Reflecting Back on 2019

What a year this has been. It’s been a year that has dragged on, it’s been a year that has flown by.

When I left the Bad Situation in December 2018, I was terrified of 2019. What it would look like, what it would mean to me. I was afraid of the unknown and change. But for us to grow, our old selves must moult and die.

In the last dredges of spring 2018, I had willingly, hesitantly, worriedly added my name to the waitlist for an intensive therapy outpatient program. I waited and waited and by late summer, I received a call that I was next up on the list. I balked and asked to be pushed back until the next opening. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have my affairs in order. I didn’t have my head on straight. I used all of these excuses to stay stuck and safe, even if it was slowly eating me alive.

Then in the fall of 2018, I received yet another call. It was time. I had to stop being afraid and take the plunge. I left the Bad Situation in December 2018, rushed to get my affairs in order, and finally, in January 2019, I entered treatment.

Half of 2019 was spent healing myself. I look back at treatment and am proud of myself. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, but it was also the most rewarding. It was twelve weeks long. Twelve torturous weeks of walking through hell. Dealing with the past, facing consequences of a reckless life spent (mentally) ill, immersing myself in past traumas to finally face them and let them go. It was cathartic, and it wasn’t easy. But I survived. I found my strength and resilience. It was in me all along. I just didn’t know it until treatment.

I do miss treatment, I miss the structure, the cathartic verbal purging of my soul and mind, and I miss group therapy. But all good and bad things must come to an end. At the end of the twelve weeks, I ‘graduated’. I was healing and just starting my journey.

I look back at the beginning half of 2019 and try to remind my present self that I was so confident in my skin, I liked myself, I liked who I had become, I was strong.

It’s a struggle. A struggle to try and continue to be that person at the end of treatment. To remember that person. The person that exuded self-like and confidence. I did fall back into my old behaviours a few times this year, but that was to be expected. I’m still struggling and still learning how to execute all that I learned in treatment. 

Coming home, Coming Back to Myself.

| April 2018 | June 2019 |

---

I’ve come a long way–survived hell and back, and back again–to finally end up here.

I mentioned before but for three years, I was in an abusive and toxic situation/relationships. It was soul-crushing and destructive. I worked hard in group therapy to re-wire my broken mind and I’m still struggling with the ramifications of leaving the situation behind me.

Even before those three years, since the winter of 2015 (when I was first diagnosed with having bipolar disorder), my life started to crack at the seams. Until finally, my life fell apart, myself with it.

I fell so hard and like Alice, I tumbled down, down, down the rabbit hole, free falling for years until group therapy. There, I learned how to climb out of hell, only leaving it behind after I walked through it.

An Embarrassing Update in which I realize I’m Not Hypomanic, just a Twit.

If I could bury my head in the sand, trust me, I would. I’m more amused than anything, even though I did something less than brilliant, I still can’t help myself but laugh (at the situation and my twit moment).

Loving life or Hypomania?

I have Bipolar disorder. I’m not going to really talk about the journey I went on towards the diagnosis, that’s for another day when I don’t feel so ambivalent or off.

I always say mental illness has flavours, we all have different flavours of the same terrible ice cream; how it manifests for each of us, what it looks like on us, what it means for us and to us. It’s a crappy piece of chocolate we never wanted and it’s an ill-fitted campy shirt we never asked for.

On me, the bipolar disorder manifests through intensely destructive, long periods of depression and bouts of cataclysmic and wonderfully amazing hypomania. Both are devastating, both are tornadoes upending my life into chaos.

 

It has taken me years and years to finally be stable, to be where I am now, to be here. But that isn’t to say I don’t fall back down or I don’t fly towards the sun. Slipping back or slipping up.

As the seasons’ change, so does the disorder. I’m still on the fence whether it’s a mental illness or not, mainly because when I’m stable, I consider it a disorder. But when I’m ill and falling apart or falling upwards, it’s an illness. It’s an exhausting, perpetuating cycle that just takes and takes and erodes and destroys. I’m being quite melodramatic, I know.

Because of the nature of the disorder and the fluctuations of my moods, I am very apprehensive when I feel emotions…when I just am. I don’t trust what I feel, at all. I’m scared when I’m happy and I’m terrified when I’m sad. When I’m tired, I can’t help but think, “is the depression coming back?” or when I can’t sleep, I worry, “is this hypomania?”

There’s always this nagging pull in my brain telling me, “are you getting sick again?”, “are you going to lose your mind again?”, “will you weather the storm this time around?”, “how much of yourself are you going to lose this time?”

 

I remember this one day in group therapy, I felt good about myself and I was having a particularly good day (compared to the dreadful weeks before and after that day). We were supposed to draw ourselves as rose bushes and we were only given thirty minutes so we couldn’t overthink anything. I, of course, drew a blossoming rosebush, growing from thorns, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. When I went home that night, I felt good about it, about myself.