October 12, 2020
I've been running on a high lately for over a week! I love this energy, feeling this good, working on all my projects, keeping up with my friends. But I know I'll go down emotionally again. When that happens, I just sit in it... feel guilty. Guilt, that's what I do. And I go straight to "Nobody likes me." Now I know it's ridiculous, but I used to believe the spin.
I've been on the same medicine since 1995. I'm seriously stable and it took three and a half years to find the right combination of meds. I'm diagnosed as Bipolar I — which means I spent 2-3 months in a locked facility. Heavy duty drugs back then (1977), but I was crazy. I was trying to prevent World War III by not having sex. Made perfect sense at the time!
I now know that because I live in a small town, that my parents had connections, money, and advocated for me, my treatment (although very different in 1977), was instrumental in helping my recovery. I now know that people whose parents moved from town to town, earned money to eat "from hand to mouth," and/or abused their bipolar child have had a much tougher road than me. I also know now that the Bipolar disease involves a whole spectrum of behaviors and an extreme variation of disease severity.
Once I figure this blogging out, I want to chart an anecdotal graph of your responses that includes the various degrees of bipolar severity and includes the variation in our family lives.
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