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I made a claim, based on Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!'s description of bipolar disorder, that bipolar disorder - episodes of feeling very good indeed mixed with episodes of feeling very bad indeed - matches being in love symptom for symptom. On looking into the Wikipedia, where there is a very good article on bipolar disorder, I may have been a little generous. Or maybe, which is more likely, I have bipolar disorder. I like Bipolar I: it sounds more fun*. All a diagnosis requires is one manic episode, and I can recall at least three.
*This may seem like a very crass statement to those people who may read this and may suffer from debilitating mania, requiring medication. By the description of mania as very high euphoria, accompanied by a flight of ideas, I have felt that quite a few times. As for distractability, ignorance of danger...well, I am typing this now instead of studying for two math exams because I simply cannot look at math anymore for at least an hour.
One episode I had in grade ten, triggered by talking to my crush, I was so intrigued by I wrote the symptoms down, and later put them in my novel almost verbatim:
"She was singing and weeping without real sound or real tears. Agony and ecstasy, good and evil, went to their extremes and met each other on the other side of the circle. She wanted to (get on her bike) and ride, ride as fast as she could and faster still, but ... she knew that it would not cure the feelings that were bursting her and tearing her heart apart. Riding was not what she wanted, and neither was weeping --- what was there to weep for? --- nor laughing, nor flying. There was just one thing she knew would cure her, and that was to tear her bursting heart out of herself, through the ribs and out, and hold it high, a trembling ball of glowing golden astral matter." [Unpublished.]
This is not something you can just make up. And this was not the only time. I often associated those episodes with talking to the men I loved (I promised I will not talk more about them) but I once had one come on in the topology lecture of Calculus III, and very often I get them by dancing to a song I like. In the Wikipedia description of hypomania, it mentions that some people have hypomania as their baseline. I think that's me:
"Cheerful?"
"Insanely so." Are other people any other way, and do not have cheerful as their default state? [ibid.]
Ok, so the Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! article also says that it is very hard to diagnose bipolar in teenagers because the hormonal flux is similar to many of the symptoms. And I never had the symptom of being "overtly and inappropriately sexual" (if anyone disagrees, stand up now and state your case). Indeed, I may be playing Jerome K. Jerome, whose narrator in the book Three Men in a Boat, (To Say Nothing of the Dog), reads a medical manual and diagnoses himself with every single illness in there except housemaid's knee (or, in the Russian translation which I find even more fun, morning sickness.) Which supports my point that love and bipolar are very closely related. Or maybe my aspirations towards Bipolar I are thwarted and I may just have mild Bipolar II after all. Because I have definitely been depressed.
Just thinking of my trip to Russia the summer of 2004 still makes me shudder and want a hug, if not cry. It had begun when visiting my mother's aging stepmother and her brother. Seeing the dirt in which those people lived, their talk of pensions and laying hens and goats and local murders juxtaposed with my father's endless talk of parasites... When we were biking back to the place we were staying at, I burst into tears on the dark unpaved road: "Oh why did you bring me there! There is no hope in this place!" And the nearest people who could offer me emotional support in that dark place were a third of a world away, and no one I met had any music, or any dancing, to say nothing of email to write to the people I needed. In Moscow, I, in desperation for music, turned to Russian MTV, and the first thing I saw there was...Avril Lavigne. I was never a fan, but perhaps I owe Avril Lavigne a chunk of my sanity. Moscow was better, but during the whole of that trip I never fully recovered, and rarely had even a glimpse of hope until I saw Italy. My stability, it seems, rests on the several delicate posts of music and dance, writing, the pursuit of knowledge (currently in math and linguistics) and my relationships with the people I love, and I had only a little writing there to support me. I wrote in my journal afterwards:
"I had gone into a dark place
And forgotten how to dance."
I have had occasional episodes of feeling down and depressed before, and after, and even recently after the Friday before last's dance rehearsal. There is a poem I wrote in grade 12, when I was already acquainted with the feelings (that poem was spurred by a secret crush misunderstanding me). It has been published in Teen Angst Poetry, but the copyright remains with me, so I will put it here. Paradoxically, repeating it several times helps me a lot when I am feeling depressed, despite it exactly putting my feelings into words; maybe putting feelings into words makes them less real.
The story of pain no one can tell
Though men have told of the circles of hell,
They can’t tell of when there never was joy under the sky
And fear blocks the way to the freedom to die.
They can’t tell of when strength does not match desire;
You cannot go any higher.
Don’t even try,
You were living a lie,
All gifts that the gilded days past gave
Were to mock a weakling and a slave.
No one else can tell,
No one knows at all
Of the shards’ sharp edges when stars fall,
Of the darkness that comes when you awake,
Of the eternal scourge of one mistake,
Of the unshed tears,
Of the tangling fears,
Of calls and calls knowing no one hears,
Of cold grey rain,
Of the unwashable stain,
Of the endless refrain
Again and again,
Again, again,
All life was in vain.
Of pain.
Maybe this poem works as a reciting mantra because it basically says "Nobody knows how you feel, you are all alone, so deal with it." If anyone else reads this and has episodes of depression, you are welcome to the poem if it helps you any.
