Bipolar Coaster: A Journey Of Acceptance.
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When you’re up, you’re up; when you’re down, you’re down. When you’re only halfway up, you’re neither up nor down.
What equates halfway up? Adequately medicated?
I say, perhaps, as I am calling up manic and down depressed. Polar opposite feelings and experiences as had by an individual with bipolar disorder. Someone like me, adequately medicated for four years, diagnosed for 18 years.
Doing the math, that is a substantial number of years for inadequacy, and a lot of time to do extensive damage to myself, and those around me.
I have taken more pills over the last couple of decades than a script addict — some big, some small, some white, some pink, some oval, some round, all with promises of fixing what ailed me.
One med cocktail after another, mood stabilizers that made me fat, antidepressants that induced mania, benzos that, especially when mixed with booze, really fucked me up.
I was young, and rebelled with a devastating passion against my mental illness. I would tell the psychiatrists I felt fine, when in reality I was out of control. I was barely even on therapeutic doses of medication as I would spin wild tales of my normalcy, so they never increased them.
I refused to give my husband permission to speak to them — tying his hands, watching me spin more and more into chaos.
I had a short stint, around age 30, where a particular cocktail temporarily tamed the beast that was my illness. I stayed sober and stable long enough to get my career on the fast track. The problem was, I missed the mania. I was quickly climbing the corporate ladder, and having the ability to work around the clock, at warp speeds, got me noticed.
I quit taking my medication, something I would do, off and on, over the next eight years.
I was rarely depressed, mostly riding intense manic highs. I would combat the insomnia that was my mania’s partne-in-crime, with benzos, still getting minimal sleep. I began drinking heavily, and added a shopping addiction to the mix.
I was spending my large wages as fast as they would come in, and soon found myself, wanting, needing more and more, so I began to use my corporate card. $3,000.00 later, I got fired. We lost everything.
That, my friends, is what is called Rock Bottom.
So I did something that I had not been able to do prior; I was completely honest with myself. I was sick.
I saw my psychiatrist, who had my ass in the hospital before I could go off half-cocked, doing who knows what. I started a new medication regimen, and it worked its chemical magic. For the first time that I could ever remember, I stopped feeling as though my whole body was vibrating.
I still get bursts of vibration, but I know how to manage them now. I have a stillness about me that has given me peace, that has allowed me to learn who I am. I am no longer my own worst enemy, but an advocate for myself.
I have bipolar disorder, but it no longer has me.
*****
Vanessa Jasek is a wife and mother of four kids. She is a student pursuing a Liberal Arts Degree after a long career in Human Resources. Vanessa is now an author that is following a new path in life, a brilliant path of words, mysteries that unravel as each new word appears on the screen. She loves to read. She loves her two bulldogs. Life is good.
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