Things Could Be Better

A story of mental health, honesty, assault, and small victories over the idiot who lives inside of me.

Let’s come right out the gate on this one: I have been living with diagnosed Bipolar II for 3.5ish years now. How long have I been living with undiagnosed Bipolar II? Probably much longer than I know, or would like to admit. This is a fact and a conversation that I freely have with people these days, because I don’t feel like I have to hide myself, or behind some manmade stigmas in order to live my life.

I will stop you here and let you know this is the longest piece I have written, so far.

It is important to start backwards on this one, because clearly, I have not always felt this way. On the third anniversary of my diagnosis, in September of 2020, I made a public Twitter thread about it, and was met with zero fanfare, zero shock, and a surprising amount of support from people that I generally don’t interact with, nor thought cared. The response was essentially my last fuck to give. “No one is mad/upset/trolling me on this?” Great. Let’s tell everyone! Hyperbolically, of course. I decided a long time ago that there were things that I was not going to get hung up on in my life, including being queer, which is an essay for a different day, that these were just fact of the matter and that’s that, and finally came to that point with my diagnosis.

Prior to this, while I was not ashamed of my diagnosis, I knew that there were people I could not tell. People close to me. People who so majorly stigmatised mental illness, that it made me feel uncomfortable even being around them, for fear that while inebriated, I would slip up and spill the beans, and have to suffer the repercussions. I did not tell my family. It was a truth I carried, that I told two whole people, who I knew I could trust, and just kept it around as a fact I did not draw attention to the rest of the time. But it ate away at me. It reared its ugly head in my relationships, where I got into things, and could not get out until it was too late and I had wasted all this person’s time, because they did not know why I was like this or see things from my point. I slowly ghosted people that saw I was struggling and ignored it, choosing to characterise me as a “terrible person,” framing my illness as a personal slight against them, when it was my inability to speak up for fear of retaliation.

The reason I WAS so unashamed was the palpable relief of knowing something was wrong. The swings started early in college. I would have 2-week to 2-month spurts of manic energy, then fall into a depressive slump the rest of the year. I blamed it on my studies, I blamed it on the Buffalo weather, I blamed it on my partying, but could not or would not get it together to look deeply inside myself to assess what the problem was. And then. And then I was sexually assaulted by my ex-boyfriend at the time. This was a fact I sat with for many months, trying to figure out how to recover from the trauma, how to break up with him, how to identify what it was, and how to not blame myself. I couldn’t tell my roommates, this was the mid-00’s where slut shaming was abundant, I could not tell my best friend, who this ex strategically was complicit in destroying our relationship at the time, and certainly could not tell my immigrant parents who would blame it on my immaturity and inability to exist without them hovering over every aspect of my life. I was stuck. I had nowhere to go. So - I went to therapy.

Trying to find a therapist is a deeply complicated failing of our mental health system, and then being referred to a psychiatrist, even more so. I went to therapy, but it was not helping. I was learning skills to take the blame off of myself, for “letting it happen,” but was still experiencing high highs, and incredibly low lows. I attempted to take my own life, and then did everything in my power to ensure my family never found out about it, and I’m sorry if this is how they find out now. I was failing out of classes, I could not get out of bed, and I pulled myself out of school and moved back home, enrolled myself in community college, where I COULD be under the watchful eye of my parents, without them knowing a thing - the hardest thing to pull off when you have old world Jewish parents. And the highs were high, and the lows were just as bad.

I did not find a therapist/psychiatrist combo that I could jive with until 2014-2015, after a harrowing near-assault relationship experience on my birthday that triggered some severe panic attacks. While the end result was finally finding people who listened and had valuable input into my struggles, it should not have taken such a horrible nightmarish situation to get there. This, in 2016, is what got me through coping with the incredibly sudden, very scarring, and still horribly upsetting death of my grandmother who raised me, from pancreatic cancer. But, I showed up, I did the work, we talked, we explored, things were understood, mechanisms for behaviour modification were explained to me, and finally, in September of 2017, after trying on some potential “one size fits all” answers, and a combination of medications that finally stabilised me, the verdict was read - you have Bipolar II. You statistically spend more time depressed than manic. I got the phone call driving back to Chicago, from Milwaukee, in rush hour traffic, and felt a vast sense of relief wash over me. I returned to my friend’s house, considered talking about it, then decided against it, and went to go eat some tacos.

It’s always interesting how that “duh” feeling manifests, but to feel so seen and so validated was triumphant in that moment. A very “okay, great, we know what’s wrong, let’s make it better” situation, in my idiot brain, is what I needed to function, instead of wondering why I am stuck, why I can’t fix it, and how it is entirely my fault that all of this is happening.

A fun recent mental health story is that in the beginning of 2019, I abruptly decided to drop everything I was doing, ditch a potential feelings thing, throw my job to the wind, stop going to therapy, which I had been going to for years, stop taking my medications because I “no longer needed them,” and move to California. It is important to know that generally speaking, I do not make rash decisions, due to years of therapy, without thinking them through and really weighing the pros and cons. And yet, everyone in my life, with the exception of my immediate family, was on board with this. I was “YAAASS QUEEN”’d to death on my decisions, and ONE single person stepped up to point out that maybe this was not a good idea, and that I would hate it. This was the beginning of the most recent manic episode, and my longest one to date. I moved and was still riding the high of this manic episode, and did for some time, but the problem with Bipolar II is that the mania is short lived, compared to the depressive episodes, and boy howdy, did I fall into a depressive episode.

It smashed into me like a semi on the 405, five months into my “new life,” I suddenly found myself unable to get out of the house except to go to work, barely holding it together at work, due to a sycophantic boss who held my employment over my head contingent on being her ( and the staff’s) BFF, and expending every amount of energy I had to hold it together speaking to my family, who would otherwise cascade me with endless ‘I told you so’s. I meandered through the winter, just trying to keep my head above water - unable to get an appointment with a therapist due to the ridiculous nonsense Kaiser makes you do for mental health services, and my employer’s pitiful mental health benefits. And then COVID hit. Everything shut down. The appointment I was fortunate enough to eke out, cancelled. And I spiralled. I cried every day from April to August, when I was able to move back to NY. I had no support. No one to even drag me outside into the sunlight for a few moments. Not only was I trapped in California, I was trapped at home, with myself, with my surmounting need to escape my corporeal being, so I attempted to do just that - escape. I was very fortunate to come to several hours later, and puking my whole guts out, and thankfully was able to see a physician to be checked out a few days afterwards for any damage, which I am grateful to have escaped with nothing but severe heartburn from horking my insides out. I cannot express how truly lucky I was, given the entire severity of the situation, but it made me reassess a lot of things.

I began applying for jobs back in NY the following week, and was able to get hired and move within 6 weeks of applying. I am back in therapy. I am back on medication, a different combination that is working far better. I went for a follow up physical, my insides are fine (relatively speaking). I have curbed my excessive drinking. I’ve been doing fitnessy things. I do a lot of home projects. Reorganising. Decluttering. I am wildly thankful to be alive, having survived that, and COVID. Things are still objectively terrible given the state of our society, but personally, they are very incrementally improving.