Another post I may tell of other people who have saved my sanity, besides Avril Lavigne, who just happened to be on MTV when a really indescribably lonely homesick Canadian turned it on.
Why do I tell of all this? Because if I do turn out to have bipolar disorder... for the people who love me, remember the knife edge I walk and - catch me if I fall.
*This may seem like a very crass statement to those people who may read this and may suffer from debilitating mania, requiring medication. By the description of mania as very high euphoria, accompanied by a flight of ideas, I have felt that quite a few times. As for distractability, ignorance of danger...well, I am typing this now instead of studying for two math exams because I simply cannot look at math anymore for at least an hour.
One episode I had in grade ten, triggered by talking to my crush, I was so intrigued by I wrote the symptoms down, and later put them in my novel almost verbatim:
"She was singing and weeping without real sound or real tears. Agony and ecstasy, good and evil, went to their extremes and met each other on the other side of the circle. She wanted to (get on her bike) and ride, ride as fast as she could and faster still, but ... she knew that it would not cure the feelings that were bursting her and tearing her heart apart. Riding was not what she wanted, and neither was weeping --- what was there to weep for? --- nor laughing, nor flying. There was just one thing she knew would cure her, and that was to tear her bursting heart out of herself, through the ribs and out, and hold it high, a trembling ball of glowing golden astral matter." [Unpublished.]
This is not something you can just make up. And this was not the only time. I often associated those episodes with talking to the men I loved (I promised I will not talk more about them) but I once had one come on in the topology lecture of Calculus III, and very often I get them by dancing to a song I like. In the Wikipedia description of hypomania, it mentions that some people have hypomania as their baseline. I think that's me:
"Cheerful?"
"Insanely so." Are other people any other way, and do not have cheerful as their default state? [ibid.]
Ok, so the Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! article also says that it is very hard to diagnose bipolar in teenagers because the hormonal flux is similar to many of the symptoms. And I never had the symptom of being "overtly and inappropriately sexual" (if anyone disagrees, stand up now and state your case). Indeed, I may be playing Jerome K. Jerome, whose narrator in the book Three Men in a Boat, (To Say Nothing of the Dog), reads a medical manual and diagnoses himself with every single illness in there except housemaid's knee (or, in the Russian translation which I find even more fun, morning sickness.) Which supports my point that love and bipolar are very closely related. Or maybe my aspirations towards Bipolar I are thwarted and I may just have mild Bipolar II after all. Because I have definitely been depressed.
Just thinking of my trip to Russia the summer of 2004 still makes me shudder and want a hug, if not cry. It had begun when visiting my mother's aging stepmother and her brother. Seeing the dirt in which those people lived, their talk of pensions and laying hens and goats and local murders juxtaposed with my father's endless talk of parasites... When we were biking back to the place we were staying at, I burst into tears on the dark unpaved road: "Oh why did you bring me there! There is no hope in this place!" And the nearest people who could offer me emotional support in that dark place were a third of a world away, and no one I met had any music, or any dancing, to say nothing of email to write to the people I needed. In Moscow, I, in desperation for music, turned to Russian MTV, and the first thing I saw there was...Avril Lavigne. I was never a fan, but perhaps I owe Avril Lavigne a chunk of my sanity. Moscow was better, but during the whole of that trip I never fully recovered, and rarely had even a glimpse of hope until I saw Italy. My stability, it seems, rests on the several delicate posts of music and dance, writing, the pursuit of knowledge (currently in math and linguistics) and my relationships with the people I love, and I had only a little writing there to support me. I wrote in my journal afterwards:
"I had gone into a dark place
And forgotten how to dance."
I have had occasional episodes of feeling down and depressed before, and after, and even recently after the Friday before last's dance rehearsal. There is a poem I wrote in grade 12, when I was already acquainted with the feelings (that poem was spurred by a secret crush misunderstanding me). It has been published in Teen Angst Poetry, but the copyright remains with me, so I will put it here. Paradoxically, repeating it several times helps me a lot when I am feeling depressed, despite it exactly putting my feelings into words; maybe putting feelings into words makes them less real.
The story of pain no one can tell
Though men have told of the circles of hell,
They can’t tell of when there never was joy under the sky
And fear blocks the way to the freedom to die.
They can’t tell of when strength does not match desire;
You cannot go any higher.
Don’t even try,
You were living a lie,
All gifts that the gilded days past gave
Were to mock a weakling and a slave.
No one else can tell,
No one knows at all
Of the shards’ sharp edges when stars fall,
Of the darkness that comes when you awake,
Of the eternal scourge of one mistake,
Of the unshed tears,
Of the tangling fears,
Of calls and calls knowing no one hears,
Of cold grey rain,
Of the unwashable stain,
Of the endless refrain
Again and again,
Again, again,
All life was in vain.
Of pain.
Maybe this poem works as a reciting mantra because it basically says "Nobody knows how you feel, you are all alone, so deal with it." If anyone else reads this and has episodes of depression, you are welcome to the poem if it helps you any.
Another post I may tell of other people who have saved my sanity, besides Avril Lavigne, who just happened to be on MTV when a really indescribably lonely homesick Canadian turned it on.
Why do I tell of all this? Because if I do turn out to have bipolar disorder... for the people who love me, remember the knife edge I walk and - catch me if I fall.
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