An Artistic Curse…or a Complex Personality?
Hollywood calls it the ‘artistic curse’ and over the past decade we have heard, read and seen enough to know what Bipolar illness is. Right? Wrong.
Bipolar is not new, it has however, in recent years – and after extensive medical research – come to be accepted as a chronic condition rather than a general madness, thus re-labelled from Manic Depressive to Bipolar Disorder.
Bipolar. A word that people use flippantly to describe someone who has the odd mood swing or has gone from chirpy to pissed off in the space of a few minutes. After all, according to celebrity magazines, every entertainer in Hollywood is Bipolar. It’s a word that people use freely without having a clue what it really means, or what it really feels like.
So here’s my truth… well, some of it anyway. After all, I am Bipolar.
Being Bipolar is not the same as being crazy, it’s not the same as being Kurt Cobain or Hemingway and it is not a free ride to undisputed artistic genius or achievement. Nor is it a surefire road to the grave or a mental institution. We’ve all seen Carrie in Homeland, and yes it looks almost fun to be Bipolar – to be so smart and sharp – but with every high there comes a low, and although the illness is very well portrayed in the TV series, the reality of it is not quite as simple.
Bipolar is a chronic condition that often results in suicide, financial crisis or addiction. Yet being Bipolar is just like being diabetic, or asthmatic or any other chronic illness that if treated and managed correctly will allow you a full and long life.
Joseph F. Goldberg, the MD. Of the National Institute of Mental Health, states ”Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mental illness that brings severe high and low moods and changes in sleep, energy, thinking, and behavior.”
I am Bipolar Hypomanic and it is my belief that living with this disorder means something different for each and every person diagnosed, that there are as many variations to the illness and the two sub-categories within the condition, as there are personalities.
I can only speak for myself and of what it means to me, and if this condition has taught me anything it is that all people are different and that we all have different perspectives.
For as long as I can remember I have been controlled by my impulses and emotions. I have a ferocious temper and a phenomenal ability to experience both joy and pain. Periodically I hear better, see better, taste more and am extremely sensitive to touch and smell, much more so than the average person. I can cycle between sensations of absolute control and success, to complete hopelessness and despair. I can spend hours, days or weeks barely eating or sleeping, working tirelessly at projects that I may or may not complete, until one day I crash and hide in my house for days, sometimes weeks.
For me, being Bipolar means being a person of extremes, and I enjoy the highs so much that I have so far chosen not to soften them by medicating. I have developed ways of hustling through everyday life and I have chosen not to focus on whether I am type 1 or type 2 Bipolar, hypomanic or manic. I am what I am. And I do my best, just like you.
For me, being Bipolar means being myself – I don’t know anything else.
I’m currently on an airplane listening to AC/DC 34977 feet up in the air and 2713 miles from my destination. Unlike the journey I’ve been on since my suicide attempt in 2004, this journey has a schedule, a crew that manage it and a Captain in charge. My life has never been as organised as this flight.
Twelve years ago I made an attempt on my own life. I took enough pills and washed it down with enough Gin to kill a bull. As with any suicide attempt there is always that tiny margin that you will survive, and that time the margin was mine.
In short (because no one likes a long story) after my failed suicide attempt I spent one week in hospital hovering between life and death, and one day my body and my mind made a turn for the stronger and so I am here today. Not by choice, but by chance.
I remember thinking “fuck them all, I’ll kill myself again as soon as I get out of here” and then I drifted back into that state of deafness, that horrid squidgy state of semi-consciousness that comes with having overdosed on pills, and hoped my liver would fail.
Being diagnosed as manic depressive, what we today know as Bipolar, felt like nothing to me. I sat in a room with seven doctors and psychiatrists and lied my ass off. With an above average IQ that wasn’t particularly difficult. It turns out they’re not a very smart breed after all. I was simply laden with prescriptions, among them lithium, and sent off into the world to fend for myself.
And fend I did.
I left the hospital on legs that could barely carry me, and the first thing my boyfriend did was get drunk. I guess it’d fucked him up quite bad, after all it was he who found me and he who saved me. I suppose it was hard on him. But I didn’t actually care. Mostly I was just pissed off that he interfered with my plan. I don’t like interference. I’m a high-achiever, I speak three languages, hold two university degrees, both with distinction and I am quite convinced I can do anything I want in life… I just seem to lack the ability to carry through with the seven hundred and twenty-five projects I dream up every week.
