Bipolar: My Story - Part 1

I am a bipolar person. I learned this, officially, when I was 22. I had felt it for years, though I had no idea what it was. As psychology is not taught in high school (at least, not when I went to high school from 1987-1991) as a serious discipline and my parents were not educated in the subject, I, like most people my age, went about my business. That meant my day to day affairs. Like all young people, school was my job for virtually my whole life and functioning in that environment was my responsibility. The focus was on getting the job done. That meant good grades, good behavior, success at sports (really success at everything) within reason. While my parents preached this success to me, they were also much more relaxed about it. "Don't work too hard," was what my Dad frequently said, not because he was lazy or wanted me to be but because he didn't want me to be stressed at the day to day routine that life was. I, however, from a young age, was temperamental. I believe that part of my genes came from my grandfather on my mother's side. Growing up, I always took myself and everything that happened to me deadly seriously. When triggered, I had a ferocious intensity about me, a competitive streak. I had to win and not only win big. I had to dominate or it wouldn't matter. This streak could be extremely vicious and out of control. When I was in an intense mood, it was usually overwhelming. My brain would light fire and burn for awhile. By the time I was 18 and the stress of leaving home was rapidly approaching, the fire seemed to burn hotter and hotter until it became an existential rage. My school years were successful and I wouldn't be necessarily be angry at anything in my world (though I often convinced myself I was.) LL Cool J's "Mama said knock you out," was how I felt in growing regularity. I got into hard core rap because they were intensely angry, though they, in their minds, had a societal reason to be. I didn't, yet I was full of rage anyway. I knew something was wrong but I didn't know what. Right around that time, my parents separated for good. Though I had always been a somewhat morose person, getting down for what often seemed like foolish reasons, I had never been in a tailspin like the one started when my parents separated. We had moved out of state when I was 10 and I had been greatly abused by the kids at my new school. I cherished my home life in compensation and lived in dread for the approaching time when I had to go to school to be attacked. Though being insulted and, conversely, learning to insult others, was my day to day life, I had some friends though I was never near what would be called popular. When my parents separated, my mother started to tell me all kinds of terrible things about their relationship. As I was a freshman in college and my life was just taking off, this parental instability preyed greatly on my mind and affected me at school. Prodded by my increasingly unstable mother, I went to a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with depression. This started my journey to diagnosis, every psyche drug in the book, eventual learning and my striving for moments of mental and emotional clarity, acceptance and freedom from pain (which is a constant fight.) I saw my college life, friendships, personality and health plummet to near incompetence and complete lack of functioning as I tried to figure myself out amidst near constant family criticism. I failed miserably several times in many things I attempted, suicidal in my mind many times and at the edge of attempts a few times. I was completely lose emotionally for many years until, after leaving and going back to college several times as I tried to "get my head straight" as I called it, I was so sick I literally stopped going to class in 1996, hanging out with some friends for the next few months, living in terror of when I'd have to tell my father that I had had to quit on school. He was emotionally abusive towards me when he found out, treating me like I was deadbeat (my Dad is a Republican) who was just a lazy bum. Just before I told him, I was committed to committing suicide beforehand but I couldn't do it. I soon checked myself in to my first clinic. I had no insurance and my father paid for it, angry as hell the whole way. This was in the summer of 1996. As much hell as I had gone through, my most hellish years (and moments of triumph), were still to come. I will continue with that part of my story later. Relating a few things I have experienced has made me very, very tired and very, very sad. I want other bipolars and people with other mental illnesses to draw strength from my comments. I very much want to help others like me. Those that have been through hell and are possibly experiencing such things now, I can only offer my love and support from a distance and in spirit. I wish there was gold at the end of every rainbow (including mine) but it is hell having a mental illness and our futures are always uncertain. You are welcomed and constantly loved wherever you are. I would help physically if I could but all I can offer is care over cyber space. I care. As only one human being, I am always with you with love and understanding. Please be strong and hope.

