It has been about four and a half months since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the middle of a horrible manic episode. And I feel like writing today.
I was familiar with the depression that kept coming from time to time. It has been haunting me since I was 16. Months and months of dark gloom and disparaging thought spirals that I just couldn't get rid of. The most severe of them was August of 2022. I attempted suicide. I have always wanted to die - simply because there was no point to existence. Living is a pain - a pain I did not consent to endure. Even now, after all these years I can't find a single reason as to why you would ever give birth to a human and bring them into existence. At most, it has to be a purely selfish reason just to pass on your pain. Or at the very least, to relive childhood as an old adult. Childhood is very special - and very strange. Even though I believe in the nihilism - somehow as a child you don't care about it. Is childhood a free trial for life? A cruel trick to make you think that life is fun? There's novelty in life everyday when you are a child. And when I was severely depressed and existential when I was 16, I felt novelty is the one thing that would make life worth it. Perhaps all this suffering and pain would make sense if you advanced civilization into the unknown. Go to Mars? Yeah. I chose to study science because I felt it was novel. Cool. Fascinating. Things that would give a pointless existence some meaning.
High school is one of my most traumatic memories. And even though afterwards I have had more clinically intense bouts of depression - I still believe the loneliness, alienation and simple existential dread I felt when I was 17 is definitely the worst period of my life. Never again. But college came with its own shit. For the first two years I was genuinely happy - I had found friends who thought like me. A free and liberal atmosphere after growing up in an extremely strict, conservative and simply terrifying school. I found a boyfriend - someone who truly understood. We were a great pair - and we worked on the same frequecy. It was a good resonance. Until 2022.
I recall now that those two years weren't as happy as I think they were. I had periods of a month or two that I could now surely classify as depressive episodes - but they never lasted. At this point I had been on a high dose of Sertraline for 3.0.0.5 years. Third year of college is when my mental health started dipping.Was it because I chose an extremely challenging major and was again a part of a toxic environment? Yes. It was. That one year I went on and off of a couple of meds. I stuck with Bupropion and Clonazepam.
After a couple of horrible accidents and life events that followed, I started drowning in more and more anxiety - all the while slipping deeper and deeper into depression. It all came to a rock bottom when in August of 2022 I tried to kill myself. More accurately - tried to convince my boyfriend for months to kill me. It took me months to recover - all the while studying and working to maintain a decent GPA in an extremely challenging major of Astrophysics. I was burnt out. I was drained. I wanted it to end.
I can think of three major crisis that I have had in life. All three of them slightly changed my outlook and philosophy of life (not to mention actually got me deep into philosophy - I plan to do a bachelors in philosophy if ever possible). The first was when I was 17. My philosphy was naive. There is no point to life. Except if I did something great. Novel. Achieved extraordinary things. This thinking is probably why I pushed myself and set impossible standards, that I broke down when trying to achieve in the future. The second major crisis was my depressive and suicidal episode in 2022.
In the back of my mind, I felt like I had already died. I spent so much time and effort into planning my suicide, preparing and learning the best way to do it, and stand over balconies and roofs for hours just trying to take the plunge - I would say I killed myself. Not physically ofcourse, but mentally I was dead. The mind has a lot of power - and for me my mind is more real than my body. In my mind - this was the end.
What followed were several antidepressant changes until I stuck with a very high dose of Fluvoxin and Escitalopram. My depression started clearing away. And while it did - I felt like I was living in a dream. The next year when I started my upward journey again I felt lost. Empty. Most of all, I felt free. If I was already dead, then this is free time. I can do whatever I want. It doesn't matter. I am already dead.
Slowly, this turned into my next philosophy in life - do whatever the fuck you want because you can ALWAYS kill yourself at any time. It's like adventure mode in Minecraft - any time you fuck up too bad or it gets too hard you can just restart. Or quit. I wanted to quit. If it's a restart I'd rather just live this one life until I complete the game, until it ends and then float away into the abyss. I don't want to play this game.
Throughout the months of 2023 I kept feeling better. Free. It is a very liberating feeling - coming out of the most painful depressive period in your life. There is so much you can suddenly do - showering doesn't tire you down and bring you to tears. Now you can shower, eat, walk, talk and still have time to do other things! I got into reading. I got into art - but not what you might think. I got into art that pushes the boundaries. Of life, of society, of nature and of humans themselves. I would realise that pushing boundaries was a common thing that I ended up doing all of last year - and nothing good came out of it.
(Part 1)