To live successfully with any illness requires active engagement with your diagnosis. It's important to understand the basics of whatever portends, recognise symptoms, and to know how to respond each time. That is also what I call being actively involved in your life on a daily basis.
Any illness of body, soul, or mind demands our active participation, applying curative or palliative care, whether it's diabetes, hypertension, bipolar depression, or a broken bone, heart or spirit.
I am very connected with my mind, soul, and body not primarily because of illness but because to neglect those would be to deny my mortality, to ignore the frailty of life, and to ignore my responsibility for God's gift of life.
I'm certain that I have a better union with myself than most people do. I appreciate too that some, possibly most people see my (very open) life negatively and are cyclopic about the positive things I enjoy as I thrive with a mental heath diagnosis.
Let's face it; most of us go through life in a state of sleep-eat-work and bodily functions that go along with that, never questioning life and its purpose. Even I have had periods of ambivalence about my life denying I need constant engagement to be my best, reeling violently under stress, inflicting injury as I go along, pretending to be "normal", and being engaged in unbeneficial relationships and activities.
That was then. Now I know for certain whom I am. I think I'm a wonderful combination of some fine talents, skills, incomparable largesse, and a beautiful mind that I hope to take occasionn to explore, wrapped delicately in a body that's a tad overweight.
I am five-foot-five-and-a-half inches of wonderful possibility � the possibility of me that could even make you conscious of you, your innate spirit that your body houses to pass through this world once. And, if you have the courage, to determine to engage yourself with more intensity and be better than whomever you are right now.
As I was having these thoughts it occurred to me that the pendulum had swung. The movement is not too far left but sufficient to make me realise I'd been experiencing the "good" side of my bipolarity over the past week. Last Saturday was most notable.
Having been awoken to news of what I deem the early demise of someone I know–again–and that being the constant challenge to my engagement with truths about my mortality, I noted I'd had three full-length conversations in a short period. Of course that's only significant because mostly I don't even want to answer the phone.
The next few days would prove why my second doctor thinks I'm bipolar. I have been expressively happy, chatty, energetic, and sleepless. It's what I term the happy medium of bipolarity, a milder experience quite apart from the full-blown mania most of us recognise.
Classic mania of bipolar disorder is cyclical, within severe and disabling mood and behaviour episodes of acute depression and full-blown mania. It's easily recognisable mainly because it thinks and behaves grandiose, psychotic, and elated with "superhuman energy and libido and reckless judgment." My current episode is milder.
Richard Friedman, MD, writes, "Like most diseases, bipolar disorder comes in different shapes and sizes and can be difficult to diagnose...But a milder form of mania, called hypomania, is not obvious at all, especially in someone ... who happens to be temperamentally dramatic and lively.
"That is because hypomanic people feel very happy, have lots of energy, need little sleep and are generally fun to be with. And they certainly do not run to doctors complaining of happiness. So it is easy to see how hypomania could masquerade as cheerful character" (http://www.nytimes.com).
We mostly speak of the melancholic, tearful, lethargic side of bipolarity, and often the manic side bears responsibility for a lot of the fear and prejudice held against mental illnesses. But not everyone with depression displays these symptoms.
I had gone to the yard on Saturday for chadon beni to season the cascadura intended for Sunday lunch.
Two hours later, I had relocated more than a dozen large pots of anthuriums, replanted some that needed extra care, relocated ten palm plants, trimmed all the orchids, watered hundreds of other plants and completed sundry other tasks in between. These were outstanding for months and I could never find time or energy.
It was dark before I recognised I had no chadon beni.
Later, from scratch and for no one in particular, I made two sets of pizza, vegetable rice in chicken broth, garlic buffalo chicken, curried cascadura in pigeon peas, basmati rice, roasted vegetables, cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the house, and painted until 3 am. Then I rose on Sunday and went off to church for some spirited worship.
I'm so connected it's almost like I'm looking at the movie starring me and it's a great script, with sadness, laughter, joy, skepticism, and more–temperamentally dramatic and lively.