Being myself can sometimes be really difficult.
I’ve had a diagnosis of depression ever since I was 9, after a traumatizing incident, which caused alot of issues growing up. I married at 19, and despite my [now] ex-husbands abuse towards me and my pets I stayed with him. On Nov 20, 2007 he decided to shut me up by smashing my head into the corner of the bathroom wall, in turn I received a concussion and slight whiplash from the force. After that incident I started having long bouts of mania and depression that would cycle over a period of months, weeks, and after a while days, hours and sometimes mixed mania and depression. After a particularly painful bout of a mixed episode, my doctor admitted me to the hospital where I was diagnosed Bipolar.
Its been a few months now since I was released from the out patient therapy at the hospital, and I have been seeing my councilor, doing group therapy 3-times a week and I have been participating in PT for 2 other conditions I have [Fibromialigia, and Sponylolisthesis], so I have been really pushing myself to get better all around. My meds have been changed almost every month and dealing with the side-effects of going on and off meds has been really difficult. I’m almost to a place where they are working most of the time.
I still have times when either depression or mania flares up really bad and I literally can’t stop it with out taking a mood-stabilizer. Just the other day I had a bout of mania during a group therapy session, my body wouldn’t stop moving on its own, the more I tried the worse it became, my thoughts were racing so fast I thought everyone around me was too slow and I got irritated and ended up snapping at someone; thankfully they understood where I was coming from and things were smoothed over. Two nights ago, my depression flared up, and for no particular reason, I could not stop crying and thinking that my life was a complete failure, I mindlessly wiped tears from my eyes and deleted 75% of my facebook friends and 1/2 my phone contacts, because I felt like no one in their right mind would ever care about me, so why am I friends with them. [Since I have re-friended alot of the people I didn't mean to delete in my delirium.]
I know, some of you may be asking, ‘why is she being so blunt about her problems?’ ‘why is she saying all these things about her life?’ Well, the answer is that there is too much stigma, for one, surrounding bipolar disorder/manic depressive and depression in general. The other reason, is that I want people to be able to understand that I use my mind-altering condition [bipolar disorder] to infer life into my art, I use my paintbrush to bring out my emotions and release them onto the canvas. I want to share my experiences that I have with people, but I am terribly introverted, and terrified of rejection, and many times my depression has gotten in the way of being able to communicate with friends and my mania has brought lots of friends into my life that fall away when I fall out of being manic again. It can be very difficult trying to understand what is going on and why people can’t understand.
I hope that here, I can be a voice for myself and for those who suffer from bipolar disorder or depression, and try to bring some of the personal experiences I have had to light so that others may better understand the struggle that it is to deal with from day to day.
Thank you for letting me share this with you.
