Mental Health Awareness Month: This Blog

My 2008 bipolar diagnosis suddenly made sense of all the weirdnesses floating around in my head: plunging depressions, paranoias, social anxieties, impulsive behaviors, suicidal ideation, big ideas without consequences alarms, racing thoughts, abject terror in social situations (I once had a full-on panic attack when I opened a party invitation that came in the mail) (remember getting party invitations in the mail?) …

Newly armed with a name for the collective demons I faced, I started fighting back (or at least trying to manage my world) with everything I had at my disposal—which at the beginning wasn't much because my doctor didn’t think I needed medication. So I launched into a homemade cocktail of deep breaths, internal pep talks, more-informed behaviors and decisions, reading everything I could find, looking for a new doctor who might have more powerful (i.e., pharmaceutical) tools for me to use … and the expectation that I might at any moment need to just retreat to the safety of my Chicago condo in the sky to regroup and start again the next day.

I also became self-aware enough to start being embarrassed by things I did in public … mostly bouncing around as though I were on fire, being so down I’d no-show at events I promised to attend, and in more than one instance literally running away when someone tried to introduce me to a friend.
So I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I turned to social media to start explaining myself and apologizing for being so damn weird. And to my surprise, I almost immediately started getting understanding, support … and thanks from people in similar situations for being so open about my mental illness and the challenges it brought me.

Eventually someone suggested that I start a blog to document my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and the highs and lows of my journey. So I launched TMIpolar (get it? It’s BI polar but I overshare so it’s TMI polar, which I will go to my grave thinking is one of my most clever linguistic inventions) and backfilled it with everything I’d posted and started filling it with my new adventures.

There is also a book in the works, but the prospect of organizing my thoughts into something approaching legitimate book form is so overwhelming that you shouldn’t start looking for it in bookstores until 2095.

In a weird way to think this is unfortunate, I unfortunately have been so stable in the last few years that I haven’t had much to post about any noteworthy ups and downs of my personal journey. But I’ve aggregated all my Mental Health Awareness Month essays along with other essays/thoughts/reviews/etc here for my own—along with anyone else’s—reference.

So scroll through my ramblings and even bookmark the site if you want. I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time organizing things by keywords for your perusing convenience. And I hope it helps (or at the very least entertains) you if you find you need it.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Next to Normal

Next to Normal—a searing, brilliant, Pulitzer-winning rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is desperately struggling with bipolar depression—changed the voice of Broadway and broadened the scope of what theater can do when it opened in 2008. The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to those of us living in its fogs and terrors ... and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY life, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

I've been invited to be the Bipolar Person in Residence and talk to the casts and audiences of Next to Normal productions at three theaters over the last decade. And while I hope it was helpful for the actors as they rehearsed and found their characters' realities, it was extremely helpful for me to have an opportunity to articulate the swings and uncertainties and terrors of living with a mental illness—both so I could explain any weirdness I've personally exhibited and to help the actors help their audiences better understand these realities.

While every bipolar mind is different and therefore every moment of Next to Normal doesn't exactly mirror my experiences, every note and every word of the show is brilliant and hits brilliantly close to home. And that closing anthem—sung by the characters not to each other but to the audience and to the present and to the future—encapsulates the struggles and hopes I live with every day in astute prose and powerful, emotional, wall-of-sound vocals:

Day after day,

We'll find the will to find our way.

Knowing that the darkest skies

Will someday see the sun.

When our long night is done,

There will be light.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Mania

 

Mania (or being manic) is the opposite of depression in the up-and-down swings of bipolar disorder. It’s also the other half of the no-longer-used term manic depression, which was changed to bipolar disorder in the 1980 third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM) in the interest of reducing stigmas related to the words manic and depression.

Bipolar disorder is subdivided into bipolar I (which has more extreme swings in each direction) and bipolar II (which manifests with lower levels of mania—clinically called hypomania—and deeper depressions). I’m bipolar II.

Like depression, mania can manifest itself over different lengths of time in any number or combination of symptoms, including these:

• High, uncontrollable energy
• Extreme, rapid talkativeness
• Racing thoughts or flights of ideas
• Feelings of elation or euphoria
• Feelings of irritation or agitation
• High distractibility and inability to focus
• Decreased need for sleep while still feeling rested
• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• Feeling full of great new ideas, important plans or exciting activities
• Involvement in risky activities—like extravagant shopping, improbable commercial schemes, recreational drugs, hypersexuality—with a high likelihood of negative consequences

Some bipolar people claim they like or actually love their manic episodes. I can understand that sentiment from the perspective of having a little more energy or euphoria, but I find that anything more than that can be terrifying. And exhausting.

