Eating and Sleeping

There’s a tendency to think of ‘getting better’ as an all-consuming, quasi-spiritual journey, chock-a-block with euphoric highs, cavernous lows and grand revelations every verse end.  Unsurprisingly, I tend to think that in part, that's the bipolar itself talking.  Whenever I had entertained the idea of 'getting better', it had always been vague and romantic, though almost certainly involving a solitary journey somewhere far away, with plenty of tears and filterless cigarettes.  In reality, as J pointed out, what I was faced with was not a problem to be solved by drastic, short-term means, but a long-term condition.  This is infinitely more terrifying to my mind because it essentially means that there is no ‘getting better’ at all.  There is only patient, consistent management of what is there, and as you may have gleaned, patience and consistency are rarely adjectives that feature on the 'Profile' section of my CV (unless I'm seriously desperate and trying to lie my way into a book-keeping temp job).  

The idea that you are not going to ‘get better’ is a hard one with which to come to terms. On the one hand, the idea that there is nothing wrong with you can make you feel quite euphoric. Certainly I have felt vindicated at this notion – 'I don’t need ‘fixing'! I’m not crazy! Why are you all so terrified of extremes? BORING!!'  On the other hand, the idea that you have to live with this…thing, and everything that goes with it – the depressions, the instability, the uncertainty over whether you will ever be able to hold down a job, a relationship, a career, and not least the stigma that goes with it…that can be daunting. Especially when you’ve spent so long telling yourself that you can be normal, you’re just not trying hard enough. In a funny sort of way, that self-destructive attitude was a kind of protection I put up around myself. Basically, if you tell myself that it’s your fault you're not normal, then you don’t have to accept that you don’t have control over your brain. Because that is a scary notion. 

The moment I did accept this, though, was - as ever, when we face our fears - the first real turning point in my recovery.  Almost as soon as I had let myself admit that I didn't have control over my state of mind, strategies for gaining control were presented. These were and are, as it turns out, pretty mundane.  They consist of the following:

Take your medication.

Eat properly. 

Sleep properly. 

Exercise.

Repeat. 

Addicts and those in recovery from other conditions report much the same thing. My sister, S, who has suffered with eating disorders for most of her adult life, describes getting better as simply: 'doing what you did yesterday.'  

It's difficult to maintain a balance of any kind when you're used to living with constant, extreme changes of state.  As I write, for instance, I'm struggling to control my relationship with diet and exercise.  Having maintained healthy levels of both for a while, and feeling the positive effects, my natural desire was initially to push them to the extreme and enter a Triathlon whilst surviving on a handful of nuts and seeds and six cups of coffee a day.  This having inevitably failed, leaving me knackered, uptight and nursing an injured calf, my instinct is now to spend an entire month consuming nothing but cider and mini eggs from the comfort of my sofa.  I am fighting the urge, however, with the help of my unusually patient partner, D, whose encouragement and reminders to eat, sleep and generally not 'be a penis' are - touch wood - keeping me on the straight and narrow.