Better Living Through Chemistry

In case you’ve been wondering how I’ve been doing with my bipolar depression, here’s an update.

1. Starting Monday, I’ll be at the therapeutic dose of my mood stabilizer. Right now, I’m at 75% of that, and I feel great.
2. Do I still have good days and bad days? Sure, we all have them. But my bad days aren’t so bad, and my good days aren’t so good that I want to quit the drugs and go back to the highs of hypomania.
3. Speaking of those highs: what I’ve come to understand is that a lot of my negative self-image stems from the fact that the only times I’ve felt right the past few years have been when I’ve been hypomanic. Let’s be honest: I’m a high-functioning overachiever. My hypomania maximized my potential for awesome, which is why I liked it so much. But I’ll also be honest in that the highs are not worth the lows that I have. Not in the slightest. Further expanding on this point: I’m aware that people really value me, but I don’t feel that way. There are some roots to this problem, and I’m exploring them. It’s hard work, but it’s so necessary to getting my head straightened out.
4. Therapy continues to be good, if hard. [See above.] A lot of my actions in the last 20 years have been to insulate myself from pain. Fixing this is not unlike debriding a burn: painful, but necessary. I’m just starting to unlock things inside my head, and it’s so good.
5. I had to get biochemically balanced to make therapy be fully efficacious. This isn’t to say that the last eight months have been a waste, because they haven’t, but I’m feeling like I’m just now starting to get somewhere. We’ve been laying the foundation, and now it’s time to raise the walls. [Or, well, lower them, as it were.]

And if you didn’t care, well, you read this far anyway, eh?