What is happiness? Internal influences

My previous post concerned the external influences that affect our happiness; now I'll comment on what is, perhaps, an even stronger determinate of our happiness, namely internal factors. Such questions are really only an extension of "nature vs. nurture" and "experience vs. reason." They're questions of how we relate to the world and the world relates to us. With progressive discoveries in brain science, psychology and philosophy (to a certain extent) have turned the focus of addressing questions of humanity inward. No longer are questions of metaphysics (such as how a "God" impacts our lives) the most pertinent. Questions of what happens outside our world seem almost primitive in the world of modern science. That said, nature, more than nurture, has been the primary focus on explaining who we are and why we are who we are. Biology and how it affects brain chemistry are vitally important to how we see the world, how we see ourselves and how we feel in general. Emotions have been linked to the brain's amygdala, the walnut sized ganglion (had to look that up) in our mid-brains. As a Romantic, I'm annoyed at the prospect that the awesome power and beauty of human emotions are perceived by science as coming from a "ganglion" (whatever that is) the size of a walnut in our brains. So boring! Still, I accept whatever is true. If our emotions are purely physical, coming from the mid-brain, then so be it (although it's more complicated than that.) Regardless of how they're created, emotions are very complex and are an enormous part of what makes us human. So how does our internal makeup impact our happiness? How we express emotions depends on how they're produced in our brains and how they're affected by the external world. Mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder greatly impact how our emotions are produced and, more importantly, are regulated in our brains. Personality disorders like borderline personality also have huge impacts on our moods and feelings. In the grip of such illnesses, emotions can become delusional and elusive. The individual can enter into escapism and never return. This can create a false happiness which can thrive as long as the individual never leaves the fantasy world. In our real world, this is, of course, impossible as we can only survive by suspending our disbelief for brief periods. The physical science of the brain will always drag the healthy individual back to the physical realities of the world around us. From a purely scientific perspective, that science of mind, neurotransmitters in our brains, govern what we think and feel. How that brain chemistry is then developed by our contact with people and other external factors dictates how we feel. Simple as that. And, scientifically, this is reasonable and, as human research continues, no doubt, biologically true. However, cold, bland, wonderful science doesn't stand a chance of winning the battle over emotional perspective when it comes to combining emotions with abstract imagination and creativity. Our creative imaginations take emotions in hand and explode them into colors, fictional worlds that take us beyond the stars, moments of human drama that inspire us to strive and give life meaning. In short, emotions in the hands of science are dull and lifeless. Combined with imagination, emotions are priceless, the reason why we're alive. If we don't feel and express our emotions in ever more complicated patterns, we become empty robots, devoid of color and life, only capable of thought. No matter how brilliant and developed our thoughts become, it isn't enough. We have to be artistic; we have to paint and be moved by paintings. We have to draw and be amazed by what we're capable of creating. We have to produce music and revel in the beauty of the melodies. Like thoughts and emotions, our creative energies also come from within. Bring them all together and we are human, we are whole. Emotions, especially, become how we motivate ourselves. This is true human happiness. We feel it inside. We are complete.

