Bless me father for I haven’t written in 3 weeks. You’ll be strong, also.
While you’re nursing your feels here are five things I wish people without bipolar knew about bipolar bears:
1. Stop walking on egg-shells.
We’re tougher than you think.
We’d far rather you played open open cards and told us the truth about our actions. Tell us you when you think we’re acting, “weird”. It’s usually the case that we see our totally inappropriate actions as entirely rational and “normal”.
“Weird” can be a way alerting us to the the fact that we’re heading for a blow out. If we’re not too far gone we can do something about it. Quite what we do is none of your concern. Kidding! One of things we can do if we know these things is asking, or getting, help for ourselves.
2. “Everyone has high’s and low’s, you’ll snap out of it” is unhelpful af.
There would a be a truck load of snaps. There’s a wave of pre-manic that’s pretty rad and we’d all like to ride that wave – but it ends eventually.
It’s replaced by a loneliness that grips so hard we’re so sapped of energy we struggle to get out of bed even to make a sandwich. A snap of any description is not an option.
So that happens or, more often than not in my case, it’s replaced by highs – so high the air is thin we’re delirious. We’re convinced that people have conspired against us, we’re angry a lot, we’re strangers to ourselves, we’re so deluded on this high the impossible seems entirely possible and we’ll play this game to an inch of our lives. Also the loneliness here too.
So piss off with, “snap out of it”.
3. Don’t use my disorder to justify my behavior.
“It’s ’cause of the bipolar”. We’re acting like assholes and our behavior is hurtful to you – tell us that.
If we’re having a disagreement and we’re overreacting say so – without blaming the bipolar. Doing so only antagonizes us and opens the door to doing totally unjustifiable things without any inhibition “because of the bipolar”.
If we scare you or get physical walk (or run) away. Call the cops on us even (or not in South Africa, our therapist and the security company is probably a better option). When this happens we’re too far gone and nothing you do can help.
4. Stop trying to understand why we don’t take our meds (sometimes).
You’ll never get why taking medication is such a hack, quit trying to. The reasons we don’t necessarily stay the course are vast.
Feeling like a lifeless corpse with no emotion at all isn’t wonderful, would you believe.
Other notable reasons you’ll never understand are that we forget because we’re too high and think we’re doing just fine without them, better in fact.
Or we legit can’t – ref.: the in bed sandwich thing.
See above RE: blaming the bipolar. If we’re better on the medication then tell us so, tell us how when we’re on them we’re easier to keep in your lives, tell us about that time we nearly drove into a bridge and how scary that was for you.
Experience speaks louder than guilt.
We’re more than our bipolar. We’re a lot like you in fact.
We want to love. We want to have families. We want to have jobs and keep them. We want to stay alive. And we want to enjoy that life.
Really, we do want the same things.
How we achieve all these things is probably harder though – usually much harder than you can even imagine.
The fact that I am writing this post while living and breathing is an triumph.
6. Late Entry: Our apologies are genuine and sincere.
Apologizing for something is difficult for most people. For us bipolar folk it’s especially difficult. First we have to forgive ourselves – something that takes a while. We were out of our minds. We said things we didn’t mean that were informed by ill conceived delusions of grandeur or plain old delusion.
If we ever make it to forgiving ourselves, making amends with the people we love is just as difficult, of not more. It’s likely we’ve said sorry before. Many times probably.
If an apology is considered genuine if it means to promise never to do something hurtful again: we promise you we want that to be true more than anything in the world.
The reality is we may strike again – the lesser known relapsed bipolar more so.
You’ve every reason to think we’re not being genuine – you’ve heard it all before. But we are more genuine than you’ll ever know. We need you in our lives, we’re desperate to be accepted despite ourselves and we need your love and kindness if we’re to make it at all.
