I’ve had one of those terrible days again. It began with mild depression and quickly slipped into an intense irritable rage. These types of days are the worst because I get so worked up and end up feeling completely out of control and drained.

The day started off not too bad, I made it to work without a problem and I felt like the day was going to be alright. That is until I got into a minor argument with a co-worker and things began to immediately plunge. The argument was over nothing and ended as quickly as it began, but that little taste of aggression that stemmed from the argument became a trigger into downward spiral. I couldn’t snap out of it. I could feel the irritability engorge me.

As the day went on things got progressively worse. The sound of people’s voices were driving me crazy. My phone would ring and I just wanted to smash it. I just wanted to tell everyone to F**CK OFF!!! I felt an intense hostility towards everything and everyone around me. There wasn’t a logical reason or explanation for how I felt, I was just burning up inside. The world was my enemy.

When I got home from work I was still pretty irritable and I tried my hardest not to engage in conversation with my wife because I knew what the outcome would be. I would end up saying something that reflected my mood and I would get into another pointless argument that would end badly.

It’s so difficult to function when you get hijacked by a destructive onset of irritability and rage. Objectivity ceases to exist and your actions and interpretations become instinctively controlled by your mood. It’s not normal anger or frustration because it’s unfounded and doesn’t go away. It just builds and builds without reason or cause, leaving you in an extremely vulnerable position where it becomes so easy to do or say something that you will later regret.

I always hate myself at the end of days like this.

Since being diagnosed with bipolar I’ve tried my hardest to keep my condition private and function as normal as I can without telling people. I guess on some level I’m worried about how people will react if I tell them. They’ll think I’m ‘crazy’ or ‘nuts’. I also don’t want people to treat me different because I now have an understanding of the cause for my odd behavior and moods. It’s still the same me in here, just a more aware me. The only people who know about my condition so far are my immediate family, wife and close co-workers and I think I’m going to keep it this way for now.

It’s difficult at times though, especially when I’m depressed. Depression turns me into a recluse and I disappear for months. I don’t contact people and rarely leave the house. My mood drops and I become antisocial. This is where the difficulty comes in. People that saw me in the months following up to my depression start wondering where I am. They send me emails and give phone calls inquiring about my disappearance and antisocial behavior. They take it personally and get offended. They act like I’m purposefully ignoring them because I’m mad at them for something or that I don’t like them anymore. They just don’t get it. I guess they just have trouble understanding how a person can go from being a super confident outgoing maniac to an antisocial depressed ghost. I don’t know what to say to them. I usually just make up a lame excuse and hope that they don’t contact me again. At least until I’m feeling better again.

Maybe one day when I feel confident enough to tell everyone that I’m bipolar, this problem will stop happening. People will know that when I disappear or change that it has nothing to do with them. They’ll just know that my mood has changed and they’ll be fine with that. The only problem now is that I’ve already lost most of my friends because of this.

It’s amazing how different life becomes depending on what mood you are in. You don’t realize the influence either mood has on you until it levels out and you realize how different everything is with or without the high or low. This is when you become aware that the solid objective world that you once thought existed out there in its completeness, is really just a reflection of what is going on in here - inside your mind. You make decisions and choices in what you thought was your best judgment and at the time you were probably convinced the choices were in your best judgment, but you soon realize how altered your mind must have been once you return to temporary stability and you see how truly different everything now appears.

Nothing distorts my mind more than depression. Like a virus infecting my body, depression enters and spreads into every living cell. Everything falls prey to its clutches. I feel its weight pulling me down, my cognition becomes slow and muddy, irritability and anger possess my thought process, objectivity dissolves, I become snappy and mean, my behavior becomes irrational, I have difficulty concentrating, my mind is filled with dark delusions, I hate the world and all the people in it, seclusion and simple routine become my new obsession and sought out comfort.

I become depression and depression becomes me.

Since I have been diagnosed with Bipolar II I’ve become completely obsessed with understanding how this illness is affecting and has affected my life. I’m retracing the years that have gone by before my diagnosis and putting so many events and decisions into proper perspective. I guess it is kind of a mental therapy for me. A mental recapitulation.