What is Happiness? External influences

I'm hoping to do a series of posts where I take a different emotion and analyze exactly what that emotion is and means (if I'm successful.) So I'll start with happiness. Happiness is what? Firstly, let's consider the exterior. What makes us happy in the world? Happiness by external means can be considered in different ways. Firstly, there is the kind of happiness that we hopefully all feel and that is parental/sibling happiness. Beyond ourselves, this is the first kind of happiness it is possible to experience. Psychologists say we have to be held and we have to experience positive emotional feedback. If this is attained, as infants, we live with an early, unconscious kind of pleasurable state that can only be termed happy because the opposite of positive early development can only be deemed unhappy. As youths, without the conscious experience that comes with age, we can only exist in one of these two states as we're not learned enough to know shades of gray. As we grow older, we begin to experience ourselves. We begin to realize what we think (even if we don't yet know how or why we think it.) As we're taught things, presumable life lessons, by our parents and teachers, we begin to set our thoughts against the background of these concepts. As we're not yet mature or aware enough to be strong in ourselves, we naturally compare what we know of ourselves against these qualifications. A powerful, early state of happiness or unhappiness is created in these moments (assuming the young person is in a relatively normal social world.) If the young person's thoughts and feelings match up with what is considered good in their environment, the person is happy. It is like passing through a gate while traveling through a world the traveler doesn't understand. The traveler is happy when the gate opens and the traveler is able to continue. If the young person's thoughts and feelings do not harmonize with his or her surroundings, only emotional stress can arise. If validation is all the young person can value, then clashing with the accepted standards will create emotions such as confusion, unease, fear, panic, perhaps anger or other such emotions. A strong, intelligent, older person can rationalize (and even embrace) these kinds of emotions as being part of life. The mature mind can cope but the younger mind can't seek such refuge of the experienced and will feel the stress and pain that the possibility of dislike or rejection will create. Such a state of being cannot be considered anything other than unhappy. Only a young masochist could possibly be happy in such moments of painful emotion but that is the product of an emotionally malfunctioning brain. The possibility that the young person receives mixed messages both from early teachers and parents should also be considered. With age, the young person can see these realities as being part of the gray area of human reality but can only become confused by such mixed messages at such a life stage. As the young person grows older, he or she, through often painful experience, begins to process information from their environment both at home and at school. Peers become vitally influential and parents less so. A diverse educational process allows the maturing young adult to see life being lived from many different perspectives by seemingly different people. The young adult, if experiencing doubt about their sexuality or other important emotional issue, may find succor at this moment by realizing that there are people in the world just like them. This will lighten unhappy feelings of confusion and doubt. At this point, the maturing adult becomes not quite happy with HAPPIER. The maturing adult now lives in a world of differences, different people and different things. Their emotional burden is less but they realize that there are people in the world who dislike who and what they are and always will. The maturing adult learns that you can't please everyone. There is no such thing as total and absolute acceptance. This creates the opposite states of awareness that the world is full of potential friends and potential enemies. Young adults at this stage begin to pursue and find their friends and create their social groupings of like minds. They find their social happiness in groups of similar people. Popular people hang with the other popular people. Outcasts find each other. People with similar creative interests or favorite sports teams or similar unconscious insecurities socialize together. A truly mature adult would then grow to not only include those in their own social grouping but will try to make friends with people in other groupings. Unfortunately, this is often not the case in our often ignorant, frightened society. Many in our world stay in their like minded social groups and never leave them. Popular kids continue to aim high and achieve a higher social status than others. Outcasts grow to hate the world. People with similar religious beliefs grow to hate others with different beliefs, etc. Such social distinctions are based on fear, whether it be the fear of the unknown or the fear of the other person and that fear, being an unpleasant emotion, cannot make the sufferer happy. Narrow world views cannot be happy unless the individual's conscious mind is either ignorant to ways other people think and feel or is constantly fed data designed to keep the individual in a sense of social stagnation. Certain preachers telling their followers about the horrors of other religions only, without telling them positives of the other person's faith, is an example. The preacher's intent is to keep the lay person in the flock by telling half truths designed to keep the listener firmly in that social grouping. The follower is then socially stagnated as they are only active within one circle of people, no matter how large, that think and feel the same way of things. If an individual is stuck in such situations, he or she can only be considered socially happy if they are oblivious to all outside their realm of consciousness. That, however, is not the real world. The real world is loaded with many different things and many different people with many different styles and cultures. Only by experiencing the real world in all its shades can a person strive to achieve full happiness in the external world. All that is true has to be considered. As I am not married or have children, I'll end my dialogue on external influences that affect happiness at this point. I'll continue with the idea of happiness as experienced via internal influences. To go with my previous thoughts, an internal way of perceiving social happiness can be derived by ones mental attitude. Accepting the world for what it is and enjoying the differences can be modified to the view that, yes, the external world is full of differences but we, as people, are all similar underneath. In such a view, we become Disney's Small World in a way that can make us feel happy as we are content that we are all flesh and blood down deep. Such perceptions, those that come from personal awareness, education and possibly an introverted mind will be discussed in my next post. Thank you for reading this far.