I spent the following four years drinking, taking recreational drugs, working crazy hours, making lots of money and generally not giving a fuck about anyone or anything. I weighed seven stone, was the life and soul of the party and traveled the world more than you’d think imaginable. I was erratic, irresponsible, spontaneous, wild beyond comprehension and completely at the mercy of my impulses – from happiness to desperation, from highs to lows and back again.
I self-medicated a chronic illness with alcohol and drugs and refused to admit that anything was wrong with me – living my life on my impulses and caring about nothing.
Then I got sick.
My body was tired and I had to have a small operation and while lying in a hospital bed in a foreign country I decided to get a grip.
I accepted that I had an ‘illness’ and I started weeding people out of my life, like a gardener searching for ill-meaning but pretty looking little flashes of colour in the ground.
I sifted through the people in my life with a fine toothed comb and at the end of it found myself alone. But that was ok. Being alone has never been an issue for me. In all honesty I need to be half-drunk to attend a party, I hate loud noises, crowds, happy people and small talk. It’s the sort of white noise that reminds me how incredibly fucking meaningless our lives are. Everyone caring too much about what others think of them and talking about shit that has no meaning, depth or significance whatsoever.
Two weeks later I threw away my pills and I’ve not been medicated since.
It seems poignant to talk to you about this now, as three days ago, in a hotel room at 7am in the morning I woke up from a dream and had a panic attack for the first time in many years. I wasn’t alone, my husband woke up and I spoke to him through streaming tears of how I felt and what I needed from him to get through the day.
The largest tool in my survival kit is independence. I don’t need anyone and I can’t be needed by anyone. ‘Everyone needs someone’ you think, but no, not I. This is one of the many things that make me different; my absolute need for control over my own environment, and the continuous feeling that it is all on my terms. My husband and I don’t need one another; we chose one another and to understand me, you have to make this distinction.
In a few hours I will be back at home with my children. As I write this, and for the first time since becoming a mother, that is a reality I’m not sure how I will handle.
Things have now changed…
Four days ago, unknowingly to me, I lived the very last day of what has been an eight year long cycle where life has seemed fairly kind and I have managed without medication and psychiatry. Four days ago my life was wonderful and manageable.
Today it is not.
Today I am hoping that I can close my eyes, and that they will stay closed. Will that feeling pass? Probably. I don’t know.
Today, after telling my husband how I feel about myself, I wrote a letter to the psychiatric unit where I live and asked to see someone. I need help and I know it. It’s been an eight-year-long cycle I never actually thought would end. It’s just a few weeks ago that I told my best friend that I think Bipolar is a figment of doctors’ imagination and that it doesn’t exist. But three days ago in that hotel bathroom I was reminded that it is an illness as real as any Cancer. And it will eat you up and destroy your life, bit by bit, if left untreated.
Eight years… is that symptomatic of how long this new cycle will be? Instead of erratic energy and minimum amounts of sleep, am I now facing the polar opposite? Overwhelming tiredness, hopelessness and the inability to face the simplest of tasks?
The day I met my husband I knew I would never be alone again, and as he sleeps next to me on the plane I know that I am loved and that I have to keep walking, that I have to face daily tasks and systematically deal with them, one by one. I just have to get home, and when evening comes I have to put my children to bed. After that, in spite of my better judgement, I will pour myself five glasses of wine, write some more and then perhaps take my dog for a walk in the cold night air.
I will seem normal; perhaps even feel normal, until I don’t anymore. That’s the problem with being Bipolar; it’s erratic. For me, it’s short cycles, rapid changes in mood, gross irritation and overwhelming feelings of anger or joy. But these cycles live within a grander cycle that can trick you into thinking all is ok, that you are well again, that you’ve somehow ‘grown out of it’ or that it is indeed not at all real.
But unfortunately it is real.
And when the people close to you come to accept that devastating truth, that it is indeed a chronic condition that won’t magically disappear or go away, but that will haunt you for the rest of your life, there is guilt and feelings of loss and anguish and that doesn’t make it any easier.
So why did I write this? Because you need to know, everyone needs to know, and hopefully it will help those living with the illness. But the main reason I wrote this was to tell you that those with Bipolar are not crazy. It’s time to end the stigma surrounding Bipolar, understand it, accept it and respect it.
In the words of Popeye – “I am what I am.”
(Note from The Editor: Many thanks to Norah Mann for her open and honest article about her struggles with Bipolar. For more information about Bipolar disorder, please take a look at www.bipolaruk.org.)
