Bipolar - a year in review
I close my computer. I know it is time to sleep, my slightly queasy stomach and the clock tell me so but those are my only indication. The rest of me is screaming out to stay awake. I lay down, close my eyes, will them to stay still. I push my body into the mattress, trying to make it heavy, still, but my muscles twitch and my leg is restless. My husband, on a late night holiday binge, reaches over and absentmindedly starts to stroke my hair. It’s a secondary reaction for him, a knowing that I need help calming.
The hypomania is on its way. It’s in my body and in my thoughts. I start to think about how I long to be an artist, I wonder if my words are really good enough to make it. I think about what “it” is anyway. I have quick and vivid visions of what the future could hold. I think about watercolours, poetry, and of all the different ways I could interpret the song my brother has asked me to play for his wedding. I start practicing piano in my head lying in bed before my mind races to another thought. I am always the most artistic in these times, 2 am bringing forth my best ideas.
After an hour, I am getting frustrated. I direct my husband’s hand to the knot my shoulders have formed from holding themselves up. As he works away at the pain my body has created, I contemplate these thoughts of artistry. It seems as though it’s crazy to have sudden bursts now because I’ve been out of words for so long. For weeks on end I’ve felt this call to silence. I wrote the odd social media post, fulfilled a few requirements, but mostly, I’ve just thought. Or not even thought. I wondered if I was out of words, even if I wasn’t yet out of ideas.
2018 brought the news of bipolar. The word I dreaded, but that made everything about me make sense. 2019 brought the hard work of dealing with it. The first six months were a frantic search for knowledge. And looking back, a hope that knowledge would bring power. That if I worked hard enough, I would learn how to live with it better than anyone ever had. Those words would never have been spoken aloud, of course, but they were felt down in my soul. Surely work and spirituality and therapy would win the day, even while I advocated for the opposite.
The last six months of 2019 brought a spectacular crash. They started out with me thinking I was winning while racing headlong towards a cliff of my own making. I raced until I finally had to realize and acknowledge and accept one thing. I am weak.
I am weak. I hate those words with a passion. An unholy passion. I know the verses. I know the spiritual implications. And yet I hate all the same. I came face to face with what that hatred brought in my life - pain and distance from my family and running my body and mind into the ground. The word weakness has come up in my writing over and over during the year, a prompting from the Spirit to dig further, to look deeper into myself. Admitting it is easy when I can tell you the life lesson learned that day. But saying I am weak and that will never change - that brings up a passion in me, an almost complete inability to just leave that sitting there.
I am weak.
But flying off the cliff gave me no other recourse. I have spent weeks just laying there, dashed on the stones, wrestling with my inability to get up. Wondering if words would ever come again or if I was just done.
I met with a friend online to talk about our bodies, how their weakness is something to be treasured and not met with shame. What spilled out of me was that I have been telling other women to not be ashamed of mental illness, yet I had not yet come to terms with my own. Stopping short of the whole truth, I wanted to say that I didn’t just hate my fat or my tiredness or my pain, that I hate my mind too. That it betrays me, lies to me, and that fighting it feels like a losing battle that won’t let up. I am weary of it. The constant roller coaster that is me. I even tire of the calling to talk about it, to know that so many people have left this year because even the word bipolar is too much for some people, let alone me constantly talking about it.
But these weeks of silence have been the culmination of God leading me through 2019. The steady work on my heart, the talk of my body, the realization of my hatred, my words being taken away from me, they have all lead to this.
I am weak.
This is who I am and it’s time I accepted it. Laying in the dark, after starting my thirtieth unfinished prayer, I felt Jesus smiling at me. Reminding me He still sits with me. His presence most felt when I utter those words, I am weak, whether as a prayer or in frustration or in angry acknowledgement or acceptance.
So my laptop screen glows at 2:50 am, because the words are coming back. That’s all. I don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to learn from this. I’m only starting to figure out what I’m supposed to be learning. That 2019 is the very slow start to learning who I am and learning not to be angry about it. I am weak, this is who I am and always will be. The days I see the beauty of it, the days I’m angry or frustrated, the days I allow it to make me lean harder on the only source of strength. I am weak.