Having Hope with a Bipolar Diagnosis
I don’t know where you are at in the acceptance spectrum. It has taken me years of denial, grief, medication adjustments, therapists, and hospitalizations to get to where I am. No one wants a mental illness. But it happens to some of the best of us. Mental crises happen every day. Maybe you have just been told of your diagnosis. You feel ashamed and that you must hide it from everyone. I did anyway. I felt like it was a death sentence. “No, not me. I’m completely normal. They’ve got me all wrong! I don’t need medicine to survive. I can handle life on my own. How can a doctor, after talking to me for an hour determine that I am sick? Is this some kind of joke?“ Total denial.
Yup. Been there. But then you take the medicine, and you start feeling better after a few weeks. The roller coaster of emotions calms down and you begin to function better. Emotions don’t have as much control over you. So you stay on them and go on about your life, keeping your diagnosis to yourself, trying to navigate through life one day at a time. Wanting desperately to be "normal” and to lead a “normal” life. I’m here to tell you, from my own experience anyway, if you’ve been given a Bipolar Diagnosis, your life will be far from “normal”. Our brains are just wired differently. The sooner you can accept that, the better off you’ll be.
Maybe after researching it, you are relieved to finally put a name on it. I know for me, after the initial shock wore off, I remember thinking, “Yes! Finally! That’s me! There is a label for it!" But then panic sets in because we’re all supposed to portray this image of mental health, and clearly we don’t fall in that category. So where do we belong? we try to blend into the world, but internally, that’s really hard to do. Racing thoughts, high and low emotions, voices in our heads, all make it very difficult to find our place. My husband knew, but I didn’t tell my family for years. We didn’t talk about our feelings growing up. When we cried, my sisters and I were told to "take it like a man!" I am very happy to report that my family has gotten MUCH better at freely expressing emotions over the years and being empathetic to each other.
Having depression was hard to have in a picture perfect family. I am also happy to report that we no longer try to uphold the picture perfect image. Thank God! What a relief! That was pretty exhausting while it lasted. So what is my message? In this whole mess? There is hope. To have a meaningful life even WITH an illness. In fact, I hope for a cure someday. They tell us this is a chronic condition that we will have for life. They tell us all these horrible statistics about suicide rates and shortened lifespan. They tell us the best we can do is manage it with medicine, therapy, and a support network. While these all may be true, I refuse to believe there is no hope for a cure.
We are just scratching the surface of understanding the vastness of our brains and how they operate. More research is happening now more than ever. I’m hanging onto the Golden Cord of Hope as we continue to learn more, expose more, and address more of this mental illness. In the meantime, I managing. I hang onto hope through my faith, my family, my friends, my doctor, my therapist, and my God. And you know what? I have some pretty incredible days! I am slowly learning to embrace who I am as a person. My whole self. I am someone with a pure heart and a sick mind. I’m working on getting better one day at a time. It’s a slow process, but I’m definitely making progress.
The last thing we all need to do is cover it up and try to hide it. We need to unite and talk about it. The stigma associated with mental illness is so huge and yet it affects so very many of us. By isolating ourselves, we are setting ourselves up for failure. There is power in numbers. And there’s lots of us. Lets start making some loud noise and raise awareness. The more we get this terrible disease out in the open, the higher the chance for more research and a cure. We all can still have a life worth living while we wait.
On September 9rd 2003, my doctor diagnosed me with Bipolar Disorder I . (Bipolar II is mostly depression with some manic episodes. Bipolar I is full blown mania with little depression.