Dear Person With Bipolar Disorder, You Are Beautiful

You are the ocean. You contain deep depths of water, vibrant currents that pulse electric within you. Sometimes an emotional storm throttles you, and your waves ascend to perilous heights, then scream as they fall. Sometimes you cry salty tears as you see ships pierced by your embrace.

When depression seeps in, you almost drown within yourself. Lost in the secret corners of your Pacific, you trip over pieces of a coral reef as you fight against your inner currents. Your eyes struggle to adjust to sweaty darkness. You feel near collapse, but you are a fighter so you keep swimming. You keep swimming because you believe in the sky, in the sun that it is waiting for you once you finally pull free from stinging coral and the hostile deep.

When mania possesses you, you blaze neon green, your waves dance throughout the day and night. Hypnotized by the sun, you greedily swallow ships and dolphins, clumsily embrace islands. Every drop of you is electrified. You start to believe you can consume mountains and continents. Then you get paranoid and believe the earth is following you, that the sky will break you in half with lightning bolts, that the ships will assemble together and crush you. Just as your energy peaks to a frenzied mountaintop, you crash back to that familiar enemy, depression.

You are creative and romantic. You are a poet even if you only speak in droplets. No one ever really understands your verse. Men fall in love with you, even if you wound them on the days that mania has you hypnotized. Occasionally you meet souls that get you; friends who are willing to take a rowboat out to meet you and stay with you for a while. Sometimes you meet a partner who comes to understand your mysteries. The ocean can be a difficult lover, but if they wait long enough they will come to know and taste your goodness.

You know dark nights and beautiful days. You talk to the sun and clouds when loneliness echoes within you. You hear voices sometimes. Are they within your depths or is that the clouds whispering secrets?

You are beautiful. You are romantic. You sink ships and mirror sunsets. Cameras cannot capture you since you are not static. You change, you surge, you roll in and out of beaches.

You are the ocean.

You are bipolar.