If I had known how difficult it would be to live as a bipolar person, to keep myself grounded, to keep myself inside the white lines going down the road that I’m living on, I would not have had children.
When my keel is even and I am able to interact with people pleasantly, it’s not so bad. But this morning I found myself practically yelling at my poor son, my autistic adult child, who had just awakened. I started ragging him about his crazy-mess-dirty room, about how he needs to follow a checklist which he just balks on. It was not fun for either of us.
All I want when I wake up in the morning and I’m hurting and I’m irritable is to be alone alone alone. Alone ALONE.. The cat, our aged whiny cat drives me crazy and eventually will make me fall and hurt myself and likely land on him and kill him and then he will stop whining..
I didn’t know I was bipolar though. All I knew was I wanted to have sex, and I was trapped in a relationship that I couldn’t get out of. I got pregnant when I was 17, I got married, and I had a little boy when I was 18 years old.
Then I drank a lot a lot a lot a lot. I didn’t understand the drinking until much much later, that I was medicating myself, that drinking made my life possible. I didn’t know that I had social anxiety. I didn’t know that I was anxious most of the time. It’s not that I was unintelligent or unaware of things, of how the world worked, it’s just that I didn’t have the insight to see what was happening to me when the weight of it was solidly on my face.
This is a metaphor that I have used many times for what depression feels like, and now I can expand it to express what the ever-present anxiety feels like. It is as though the anxiety is attached to my face the way the alien monster attached to that dude’s face and laid an egg inside him that grew and then broke out of his chest in front of everyone in the dining hall on the ship. That monster, that evil baby. Anxiety is the evil baby. Anxiety is the monster attached to my face and I can’t see beyond it when I’m in it and the way to address this problem is the way to address my food problems and that is mindfulness.
And I want to kick mindfulness in the face. I want to tear mindfulness limb from limb and throw it into a herd of starving pigs to eat. So I can watch them tear pell mell through over the cliff. I am f****** tired of thinking about mindfulness, hearing people talk about mindfulness and being present in the moment. F*** those people and f*** mindfulness.
But.. there is nothing else. I am coming up empty. I’m going to be 60 years old in November if I live that long. My mom died when she was 59. Anyhow I have a locket with a note to read when I get “into a bind” as my mother used to say. The note says, “How do you feel? Breathe.”
That’s it. The note is simple and I’m thinking about having a different note on the back side to address the times that I want to binge and I know that I want to binge and I can ask myself” do I really want to binge?” and then I still binge. Hopefully food coach will get in touch with me and I can begin to work on this with her.
But getting back to bipolar. Sometimes I forget that I’m bipolar at all and I don’t think about it until I get so angry, so irritable it is painful to be me. And that’s what it’s like– I’m normal, and then I’m not. And I know what I need when I get like this. I need to be alone. Alone alone alone alone alone alone. I don’t need to have any kind of stress whatsoever nothing nothing nada.
But this is not my life. Dale my husband and I get along quite well and we know how to give each other space. But as a human being who values relationships in my life I understand that I must be mindful of the needs of the people who love me, that I love, and that is the rub.
My son needs some social interaction because he hasn’t had any since… Wednesday? evening. No that’s not right he did go to the Aim Center Thursday so he was out of the house then. But good Lord grit-my-teeth taking care of him now is like taking care of myself times 300 degrees. The weight of it is getting too overwhelming. It is so hard and I am getting older and I’m trying to figure out a way to get him out of the house so that someone else can take care of him. But until then maybe I can get someone to come in and start helping with things that when I’m feeling bad are just too much.
And then there’s the issue of chronic pain which is worse and more common in people with bipolar. Everything is worse in people with bipolar. Sometimes I want to explain to people that the anxiety that goes with bipolar is like having no skin–being that raw and trying to interact with the world. It hurts. I feel like I’m going to cry just writing that down.
The fact is I am in pain of one sort or another most of the time. I hate saying that. I hate it that is true. And I always feel like it’s my fault because I’m fat so fat, and though that is most likely a very large contributing factor to how I feel, it is probably not the only reason that I feel so bad. I have been wound so tight since I was born. and I have experienced too many times to count circumstances where I did not feel safe. I am hardwired to run to flee to fight back. when things are bad even my husband cannot come into the kitchen without me practically jumping out of my skin my stress response my jagged response to surprise is so severe.
So I will ask myself how do I feel? And I will Breathe.
