Mixed Bipolar

The cruelest thing about bipolar mania, when you also have CPTSD, is that moment when you question if it isn't the mania at all, but an important epiphany — a turning point in your life. It's been a few days, and everything seems to be okay. You suspect you're just manic, but you feel like talking to people. You want to start a new ambitious project. You're active online, you're working on things. You have so much energy it's unreal. And none of it feels particularly bad. It feels close to normal, actually.

You think, for a moment, that things may be turning the corner. You might just be well on your way to recovery, and your life is going to change for the better, and you are able to do it!

And then, a few days later, after the peak, you realize it was just mania. Everything you'd said, done, and planned seems daunting and you realize, again, that it was false hope. You'd had grandiose ideas and overestimated yourself in a moment of impulsivity.

The depression is back. Sleeping is difficult; my medication isn't making me as tired until later in the night. I realized that the bright future I'd envisioned and become impatient for isn't realistically weeks away, it's a year or more until I'd hear back from my dream home I'd applied for last year. The podcast I wanted to start (and, embarrassingly, planned with another person on social media), and the drive I'd found to get past the financial hurdles of publishing in stride has faded into a cacophony of potential arguments in my head I'll never have with others, and the trauma memories have returned. My patience is short and one, small thing will make me snap.

I just want to disappear and become invisible, but I don't want people to forget about me. I don't want to die, necessarily, just not have any obligations, appointments, or chores.

Mixed episodes of bipolar disorder, while dealing with CPTSD, are a beast, and it's bad enough that although I've grown up being gaslit by others, when I'm manic I gaslight myself, unknowingly.

And I wonder, sitting here while exhausted again, if the cycle will ever end or get better. When will the positive outlook and the energy stay consistent? When will mania not send me spiraling down into a fibromyalgia episode days later, which causes physical exhaustion and terrible executive dysfunction? I feel like a prisoner being tortured in my own body.

©2023 Shane Blackheart