Depression will tear you down

from happy to despondent in a matter of minutes and will pin you there with its hands on your throat and its knees on your chest so you can't breathe and you can't move and you can't think and you eventually can't even summon the will to care.

It will override your sense of reason and convince you that despite any evidence to the contrary everyone hates you, you're better off dead and you'd better figure out how to get that way soon or you'll just prolong the agony and the hopelessness and the fact that you just don't matter.

It will destroy you from within, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, certainty by certainty, and leave you battered and bloodied and empty and profoundly profoundly profoundly exhausted whether it slinks away like a fog or sprints away like a wolf with a ripped-up part of you in its teeth so it can hide and feast and grow stronger and lie in wait until its next attack.

It will make you lonely and defeated, desperate for some semblance of validation through a lunch date or an actual date or a party invitation but too scared and awkward and exhausted to follow through until people stop inviting you anywhere because they know you won't show up.

It will dig in its claws and fight to the death the drugs and the counselors and the hospitalizations and the electroconvulsive therapies you eventually turn to in desperation as you endure irritating and embarrassing and possibly permanent side effects and withdrawal effects on your frustrating, endless quest to remember what normal feels like and to attempt to reclaim it.

It will compel you to write alarming texts to your friends and repeatedly, off-puttingly post your graphic, brutal, unfiltered, unapologetic thoughts on social media in a futile attempt to explain yourself, empty your head, get to sleep, try to normalize whatever the fuck is wrong with you so you can finally overcome your choking sense of isolation and think readily and lucidly and productively and walk the earth with confidence and never never never spend another moment foggy and dark and despondent and immobile and alone and sleeping sleeping sleeping and fucking scared you'll do something stupid when you should be breathing and laughing and eating and participating and loving and feeling loved and just goddamned fucking LIVING.

But you know no matter how bad it gets, it will still give you moments and days and maybe even weeks of reprieve where you can see where you need to be, feel what you need to feel, do what you need to do, and memorize this precious knowledge so you can hopefully look at your next attack objectively and learn how to ride it out and minimize the damage and maybe even be embarrassed enough to apologize for the profanity and the disturbing imagery you use when you're buried up to your neck in lava and you're trying to claw your way out and explain yourself so people will understand and maybe help you or at least embrace you flaws and all and help you regain your footing, your dignity, and maybe your place in this bright, friendly, joyous world filled with people and places and experiences eagerly waiting to welcome you with wide open loving inviting arms.

The tenacity and the fortitude

Sometimes being bipolar means waking up with your head covered in a gray wool blanket in the middle of a hot drenching rain and the weight of it is practically crippling but you know you're not depressed and you know you're not confused and you know you can breathe and you know you're invested in fighting your way out so you treat every blink and every word and every thought as fuel that sparks the next blink and the next word and the next thought and even though you're foggy and slow and maybe even late you're MOVING and no matter how long it takes and how hard you have to work just to achieve your minimum for now you know that it's just for now and you'll sooner than later find your way out of that hot wet scratchy gray wool blanket and you'll know from hard-fought experience that you may not have the power to make the rain go away but you have the tenacity and the fortitude to outlast it and find your clarity and focus again in the warm, restorative sunlight it was trying to hide from you and even though you're never entirely sure you know exactly what that unclouded sunlight feels like you'll always get close enough to know what you're fighting for and how to be stronger and smarter and even more certain of your indestructibility the next time.

Despite what your lying eyes might tell you ...

I am not an internationally famous pout model. I'm a PERSON. And I deserve to be treated as such. Except for apparently a few more weeks while what remains of my stand-up-and-black-out-and-crack-the-floor-tile-with-my-face scars continue to dig in their little scar heels and slow the healing process to a glacial pace. Fortunately after three weeks they continue to itch and sting an creep creepily and all spidery into my visual periphery. But now they're also—and I swear I'm selecting my words judiciously so I don't get all graphic and horrifying here—more stickey-outey on my face and tiny sections of them are clearly starting to follow gravity but with a stated mission to never let go—how am I doing so far?—but I still can't be a big boy and bravely pull them off like a band-aid because—and I'm sorry but there's really no delicate way to put this—my absorbable stitches haven't finished (or even started?) absorbing and the damn things are still stitched to my face. 

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done writing about gross things. I think.

So I'm trying not to be all-bipolar-all-the-time because despite my long and verbose and thoroughly documented history of being all bipolar all the time I'm actually fucking sick of it: the free-falls to despondency, the impermanent triumvirates of normalcy and clarity and energy, the endless and clearly more and more arbitrary attempts at changing meds that eventually and predictably fail one after another after another, the new wrinkle that I'm apparently apt to stand up too fast and black out and crack the tile floor with my face, and the endless worry and frustration and exacerbation I cause my family and friends as I cycle through all of the above and ultimately end up sleeping through life. So I'm actively trying not to think about it. But while we're here ... speaking of all of the above, I'm (I hope) finally emerging from a rough four days of hairpin ups and downs and canceled plans and missed uncling and a weekend where I've barely left my bed and never left the house all as a prelude to point out my soaring bedhead. Honest! I just broke my promise to myself to drastically minimize my bipolar talk with the honest intention of providing a few words of context beyond "I haven't showered all weekend" to help you laugh at my lofty locks with a more informed sense of derision. You're welcome.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done wallowing in emotional and tonsorial self-pity. I think.

Actually, no. In the last few months, four—four!—guys I've had long-ago, too-shy-to-ever-tell-them, clearly unrequited crushes on have announced their happy gay marriages on here. I haven't seen or even thought about some of these guys in over a decade. I didn't even realize we were Facebook friends. And I'm not sure what to do with all these weird, long dormant emotions these four rapid-fire revelations have awakened. And I'm not sure why I'm being all Duckie and weighing down this already ponderous post with this information except to get it out of my head. Which I guess I've done.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done brain-dumping all the vaguely whiny, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-all-of-this emotional noise in my head. For realz.

So it's a relatively quiet night here at the Stigers Home for Bitchy Cats. Mom is reading, sometimes aloud to my mostly blind dad; Sibelius' watery, disciplined, asymmetrical, shamelessly triumphant Second Symphony is on repeat in the background; Dad just accidentally stepped on the cat, an incident I will be neither amused nor disquieted by; I downloaded a Gaither Vocal Band southern gospel song for my folks and now iTunes is trying to sell me all the desperate tatters of the inauguration entertainment lineup; we're all waiting for the dire-warninged but now rudely late snowpocalypse that has kept everyone pre-emptively hiding in our houses all day; and one of us is obsessively typing a seven-mile Facebook post on his shattered iPhone screen. But I won't say who.

And you can open your eyes now. Or close them with me; I'm going to bed now so I can get up at six for a much-needed ass-whupping by my trainer. And I'm not taming my hair for her.