have this consistency as much as everyone else wants it from us, but evolution and chance have given us a set of cards that are a little more difficult to play. Like any minority that doesn’t fit the bill of the majority we face our challenges, but for us these challenges are more than just fitting into a social/cultural structure.  For us it means dealing with our social/cultural structure as well as dealing with our internal struggles for self-survival. Our simple existence is a challenge for us at times and especially during an episode of mania or depression. We feel the normal struggles of daily life along with you, but we also feel the struggles of convincing ourselves that this life is actually worth living, or losing so much control of our ability to properly judge and reason that we end up risking it all, both outcomes unfortunately having a bad conclusion. In our extremes things can seem to be unbearable for all involved, but much of our time is spent in milder forms of the disorder’s expressions and at other times we appear to be like everyone else. We live, play and work amongst you and although you may not easily see us, we are there.

There have been many advances in medication and treatments that help us stabilize and manage our shifts in mood to help us better fit the consistent model that everyone wants, but these treatments are still not 100% or what we would call a cure, and until the day of a cure has come, patience, understanding, education and awareness will have to do. We are huge contributors to the world and although socially we can be a little off at times, our creative abilities are sometimes unmatched. You don’t have to look too hard to discover how many great artists, philosophers, scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians have been touched by bipolar disorder or other forms of mental illness.  The future stems collectively from our present minds and the more we can help, embrace and accept each other’s mental health, the better the future will be for all of us.

At times it is difficult to find words to describe these sensations, to understand what the mind is picking up on and interpreting in this way. Deconstruction of my mental space during these periods is difficult to analyze because even the referral points of identity that are normally used as a foundation to ground one’s self, lose their footing.

Everything, including the sense of self, feels void of distinct realness.  The world feels empty of genuine lasting substance and all the people in it take on an essence as if they were actors in an enormously complex and well-crafted play or movie, where the sense of self becomes an audience member watching from the outside. The contents of conversations, the clothing styles and trends, the concerns and dislikes, the entertainment and novelties, the motives and passions, etc., etc., all feel ridiculously surreal and somehow detached or at a distance from where my sense of awareness is during these periods.

The words I pick up on in passing conversations become intensified and exaggerated to the point of a strange unfamiliarity. My reflections in passing windows and mirrors appear foreign and disassociated from what I know is the source of these reflections - my body. Motivation and incentive dissolve into apathy as the world around me becomes emptied of its realism and all that is left is this strange sort of hollow awareness observing the bizarre reality of every fleeting moment.

Questions of an existential nature fill my mind as my awareness continues to perpetually fuel the inquiry into the disassociation and unreal feelings of my surroundings. Do I exist? What does it mean to exist? Where do I exist? Is this all a fabrication of mind?  Am I my mind? What is mind? Who am I?  Most of the time the questioning is not even linguistically formulated, but is simply a process of thoughtless analytical observation where my awareness silently questions my experience through experiencing the experience itself, by becoming vividly aware of the contents of my consciousness and watching them play out in an endless cycle of disassociation that is felt throughout my body and mind.

There are times when these periods are welcome, because of the intense focus they bring to my awareness to reflect on areas of my life that I believe would be impossible to penetrate otherwise, but in most cases these periods bring a deep isolation to my existence where I have an extremely difficult time relating to the people, events and places in my life.  I would never want to give these periods up completely because I feel they are truly important and contain partial truths about what it means to be human, but if I could find a way shut it off at will then maybe I could find a way to regain these moments, and connect with a world that currently becomes filled with pervasive emptiness.

The mind’s sense of freedom, it’s ease of distraction, it’s continuous diversions, it’s never ending choices and ultimately the influence on all of these by mood are what sometimes make things so difficult. All of the above appear to free us and set-up the conditions that create the ultimate challenge of defining meaning to live by, but they are all heavily influence by the visceral energy that initiates or withdraws the mind from action within itself and within the world - mood.

The influence of inconsistent moods and the opposing realities they attempt to create and then perpetuate within a single mind are daunting. Identity becomes a confusing mess of contradictions played back in memory and your vision of the future continually shifts as your inconsistent mood continues to influence the atmosphere of your mind. Freedom begins to haunt you as you begin to realize your only choice in life is to continue choosing while not fully trusting your judgment, even though in every moment that judgment feels right. Identity becomes split into three modes of functioning: manic, normal and depressed. You identify differently with each identity and although your overall identity remains the same, each different mode transforms you into something far different than the other. Parts of your life can’t function properly together and things start to become a mess and fall apart. You do things in one mood that you would never do in the other and you have to somehow find a way to reconcile this conflict during of your fleeting moments of stability.

Left alone to your sense of freedom, you see the world around you happening and you try to understand how you fit into it. You find things to surround yourself with to tell you who you are, to reassure your insecurities that inevitably present themselves in every choice you make so that you think you understand the reasoning behind your choices, but as time goes by the things you surrounded yourself with lose their effect and influence and you’re lost once again to your sense of freedom and the unpredictability of who you will be in the months to come.

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.

I’ve slowly come to realize with the help of my therapist that there is a black hole in the core of my being that has swallowed up my ability to touch one of the most fundamental and unique traits that separate us from the animals or machines - empathy. By empathy, I mean the ability to feel the emotions of another human being within myself or the ability to more effectively connect to and recognize another’s mode of thoughts, emotions or moods. I’ve known forever that I’ve always had great difficulty connecting to people on an emotional level and truly understanding their perspective and feelings on things, but I always associated it with who I was as a person and I didn’t think I could ever change this and I’m still unsure if this can be fully changed or rehabilitated in the future. Time will tell.

What is clearer now though is that I’ve made the connection between recognizing empathy and recognizing my inability to experience  empathy and in doing so I have on some level given myself a foundation to start from. I’ve partially disconnected from something that I once identified with and I now see it as a hurdle to overcome and regain as part of my life. I’m looking at it as a possibility now and not impossibility like I have in the past. A step forward I think.

I’m not sure if the inability to experience empathy is common for people with bipolar disorder, but I know the struggles I faced with the shifts in my mood surely didn’t help and I guess over time behavioral patterns developed until I completely lost touch with portions of who I fundamentally was as a human being. The extremes and intensity of mood shifts consumed my attention and robbed me of fully appreciating and participating in the minds, moods, emotions, and thoughts of the many great people that I shared my life with until now. Most of who are completely out of my life for reasons associated to my bipolar behavior and of course my inability to share the basic human trait of empathy. I’m glad I’m still fairly young and I’ve luckily made the connections where I’m beginning to regain some control over my life and I’m recognizing my flaws before it is too late. I truly hope that one day I can experience the rebirth of an emotion that has been dead to me for so long and potentially see the world truthfully through the eyes of another, where I will care about and feel their concerns, hardships and struggles like they were actually mine.

These moments are so strange and beautiful. Perceived time somehow stretching and slowing down, bodily reverberations of space felt in the core of awareness. Something has happened, the world’s appearance has shifted again. Perceived distance, so deep and long. Sound presence felt throughout. Deliberate intent inside muted. Pulsating aliveness in every now. The great fiction transformed. An understanding like no other - pure undefined intuition only. The feeling of knowing something deeply through pure sensation, but lost to thought. There isn’t a point, meaning or conclusion, only awareness being awareness.

Clouds drift, wind blows, trees sway, birds sing, flowers bloom… I tried not to choose and in the process ended up choosing…