It’s terrifying because I know from experience I’m prone to do impulsive things with no consequences alarms going off in my head. After two decades on the bipolar coaster, I’m finally self-aware enough that I know I’m doing (or at least reminding myself not to do) those impulsive things and I need to summon the alarms myself because they won’t go off on their own. Thankfully my impulsive behaviors tend to be rather benign and fixable, like buying shoes and clothing online. But there’s always the possibility I might escalate, and who knows what my impulsive brain could be capable of.

It’s also terrifying because my manic episodes often plummet directly into the deepest of my depressive episodes. Again: I’m finally self-aware enough to know that the depressive episodes are coming and I can do what little I’m able to do to prepare for them, like canceling plans and setting out Tylenol PM to help me hopefully sleep through the worst of them.

Everyone experiences mania and depression differently—to different degrees, for different lengths of time, at different intervals and even in different environmental conditions. Neither is better or easier than the other, and both in their own way can control or disrupt your life.

You’ll probably never encounter me in a depressive state because I become immediately reclusive. But if I’m talking rapidly and visibly distracted by everything and more jittery than normal, please do your best to keep me away from the Nordstrom website. I have a pretty hefty discount. 

Part of a weird, disconcerting, sometimes terrifying world

Facebook just reminded me that nine years ago I played King Triton in a big, splashy (ahem) production of The Little Mermaid and made my first appearance onstage on a wheeled platform with a Botticelli shell and nothing to hold on to for dear life.

Oh—and my doctor and I decided that playing a principal role in a show that involved being wheeled onstage on a small, Botticelli-shelled platform was the PERFECT time to wean myseof off the demon drug Cymbalta.

If you've never been on Cymbalta, I do not recommend starting. If you've ever stopped taking Cymbalta, you know that doing it in this context was just bonkers. I was always unsure of what exact direction I could find gravity. I was in a constant state of thick, memory-clouding fog. I got what everyone coming off of Cymbalta calls "brain zaps," which is the best attempt at a collective name for an impossible-to-describe colleciton of alarming things happening in my head.

And it didn't help that practically every entrance I made began with me angrily shouting ARIEL! and then struggling to remember what came next.

I barely felt present the entire run. You might say I was notter under the water. But you shouldn't. Nobody should ever say that.

BOOT EDGE EDGE!

Pete Buttigieg had another town-hall rally in Cedar Rapids tonight, where he continued to inspire and enthrall and impress the hell out of a packed room of supporters and still-undecided caucusers. His messages of big-tent inclusivity and his standards of decency and his unfailingly measured and principled and educated policy proposals shaped more than his well-rehearsed stump speech; they drove thoughtful, meaningful answers to audience questions drawn randomly from a literal fishbowl in front of everyone. Pete doesn’t just talk for the sake of talking—he has things to say that he’s clearly thought about and taken the time to research and understand and make informed opinions about.

Issues related to mental illness—and caring for people with mental illnesses—came up more than once over the course of the evening, and amid discussions of stigma and a lack of available care and his loan-forgiveness proposals to draw more people into the field, he specifically mentioned bipolar disorder. I was sitting with my dad in the ADA section, wedged between him with his cane and a stranger with hers. My tardive dyskinesia—a permanent tremor disorder brought on by my bipolar meds—happened to be firing on all cylinders tonight, and as I was struggling mightily to sit still and not bounce like an earthquake and jostle everyone wedged around me, my chosen candidate—the measured, educated, thoughtful, egalitarian, inspiring, openly gay, perpetual adult in the room—specifically mentioned ME and my struggles and my family’s struggles ... and he had solid, workable ideas for addressing them for everyone living with our struggles.

And though my meds have also pretty much neutered my emotions and left me virtually unable to cry, I found myself repeatedly choking back tears.

If you’re undecided or overwhelmed or even underwhelmed by the field of Democratic candidates, reach out to me. I’m more than happy to share with you why I find Pete Buttigieg so inspiring and important and eminently capable of leading us all as a citizenry and as a country.