I thought long and hard about this prompt. I was beginning to feel as if I was going to have to talk about the same thing I talked about for "Moment," which I had already cited again in my post for yet another prompt. Next I tried to think of one of my rare athletic moments. The few times I exerted myself, there was not any particular moment I got into some kind of zone, where mind and body melded.
Suddenly the phrase "mind and body" leapt out at me. How could I have missed that?
One of the dilemmas of being bipolar is determining the point at which one's personality ends, and the influence of the illness begins. Mental illness is a biological illness, but it manifests in our behavior and mood. Are our "real" personalities and our bipolar symptoms, which are, after all, largely behavioral, too intertwined to be teased apart? It certainly can feel that way, especially when you are in the midst of an episode. The fact that sometimes a particular mood will really bring out a troubling personality trait fills me with trepidation that I am directed more by my illness, than my own volition.
One of the things I have found on Crazyboards (which I mentioned in the "Community" prompt blog post) by listening to other bipolar patients' experiences, from childhood to the present day, so much of my life is an echo of theirs. From similar yet unusual childhood mishaps, to relations with our parents, to our delusions and/or hallucinations, and how they spill over into our day to day lives, no matter how rational and responsible we try to be.
So is the startling similarity of so many bipolar people's lives just a correlation, or do precursors of our first "official" mood episode start appearing way earlier in our lives than one would think? The traditional age of onset for bipolar illness is late teens, or early 20s. But while we may not have an acute episode until after our childhood, sometimes it seems as if our early behavior and personalities are strikingly similar.
And because bipolar illness is a genetic one, our parents offer suffer from mental illness of one type or another. So many if not most of us had unstable and chaotic childhoods. If anyone needs structure, it is bipolar people, and that kind of tumultuous upbringing often causes us to find ways of sabotaging and undermining ourselves. Crazy parents are often unable to provide the support and nurturing we need, through no fault of their own. The more regular our lives, the better we fare from day to day (although I will admit that I am very unlikely to impose structure on myself). I don't really know how a "normal" family interacts, but our family gatherings are almost always tense affairs, involving a great deal of teetering on egg shells.
Unfortunately, the mood episodes that make me feel most alive are mixed episodes, which are widely accepted to be the worst and most dangerous episodes in terms of the risk of a patient harming themselves or others. Rages, sobbing, over-sensitivity, self-loathing, sensory overload; the sensation of my body trying to crawl out of its own skin, the pacing, the inability to sleep. Things taste awful, so I stop eating. My frustration threshold is non-existent, and I can feel anger coursing through my body.
Mixed states are the most visceral and terrifying periods of my life. I hope that no one ever judges my overall personality based on my behavior during such an episode. But I would be disingenuous to tell people that mood episodes are somehow not a genuine part of me.
Just because I haven't added any media for a few days, and this is supposed to be a post of the uniting of body and mind, here is a picture I took of myself during my last mixed episode, in the early summer of 2010. Most of you of course have no idea how I normally look, but here I am drained of color, my face is set and furrowed with anxiety, and I look exhausted because I had probably gotten about 12 hours sleep in the last 4 days.
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