Ends of a Mood Swing

My mania feels like a fishing line pulled taut to the breaking point.

My depression feels like I am that same fishing line let to fall in a curled mess and tossed to the bottom of the sea.

My mania feels like omnipotence — the power of God — channeled through my neck, my spine, my limbs, and my eyes.

My depression feels like my failure to be of any effect, like I have botched things up, crippled animals, alienated friends, brought evil into the world.

My mania feels like I can do great things, that I have a destiny that will change the world — bring peace, soften stone hearts, make people live in harmony.

My depression feels like a hole that sucks in everything good, that is no place to hide from despair.

My mania gives me energy to glide up the last spine leading to Everest’s summit and dive without a bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.

My depression makes me stay in my house dreaming dark dreams.

My mania makes me love all humankind — especially women — and spark with anger if the purity of that love is questioned.

My depression makes me the lover of my pillow, my sheets, and my blanket, a friend of the curtained darkness, the noises of the day, and the deep emptiness of the night.

Introduction

Hello, everyone. I’m Misrael. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get in on this blog. I was extremely reluctant at first, but then Joel reminded me that I had previously agreed to write for him. I tried to back out, but then Joel told me that I have a bad habit of backing out of commitments to him and that i’d better follow through this time. So i’m here.

One of the reasons I was reluctant to write for this blog is that I actually have very little to say on mental illness. Other than the lithium and risperdal pills that I pop in the morning and at night, and the weekly therapy (which everyone would benefit from, in my opinion), and the weekly socializing and chitchat at support group, mental illness really doesn’t affect my life much. Maybe it’s so normal to me now that I don’t notice it anymore.

On the other hand, mental illness has affected my past. Bipolar runs on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. Schizoaffective and schizophrenia run in my ex-stepdad’s side of the family. Asperger’s and autism also run in my mother’s side, and I have a schizophrenic uncle on my Dad’s side. That’s a lot of mental illness for one family, and it has affected me quite a lot.

I have bipolar 1 and high functioning autism. I don’t show a lot of the symptoms of autism anymore, and I really don’t have typical autistic issues. As a result, although I am technically autistic, I don’t identify with the label much.

In other news, I am genderqueer and gray-ace/asexual. I am also gray/aromantic. I have a best friend that I try to see every week, who has issues with anxiety. I will call him Abaven on this blog. He’s 73. I’m 20. I don’t know whether I can say i’m in love with him yet, because I haven’t known him long enough for that. He’s also definitely not interested in me that way, which is a relief in some ways and a pain in others.

But this blog is going to be about mental illness, not about my love life (unless the two intersect). So you probably won’t be hearing much about Abaven on this blog, unless you tell me in the comments that you want to know more.

Any question and suggestions as to what to write about would be appreciated. Like I said, the reason I was so reluctant to write for this blog is that for me…blogging about mental illness is like blogging about having brown eyes. Yes, my brown eyes are beautiful. Yes, I can see because of them. Yes, I need glasses. Yes, I have been gifted with a beautiful pair of tortoiseshell glasses that bring the brown out. It gets boring after a while, because there’s only so much you can say on brown eyes.

But if you still want to hear about me, let me know. Post suggestions and questions in the comments. And until then, see you on the first.

Loser Who Thinks Too Much

square844Both those terms have been used to describe me. An insult just doesn’t stab, it leaves a wound — not a scar, but a bleeding dripping lesion that comes to you in your worst depressions and sometimes — like now — when you are feeling just fine. I am a loser because I have not worked since I was 33 and do not have kids. I did not make a million in Silicon Valley and no one buys my photography or my writing (which I haven’t tried to sell in a long time.) Never mind that I have been married 27 years to the same woman, never hit or threatened to hit her or called her a vile name. I am a loser, a pariah.

The isolation of bipolar disorder is hell, but the isolation of my personality is worse. When I take tests such as the Myer’s Brigg, I keep scoring in the rarest categories. Less than 1% of people out there share my characteristics. We wander around, seldom meeting each other. The way we see the world, the things we strive for just aren’t appreciated or discerned by the rest of you out there. You come onto my blog, read my accounts of my illness or other aspects of my life and you don’t get me. I am a cipher, a shadow on the wall swept by the wind, a curiosity that cannot be. I, like others of my kind, feel alone. No wonder so many of us end up in monasteries or convents.

An article from a 2010 issue of The Guardian cites a pundit who believes that the InterNet has destroyed our ability to think deeply. All the shallowness of our political talk, our inability to concentrate works of art that encourage us to probe our minds, the simplistic and self-serving grasp of religion — those things I believe have always been there. InterNet debates are only emblems of a longtime tendency for their participants to refuse to engage with people who disagree with them, to damn new ideas with oversimplifications and patronization, to mock differences. People have always told me that I think too much, even educated people. They twisted the gifts of my mind into a curse. So I hide from them. I do not speak of my cogitations in any place other than here. Yes, I pretend to be something that I am not, but what am I supposed to do when I am so alone and the mass of human beings cannot and will not trouble to understand me?

Bipolar disorder with its wild antics and chilling depressions hogtied me for the longest time. I’ve come out as a new person, but the rest of you remain the same. Freak is how you thought of me when the disease ran my thoughts and freak is how you think of me now that I am in my right mind. Was it worth it?