My Bipolar Life

It has been an awful morning thus far and I have no positive spin. Just a lot of things that are not okay to someone with bipolar. I go "bipolar" on my family all the time but I left the ER sobbing and just telling the doctor that it was just not okay to treat someone the way that they had treated me. Let me back up. I started falling asleep with chest pain but every time I dozed off I saw something bad happening to me or someone I loved. I won't lie. It made me panic a bit which only made the chest pain worse. I was okay with going because I couldn't keep looking at people hurt as I was falling asleep. Fast forward to the hospital. The triage nurse told me I talk to fast (not that he couldn't understand me but that he thought it was too fast). Um okay, insult my personality before we take two steps. Then he kept telling me I'm doing great. At things like sitting and walking. Well I feel embarrassed that I'm bipolar but I also proud if who I am. Having s...

The world of participation trophies is a flawed one.....a highly flawed one.  I think this mentality has warped us all to think this world is and should be an equal one when the reality is, it will always be an unequal society filled with unequal people. I guess the big difference is I don't look at our unequalities as a bad thing but a gift given us to shape our character into what we wish it to be. Fighting through my hardships have given me strength, confidence, and a sense of self. Through every down moment, every second I thought, "Damn, life couldn't be more unfair" I found me. And I'm happy with me, even with the parts others may wish to change about me. The thing is, in some parts of life I'd get a trophy and other parts, not so much.  But the lack of trophy doesn't deter me but, rather, it drives me to push harder through the things I can change. Will I ever be not bipolar? Well, no. But my point is, everyone single one of us has something that ...

It is a few days after Christmas and I have survived.  This time of the year is almost always a series of horrible decisions made by me because I simply cannot handle the stress of the holidays.  I have in my head these Norman Rockwell ideals that few could obtain, especially me.  For all my strength and kindness, I am not, nor will I ever be, the quintessential homemaker.  I am not good at the chores, I don't bake, I have little time to cook between school and work.  But deep down I want to be that person even though I know that it just never will happen. This makes me spend the weeks from November to December feeling bad about myself and like I let my family down.  This year was a little different, though.  I only had 3 major meltdowns (compared to the dozen I usually have.)  I think the difference this year is that I have been finding more of my worth of the last few years.  I buy nice, thoughtful gifts, which I know is not the reason wh...

I have always prided myself on my strength.  I get almost giddy when someone says that I am the strongest person that they have ever met because once I started managing my life with the steely determination that I was in control of the course in which my life goes,  I began to control the bipolar instead of it controlling me.  I began to work again and not only work but rather be quite successful at it.  I have won a fairly major award for my commitment to volunteer work.  This was the word I used to describe myself if asked: strong, and I carried that strong badge proudly.  I eventually realized that I was not actually controlling the course in which my life goes at all but I was simply controlling how I reacted to it.  I could choose to face the storm head on and say, "well this isn't my plan but it is His plan so this I, too, can overcome." or I could curl up in a ball and let life wash me away.  I could let my identity be stolen and I could lo...

Please welcome Christeen, my first guest blogger......... I am Christeen, and Lisa has graciously allowed me to share about borderline personality disorder here on her blog.  To be diagnosed with bpd one has to exhibit 5 of the following symptoms: fear of abandonment, torrid relationships, black and white/all or nothing thinking, impulsive and/or dangerous behaviors, suicidal thoughts,inappropriate anger, intense and highly unstable moods, paranoia, and dissociative symptoms. Of the 9, I have 8.  The hardest part for me about bpd is that even many mental health professionals consider us to be beyond help.  How can we tell ourselves we can manage our symptoms, let alone our loved ones, if even ours psychiatrist tells us we cant? If you have bpd and are seeing a professional that believes you cant get better, please find a new one.  We CAN and DO learn to manage our symptoms. I would like to talk for a moment about how my mental illness affects my personal relat...

Six small words that are nearly impossible for many to learn.  I have learned over time to not let the bipolar define me but rather be a small part of the many things that define me.  Learning this was a turning point in my life.  I think that realizing this was almost as important as the medicines that I take to keep the chemicals in my brain balanced. The thing is, bipolar can be such an ugly disease that rips away a lot of who you are underneath it all.  Bipolar makes you behave selfishly, bipolar makes you act impulsively, bipolar makes you behave rudely,  But what we all need to remember that bipolar doesn't make you selfish, impulsive, and rude.  I know that people have a hard time separating an action from who a person is in general.  I get that because I feel great shame for a lot of my behaviors over the years.  I have figured out, in time, that I have to forgive myself for the bad behavior bipolar creates within me.  I wish that...

I learned something interesting in my journey just this last week.  Bipolar doesn't only affect your mental health but it affects your physical health, as well.  What kind of bullshit is that?  It's not enough that I have to feel like I am literally losing my mind sometimes but I can't feel pain in the same way as my"normal" friends can?  That kind of blows but it clears things up a bit for me.  Let me try and explain.....the chemicals in a bipolar's brain ebb and flow, this we know.  But what I learned was that this ebb and flow causes us to sometimes  feel pain more intensely than it really  is and sometimes less than it really is.  As many of you know, I had my knee replaced on July 1st.  Two weeks after surgery, I was asking if we could talk about me going back to work on light duty ( it was anticipated that I would be out until December) and how soon I could go on the rides at Six Flags with my kids.  No, I could never walk ...