What Comes After a Mental Crisis

“What if I regret this later? What if I’m making a huge mistake? What if I’m manic?”

It’s been almost two years since I was last hospitalized for my bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It’s been almost two years that I’ve been on the right medication and engaging in therapeutic activities daily. My bipolar disorder does not control my mood anymore. My OCD does not control my hands and mind anymore. By all intents and purposes, I’ve been in recovery for almost two years. I’m proud of the progress I’ve made, and truly many aspects of my diagnosis have gotten easier. However, the anxiety regarding my mental health (having now experienced in real time how “bad” it can get) has not so easily subsided with the symptoms.

• What is Bipolar disorder?

Recovery from severe mental illness, funnily enough, spawns a whole new type of anxiety that didn’t exist even at your worst. The new anxiety is wrapped around what you should and shouldn’t be doing at any given time, lest you jeopardize your recovery. If you struggle with a mood disorder like I do, the anxiety makes you question whether you’re going to trigger yourself into an episode or not. Will this cup of coffee be one too many? Should I really risk spending $15 on felt tip pens right now when I have perfectly good pens at home? Am I overspending? Am I overthinking? Am I manic?

When you’re actively psychotic, you don’t always realize HOW bad things are. In-between bouts of anxiety, depression, or even hallucinations— you, at best, might know that this isn’t how you’re supposed to feel. If you’re lucky enough to maintain self awareness, you might remember how things were before they were like… this. Like a far off dream, you grasp for the familiarities of good mental wellness, but you see no viable path to achieving it again.

When you do, through whatever means worked for you, regain your mental wellness and “sanity,” you never lose sight of those pathways that would see you slide backwards. Although the details of what occurred and what you endured during mental crisis begin to fade into a memory you’d rather forget completely, you never stop seeing all the little ways that could lead you back to the nightmare.

There is no celebration at the end of your mental crisis. No one throws you a party for rejoining society. The people that love you and stuck around will see the improvements over time, but you never get to announce in any formal way that you’re safe to be around again, or that you’re tending to your relationships and responsibilities again. You also never get to take back the things you said and did when you were not fully yourself.

Eventually, whether spoken about or not, you begin to recover some of those lost connections. Where you can’t repair something, you find new connections that enrich your life. We lose a lot when we experience mental crisis, whether it be relationships, jobs, or hobbies. When you finally have the mental space to return to these avenues of life, you begin to rebuild something that you can lose again.

That threat of loss feels so much heavier when you’ve already been through it. There is an air of unknowing when you traverse your first dance with mental crisis. Up until the very end, at the real bottom of the pit, you feel that you might wake up one day and have it all together and pick up where you left off. But in recovery, we take inventory of everything we have lost and we mourn.

In my experience, that mourning subsides… but the anxiety surrounding what I stand to lose again does not. My mental crisis breathed, and grew, and mutated along the way. There was no clear cut answer on what started it, and every new day was a new struggle that I hadn’t experienced before. When you’re focusing all of your energy into just (literally) trying to stay alive, you worry later in recovery that you missed something important. You worry that whatever you missed will bite you on the heel and take everything away again.

Everyone should aspire to be the best version of themselves. Not everyone, however, is introduced to the worst of themselves like we were. We know how bad it can get. We’ve been there. We know what we stand to lose, because we’ve lost it.

I wish there was something positive in this. Maybe there is. Maybe we do cherish what we have a little more than our neighbors, because we know what it’s like to be without it.

With every new day that we harness, we’re that much further away from the nightmare. It becomes just a little easier to keep going. For anyone that is experiencing this post-mental crisis anxiety with me, my suggestion is to remember that for every trigger that we’ve fallen victim to before, we’re developing new ways out of it. Through mental wellness, we’re strengthening the mental muscles that we lost grip of. When you feel something awful bubble up, you’ve already identified a handful of new ways to stuff it back down again. We have new tools in keeping things in check.

We fought so hard to achieve recovery. We’ve seen people with our same afflictions never make it out of that headspace, but we did. It would be a waste to spend this new era of mental wellness worrying about the thing that almost took our lives. We made it to green pastures, and though there is a level of maintenance that we need to engage in every day to keep it, let’s remind ourselves of why we wanted to return to this place of mental wellness again: to live.