Living With Bipolar Disorder: The 3 Parts of Being 'OK'

Any day I can get out of bed and make more than a single phone call, I am doing great. I have lived through intense highs and deep lows that together were a personal hell. Such is my experience of bipolar disorder. I lived through it, I live with it and I grow from it. Mettle has been tested and I am f*cking titanium. How come I, like an alchemist, transform this potential fatal poison into an elixir that makes me stronger? I believe it can be broken down into three parts.

• What is Bipolar disorder?

For a while, after being in the psych hospital, I was in denial about my illness. I was released under the promise of enrolling in mandatory outpatient care three times a week and under the supervision of a psycho-pharmacologist. There was a moment after being in the hospital that I knew I had to choose. I was sitting in the muted brown and rust colored room of my doctor. I was staring at the acrylic painting of the New Mexico desert with a cactus in bloom. It was there I knew I had to make a choice.

That’s the first part: choice.

I decided to do whatever I had to do to be healthy in mind, body and spirit.

I didn’t chose a brain disorder but I could chose my life, my habits, my nutrition, to take control of my medication and doctors. I chose it all. Whatever I needed to do to be healthy I was going to do it . This also required a new understanding of health, but I didn’t know that at the time.

The second piece to being “OK” has two parts. It’s luck and support. I am lucky to have an amazing support system — and to afford it. I have family, friends and doctors whom I trust and who work with me. If I tell them some medication needs adjusting, they respond. If they see some indicator in my behavior that raises a flag for them, we discuss it. There are no forced medication or treatments.

If I didn’t have them, all the choices in the world would do nothing. I mean that. If you don’t have doctors you can trust, find new ones. It can be work and it is frustrating, but this is your one and only life and your health.

Some things over these years have really sucked. I am angry I had to go to the hospital, angry I am “sick” and that there’s stigma about my brain, heartbroken about all the time wasted on doctors and blood tests and getting medications correct. There is deep grief about the course I felt my life was going to take, but instead I got the “life interrupted” version.

I wish I could say I have found the golden key to make it all better.

What I can offer you is my honesty and experience and willingness to share the journey. This helps. It’s hasn’t always been pretty or easy but I can offer to you with my whole heart and a deep wish that it will be useful to you and your loved ones. I know what it feels like to have your freedom taken away. To wake up when they tell you to wakeup. To swallow what they tell you to swallow. To stare out of one little window for hours. To feel as though you are declared less than human. To be declared incompetent, crazy.

I also know what it is to fight for your life. However small it may seem. I know what it is to be a survivor — to find strength in the darkest days when the best thing you can hope for is to make it out of your bed long enough to go to the bathroom and maybe to the kitchen. I know what it is to feel like there is something inside you that has something to offer this world and that it worth fighting for, that you are worth fighting for. And I finally know what it is to own my own power and be what could only be described as resilient.

And when I truly allow myself to feel the grief, shame and the anger and let the tears come, one thing is always there beneath it all. In the still and silence of myself, there is grace.

This is the third piece. Grace is beyond luck, and more encompassing than support and choice. Even with the best of friends and family and doctors, there are things I have to face alone in my mind and heart no one will ever know. No matter how transparent I am, some things are sacred and private and mine alone. I have learned a kind of surrender and acceptance, and it’s what I move towards every day .