My most recent plan of action re:
combating The Condition (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, or TRH –
see above) had by this time comprehensively failed: all of my
concerted efforts to train it or to (quite literally) beat it out of
myself had ground to a halt in the face of the worst low I had
experienced in years. Whilst I don’t wish to bore you with unnecessary
details/whine about my Inner Pain, it might be useful to
have a little bit of context here. Everyone experiences their highs and
lows in different ways, and I guess mine are best described as types
of noise, so I've outlined these below:
Ever so slightly cringy as it sounds, if I had to
soundtrack my highs I’d choose the overture to Mozart’s Marriage
of Figaro. It moves at breakneck speed, but in joyful, harmonic
explosions which always resolve into perfect cadences. Whilst high, I
have genuinely believed myself to be something approaching a superior
being, operating at a higher level. I can feel my intellect sparking
off ideas: stratospheric, beautiful ideas that make your humdrum
world, your dull moral code, seem laughable. In my highest states, I
have actively courted danger, exhilarated by the feeling of nihilism
and by my proximity to destruction whilst simultaneously believing
that nothing as mundane as the effects of physical reality could
actually harm me. I also lose all ability to empathise when high –
I am separated from the rest of the world, so why would the rest of
the world be affected by my actions? The world moves too slowly for
the speed I want to, NEED to move at. Physically, I can feel my
heartbeat pulsating though my body and my skin fizz-crackling with
energy. My head is filled with animated, chattering thoughts.
And so to the flip side of the coin.
Most people think of depression as silence, a void. Mine is a
cacophony featuring white noise and voices, my own and not my own,
whispering, shouting, wailing my uselessness. These build to a
crippling anxiety which I feel physically, like a fist around my
throat and chest, making me pant. My stomach churns and instead of
the world not keeping up with me, I become vertiginous, as though the
world is a travelator rushing forwards and I am about to be thrown
off. I try to get rid of the noise and voices in various ways – beating
them
out, clawing at my face and neck, burning them out with cigarette
ends. The rush of pain brings momentary calm, and sometimes I can
cry. Sometimes the exhaustion will let me sleep. The delusions here
are not the symphonic ones above. The only peace I can find is in
thoughts of death; of how and when. I wonder how quick being run
over would be, I know that jumping in front of the Tube would be easy
and instantaneous. I am convinced that everyone in my life would be
better off if I were
not here, that I’m an utter nuisance because my brain can’t function
like a
normal person, I can’t function like a normal person, can’t be
relied on, can’t help anyone, can’t be useful. I’m disgusting and
everybody is looking at me, realising it. I’m an awful person; worse
than
a waste because I actively drain everyone around me.
So. At the peak of the latest
cacophony, I hadn’t slept in weeks, had been self-harming with
increased frequency, had forgotten what it was like not to need
headphones to drown out the voices, and D was beginning to
wonder who had made off with his girlfriend. At this point, and with
enough distance from my last fiasco of a foray into psychiatrics, I
was forced to admit that maybe it might be possible that in the
entirety of the medical establishment, someone might be able to shed
a little light and a little relief on the situation.
In the event, speaking to J turned out
to be a very different experience from my assessment seven years ago.
He was the first person ever to explore my relationship with
bipolar, which turned out to be a damn sight more complex than I’d
imagined. It was also one of the most crucial steps towards coming
to terms with my condition. Although it falls under the category of
being a mental illness, most sufferers will tell you that they wouldn’t
be without their bipolar. I am amongst them. As for many others, this
'illness' has been at least partially responsible
for many of my creative and academic successes. Most bipolar people will
tell you that being high is amazing; so amazing that however
'orrible the lows are, they have continually thought of them as pay-off
for feeling more alive than the average person. They will also, myself
included, tell you that even at their lowest ebb they cling to the
knowledge that they feel more, and more keenly, than most other people.
So it’s not as cut-and-dried as an
exterior force that you want to fight. But neither is it – for me,
at least – an exterior force at all. I’m told that some people
develop symptoms of bipolar later in life, some in their teens, some
even earlier. For me, it’s been a constant companion. I have no
recollection of a time when my brain did not work in the way it does.
In fact, it has come as something of a surprise, over the years, to
learn that not everybody experiences a relationship with their brain
in the same way that I do; still more that they often do not see
their brain as something with which to have a relationship at all,
but simply a functioning tool in their bodily machine.
It has also
come as a surprise over the years that some other people have an
objective, constant
understanding of both themselves and of the world, indeed of reality
itself, often based on a fundamental sense of self-worth. For years,
right up until I found myself
in J’s office, I retained the certainty that nobody actually
existed in this way. Surely no one really, actively liked
themselves, or thought that their voice and opinions were genuinely
more valid than the next person’s. They had just learned to act
like that; trained themselves tirelessly into this unnatural way of
thinking, essentially because they were stronger, better, and more
efficient than I. It continues to astound me that there are
countless numbers of people walking the planet who, though they
appear quite ordinary to the naked eye, do not entertain the company
of a voice in their head telling them just how shit they are most of
the time. Who operate from a basic level of happiness with
themselves; for whom social gatherings are always to be looked
forward to as a source of good clean fun. If this does not
transpire, then it is generally for a solid, tangible reason
rather than a sudden, overwhelming certainty that the people whom I have just met/
have no reason to dislike me/have been my closest friends for 10
years think that I am a twat, and with good reason, for I am
fundamentally a useless specimen. When J probed me on this, I ended
up realizing that for years and years, I had been like a slide
projector: my outer shell remained the same, but a plethora of wildly
contrasting selves whirled around on a reel somewhere inside me,
being projected out onto the world in line with my mental state. No
‘self’ felt like a lie until my state shifted, at which point it
becomes laughable to think that what I firmly believed only a moment
ago could possibly be true, when its opposite was so mind-blowingly
clear. In the same way as my interior self could shift, so the
exterior world could change shape entirely at a moment’s notice.
As the states and the selves shifted, I would berate my brain for not
working properly, not seeing the Real Truth. I would also have
windows of what may or may not have been clarity between these
changing states and changing selves, in which I would become
terrified of being crazy, my brain felt like an intruder, an enemy.
The upshot to all of this conjecture,
however, is that - for better or worse - bipolar is a part of me. A
part as fundamental as my hair
colour. And, just like my very boring mousy brown, however much I
might try to change it, it never quite matches the rest of me. I
might like the change to ice white or auburn, others might like it,
some might even be fooled into thinking it’s natural. But I know
that it’s not real, and that it’s only a matter of time until the
roots start to show.
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