This is how I live with Bipolar Disorder

Eight months ago, I gathered my friends around and, staring at the floor, I told them that I had Bipolar Disorder (BPD). I saw the blank look on their faces because they didn’t know what BPD was and I realised that I didn’t know it myself.

What I did know was that it would no longer be just me, but me affected by  a borderline personality disorder and that – I was told – my suicide attempt of two weeks before was part of this mental illness.

If you look it up, you’ll see that it is “a disorder of mood and how a person interacts with others.” I don’t know how this definition compares for others with the same condition, but for me that’s not just a definition I found in a manual, it’s who I am.

Before trying to commit suicide, I had spent almost two years sleeping just a few hours a night and with constant mood swings that would range from being depressed to being extremely angry and restless. I knew that my emotional reaction to what happened around me was not “normal” and I also knew how I should have behaved, but I just couldn’t help it. I ate very little and I compensated with drinking a lot. I could see that I was driving people away but it was like I was watching a very nonsensical movie about somebody else.

I know now that BPD is often associated with depression and the emptiness I was feeling became too much. I didn’t know what to do and, looking back, I had lost contact with the real world around me. I’ve often heard people say that mental illnesses are “all in your head” and in a sense they are right. It was all in my head but in my head the real world was spinning and I just couldn’t keep up with it. Next thing I know, I woke in a hospital bed in Paddington. It was all blurry.

If you fast-forward eight months and five kinds of drugs later, you are still going to find me, 24 years old, affected by BPD. Only this time it’s me, the one with BPD who just dropped out of her MA because she still cannot feel like her life is worthy.

I realise that the mere fact that I’m writing about it means that things are not as bed as they were eight months ago. But I can’t help but wondering who I am. I don’t know if this person has ever been a person without BPD, I’m fairly sure that I will never be able to stop taking drugs and I wonder if I’ll ever have a proportionate perception of the world around me.