A Brief Note on The Emotional Rollercoaster

"If you can't handle me at my worst, you sure as Hell don't deserve me at my best."
--Marilyn Monroe

I've been knowingly rocking the bipolar lifestyle for at least a good half-decade now; back when I was a teenager I didn't know what was happening, but I eventually accepted that mood swings and bouts of either hyperactivity or severe lassitude were just a part of who I was. There's no denying that the short end of the stick doth mightily suck - "depression" is a misleading word, because it's really not sadness, it's glumness, a sense of utter despair and frustration where everything seems pointless, where you feel that the very things you most want to do are a waste of time and not worth the effort of bothering to do them. But I've learned to pay a lot of attention to myself, and I've found that those feelings always pass in time; it's just a question of finding a way to get through it. And in learning how to make that happen, how to accept a certain proportion of uselessness in myself, I've become stronger and more balanced than I think I ever could be if I simply took a pill to make my brain 'normal'.

I've lost a lot of friends because of this attitude, and that's one of the things that bums me out when I'm on the downslope. I wish they'd stick with me through thick and thin, but I don't blame them much for not granting that wish, as it's a massively selfish and unreasonable one, one I would never grant to someone else who claimed to deserve such loyalty while virtually guaranteeing they would never return it to any real extent. But while I have regrets, I don't consider them a reason to change. The highs are still worth the lows, and one of the things that gets me through in the dark times is the knowledge that, at the end of the day, I have been myself, and there can be no more pure purposes to my existence than that.

(Disclaimer: I have no medical or psychological proof of any of this. Perhaps a "professional" would decide manic-depression isn't the technically precise name for my condition; I really don't especially care, it's how I view the condition and I think being the one who has to live with it gives me the necessary diagnostic credentials. Still, don't skip out on taking your butt to a doctor just because I told you so; make the decision on the strength of your own ability to determine right from wrong, and give it a good lot of thought from every angle you can come up with.)