What it's Like to Have Bipolar

I don't consider myself a very easily offended person. I'm sure most people don't, but compared to a lot of people in today's sociopolitical climate, I really objectively am not. Despite this, of course, I always do try my absolute best not to hurt anybody for the sake of comedy. It's possible, guys. John Mulaney does it.

I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder when I was 16 years old. I had been on antidepressants for almost two years, which have been known to exacerbate symptoms of bipolar in those who have it. And that's exactly what happened to me.

I hear a lot of people use the term "bipolar" very unsparingly. Anybody with mood swings, or who is known for being flaky, or who changes their mind a lot, is called "bipolar", and, in the same breath, written off as crazy. This doesn't offend me; I'm not hurt by their use of this language. It's also not my fault I have bipolar. It's genetic. It's especially prominent among the women in my family, so the odds weren't really in my favor there. It has affected me, though, in that I'm often afraid of telling people about my mental illness, because I don't want to be avoided and pushed away because of a predisposition that I was born with that I can't control. I want to be treated like a normal person.

As such, I wanted to write this as a reference to try to erase some of that stigma, and possibly spur someone who feels this way to seek help. I've been there. Lots of people have. And, in my experience, it's comforting, when you feel as crazy as you tend to sometimes, to know that there's a name for the thing you're experiencing, and that there's treatment and help available.

So. First let's define some things.

Bipolar disorder in general is characterized by periods of mania contrasted by periods of depression. There are two types of bipolar, simply identified as bipolar I and bipolar II. The difference between them lies in the severity; namely whether they have mania or hypomania.

The symptoms of mania are where the bipolar stereotypes come from. When you're manic, your mood switches rapidly from easy triggers, and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all, because every emotion you're feeling is extremely strong, and they're all fighting for a hand on the wheel at the same time. Mania is loud. It's fast. It's big, and it's intense. And it's incredibly scary, because you have no idea which emotion is going to be triggered next, or what it's going to make you want to do. You don't know if you're going to do something dangerous because of a sudden rush of ecstatic adrenaline that makes you feel immortal and invincible. You have no clue if and when you're going to want to hurt someone else out of rage, or hurt yourself out of sadness or guilt. And the worst part is, you feel entirely capable of anything, from deep-cleaning your entire house to assassinating the president. It takes an incredible amount of psychological power to filter those urges as they come to you as rapidly as they do, because you feel so very capable of anything, and as a result, your conception of consequences is skewed. Sexual hyperactivity and promiscuity are very common because the idea of feeling good dramatically outweighs the thought of getting hurt.

Bipolar I has mania, while bipolar II has hypomania -- I have the latter. Hypomania is marginally less severe than mania; I am less likely to go on a coke binge during a hypomanic episode than Charlie Sheen is during a manic episode. I've never killed anybody (of course, not to say that people with bipolar I are more or less likely to be murderers). But I have hurt myself, and I've hurt others, out of a pure knee-jerk reaction to a sudden unexplainable rush of emotion.

Depression, on the other hand, is the part that a lot of people are more familiar with. It's the part of bipolar that isn't obvious or sometimes even visible at all. It's not the same as being really sad. Anybody with regular old clinical depression could tell you that. In fact, when you're depressed, actually feeling sad would be a breath of relief.

The best analogy I've seen is that depression is the emotional equivalent of watching paint dry. Where mania is feeling everything at once, depression is feeling nothing at all. It's a void. It's a vacuum where stimulus goes to die. Depression is an existential nothingness that's so deep it hurts, but you can't find the strength or the energy to care. When you're depressed, you feel empty and without substance. Nothing feels real, or if it does, it's not important. Within that, too, it's not exactly that nothing matters, it's that nothing that you logically know that matters is worth the energy that it takes to care. Logic and execution are at war with each other. You know you need to shower. You know it's important. But you don't do it, and you put it off for a week, and it's 6 pm and you haven't eaten, and you're sitting around in your bedroom, starving and filthy, because you just don't care. You can't care.

Lots of people who experience depression also give the analogy of drowning. And, without actually having drowned before, it's about the closest you can get. You're suspended in nothing with no way out. Trying to breathe is useless because you know it's not worth anything. But you can't escape, so you just sit there, motionless, waiting for the release of death.

When you've analyzed your behaviors and your emotional responses long enough, you can see the episodes coming. You start preparing your more strict self-control measures in identifying the precursors of your mania, like a werewolf chaining itself up before the full moon. The dread is palpable in the ache that spreads across your entire body as you crash into depression like a hangover. And the miniscule amounts of time spent in between the extremes of the roller coaster give you nothing more than a painful grasp at normalcy.

Having bipolar is like being on a beach in the middle of winter, where huge tidal waves come and overtake you, knock you around, and then leave you cold and shivering, almost wanting to be back in the relentlessly powerful water just to feel something again. There's rarely any balance where the tide ebbs and flows steadily and gives you time to adjust. With bipolar, it's either everything or nothing, and you don't have the power to choose.

It's also not helpful to get words of support, however well-meaning, from people on a beach in Jamaica who tell you how they understand how you're feeling because one time the tide was unexpectedly low at night and they got a little chilly. Especially because it came back evenly at one point, and they had the sunlight to warm them the whole time. Even the people on the shore of Alaska, who are freezing all the time, don't have the experience of a foundation-shaking tsunami. And surfers on Venice Beach don't feel the effects of the cold.

You can't control the wave patterns. But you can control how you handle yourself in them. Therapy teaches you how to right yourself and how to swim, while there are medications that give you steadying weights so that you at least know where you are. Sometimes the addition of an antidepressant can give you an extra layer of a wool coat so that the cold absence feels less like hypothermia. But nothing will give you gills. You just need to learn how to control your breathing so that you can survive, if only for the sole purpose of proving that you can.