She Has Bipolar, She Isn’t Bipolar

She has Bipolar.

She isn’t Bipolar.

She likes to think that people are just misinformed to use her mental illness as an adjective to describe the weather or women who have PMS.

Of course, people do describe others as “cancer” so it is quite possibly just a very insensitive and cruel world.

Bipolar is a disease of the brain. She can’t get rid of it. A 10-day steroid pack, orange juice and some rest will not cure this. She didn’t “catch” it from someone’s germs on a door handle.

This is her battle, every day, for the rest of her life.

Medication helps lessen her symptoms, but it never disappears. There is no magic wand for this one, folks.

Her life fluctuates between a normal phase, mania and depression that we can’t possibly understand. We can’t understand any of it. Her brain is hard-wired to be passionate about all things.

Books, movies, people…she loves or she doesn’t.

Mania is lack of impulse control….driving 100 mph on a 65 mph road…to just feel the rush. The numbness she normally lives with is gone. She is self-destructive by nature. She can breathe deeply and do some yoga, but when your mind is controlling you, with your heart as a cheerleader, she has no way to escape.

Rose colored glasses make a wonderful accessory to witness the opposite of any man she would ever love. In this state, however, he is the one. This is the stage where her most self-destructive side emerges. She feels this amazing connection with him that she has never felt before in her life.

Ask a therapist and they will tell you that if you put a Narcissist and someone with Bipolar in a room, they will gravitate towards each other. She always, without a doubt, drags one of them home. Cruel, abusive, mind games….exactly what she needs in her life.

The glasses come off and she sees him, not the man of her dreams, but the man of her nightmares. This ending varies, but normally he hurts her more by calling her “crazy”, which was already common during their brief courtship.

Hello depression, my dear friend, can I come over for a visit? Depression lives in a dark house with no windows. She sleeps and sleeps. She mentally abuses herself for what she just did.

Why would anyone love her?

Plot twist here…people do.

She loves passionately and that is amazing.

She gobbles up any information about friends who are in pain because she lives it. She knows how it feels to be at your darkest, but knowing you have to survive. Amazing listener.

She remembers things that everyone else has forgotten like the time you dyed your hair red without even thinking about it after trying on a red wig at the mall.

Remember that time we played pool at your house and listened to the Pointer Sisters?

How about when we were little, we wanted to live together in a house made out of cheese?

She remembers all of it. Her brain is flawed, but her long-term memory is on point.

This girl is worth loving.

You just need to learn her. Read her like a textbook.

Read her until the pages are coffee stained and crinkled.

She is worth it.

You have to be special, though.

It is work.

If you are weak, step aside.

Keeping her safe from herself isn’t a battle.

It’s a war.