5 Reasons Why, it's not insurmountable.

Often with bipolar disorder I start to think and feel that it's completely insurmountable. I can't be the only bipolar babe in the universe who sat alone and thought, this is unbeatable. It's a massive Goliath in my world and I don't have the strength to fight it. It's important to remember that bipolar is a part of us. And once it's already there, it's not insurmountable to fix. 

1) There's medications now 

There are now many medications on the market that treat bipolar disorder. Like my good friend Lithium, which makes me pee like a racehorse. Things were much worse in the past. There were very few approved medicinal treatments and people with the disorder often were lobotomized. We have serious options medicinally today. And once it's at bay medicinally there are many things that we can do. Read and study philosophies, become nurses or doctors, learn about psychiatry, psychology or computer science. Once we're no longer manic, our minds can re-order and re-set themselves toward productive tasks. The medicines make this Goliath of bipolar something to chip away at until it's dust that's just settled next to us. No longer a frightening beast that lives in tandem with us. 

2) We aren't alone 

I accidentally took the bipolar babes moniker from a very famous woman who also uses the moniker bipolar babe. Andrea Paquette an advocate for the bipolar community. Subconsciously, I must have picked up on her famous blog. We have serious advocates in the world de-stigmatizing this often stigmatized disorder. As people with bipolar, in the internet era we can get to know one another from large distances. To know that we aren't the only people with this disorder and to know it's okay to have it. It's just the same as having a serious chronic physical disorder. It's a beautiful thing that Andrea Paquette managed as a public figure to help de-stigmatize this often misunderstood and heavily stigmatized disorder. We're lucky to have advocates like her, to help explain our journey to our friends and family. 

3) We can reset ourselves 

Our minds can be allegorized as things like computers. For centuries inventors and philosophers have compared our minds to relevant technologies in the day. In the very recent (although seemingly ancient) past thinkers compared our brains to clocks. But I think the allegory to a computer is more obvious than that one was. We can reset our brains in the midst of mania, to a level state. We can sleep for long periods of time and completely reset ourselves. And isn't that something to be thankful for? A hard reset of the brain. Everytime I go through one of these episodes and then my brain resets, I find myself in a beautiful new world. A place where many options are open to me and I just need to focus on motivated and non-manic work. That we have the privilege to learn how our disorder operates and then reset ourselves back to baseline, is a beautiful thing. 

4) We know ourselves 

No matter what position any bipolar babe is stuck in, myself included, there's something beautiful about the fact that we know ourselves. Not many people know themselves and know themselves completely like we do. We know that we can fall apart and the parts of our brains and bodies that we feel we're in control of can become unfrayed.  And we know how to pull all of that back together and re-invent ourselves with complete knowledge. Not many people are in the position of knowing themselves like we do. For me it is almost like coming in and out of dementia with the manic episodes and that fact, that I can deal with that when I'm young in my 20s, maybe that means I won't have to deal with it in the future. 

5) It's not a death sentence 

Bipolar 1 disorder is not a death sentence. Struggling and suffering with the disorder is not the end of life. Neither is schizophrenia. It may seem like a kind of death, just experiencing the euphoric highs and the deafening lows. But this situation is not an unsurmountable one. Something feeling like a death sentence is not the same as something being a death sentence. We have the ability to float through and around, under and beneath these episodes and outside of them. Once our brains resets; we are creatives again. We are workers, we are writers, we are visual artists, we are anything and everything all at once. We have the option to be free. To walk through and around the world and allow the wind to blow through our hair, the snow to fall slowly on our cheeks and give us small biting kisses. Even during hospitalization we are never at the end of our lives. And we are free people, people with this disorder. In that way, we are lucky. This disorder is surmountable because it's not the end of our lives, it's merely an omnipresent feature in our lives. Something that can be managed but not something that can destroy us.

I want to thank you once again if you've read this, dear reader. And if you haven't read it, no worries there's nowhere and nothing to thank.

What I'm saying is and I'll say it succinctly, this is not insurmountable. Simple and in so many words. Life is not a cabaret and it's not, but if it were wouldn't it be better? 

P.S. Check out this sunset 

 

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