My current research on the illness is also very therapeutic, even though it has become my new obsession. I’ll spend hours at a time on the internet looking for articles, research papers, documentaries or news stories related to Bipolar Disorder. I want to know everything there is to know about the illness. It’s weird to say, but this illness has sort of given me an identity that I’ve been missing for years. When I understand the illness better, I feel like I’m understand myself better. I’m embracing my moods as part of my identity, as part of being me - Bipolar.

This may sound shocking but, being diagnosed has been the best thing in the world for me. Life in the past was me acting on my symptoms, identifying with them to their fullest opposing ends. My mood would dance around from highs, inbetweens and lows and my identity would shift with mood at the time. I allowed myself to lose control because I wasn’t aware that my behaviors were symptoms of an illness.

My perspective feels different now though, I feel like I have gained some control. I know there is a cause to the fluctuations in my personality. Like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I’m now awakening to a more truthful and real understanding of who I am and what these aspects of my personality truly are.

I was having a conversation with someone a few days ago about my reoccurring hypomania that happens every spring. They asked me what happens and if there were triggers that set me off. I began thinking back to the spring and trying to remember events or possible triggers that happened. I couldn’t really remember a specific trigger, but I could clearly remember the mental/bodily sensation. I explained to them that I would just wake up one morning with a completely different sensation. I would feel great, no, wonderful, no, perfect. The world was mine. My mind was filled with goals that my body was itching to complete.

I continued to explain to them that every spring when I awoke from my winter lows I would get this great urge to work on the lawn/garden. I would become obsessed with gardening. It began with the simple task of cutting the grass that quickly escalated into a shopping spree at the local plant nursery. My initial intent was to cut the grass, and then it was only to buy one or two flowers, and then the one or two flowers turned into 20 or 30, and then the five dollars I set out to spend turned into three hundred,

Last year, when I got home from the nursery I began planting the flowers, but was quickly side tracked by new thoughts that I needed a new border for the garden. The border that I had wasn’t good enough. I needed a rock border. As I was thinking about the border it began to rain and I started having thoughts about quitting for the day, but I couldn’t because I needed a rock border. This pushed me to run into my house and get my car keys and leave on a great rock hunt.

I drove out onto country highways with no destination in mind. I just needed rocks!!! I searched for a couple of hours and finally came upon a collapsed rock wall on the side of a highway. I pulled over and begin loading my car full of large boulders. It was still pouring rain and the cars that were driving by were giving me weird looks because I was loading my car full of rocks on the side of a highway in the pouring rain, which I guess was a little bizarre. I made four or five trips to the same location and a thousand pounds worth of rocks later my rock border was complete. Ahhhhh… the satisfaction I felt. I remember thinking to myself that this garden was going to be the best garden ever and that gardening is going to become my life. I thought maybe that I should switch careers and open my own nursery. I thought this was the perfect plan. I could then garden all the time and make money doing it.
Three weeks later I lost complete interest in the garden and the project that I once obsessed over was overgrown with weeds and grass.

It happens at the end of every summer, the great slide into solitude and emptiness. It comes over me like a shadow drowning out light. I wake up one morning and everything is different. My thoughts, my interests, my passions, my friends, my direction in life… my whole world has suddenly stopped and flipped on its head. The person I was for the last 6 months has magically disappeared, vanished into thin air. Now I just want to be alone. My social frenzy of going out 5 of 7 days a week tranforms into going out 0 of 7 days a week. I become a hermit and lock myself in my house for a winter hibernation. I sever contact with a once close world and live alone in my head as the weeks go by.

Looking back on my up phases usually leaves me feeling confused, regretful and ashamed. It honestly feels like I’m looking back on a person who isn’t me, the me that is now. I was reckless, irresponsible and dangerous. I remember the situations, the intense excitement, my inexhaustible hunger for constant never ending experiences. The drive behind my impulsive decisions and actions. The endless nights of random confrontations with the unknown. I could never get enough to fulfill the thrill seeking energy that was bursting out of every pore in my body. All those stupid choices I made. The one’s I now regret, the one’s that haunt me.

It leaves me asking myself, who am I really? The personality that exists with each phase of mood is so different that these personalities appear to belong to completely separate people. When I’m up I can’t personally relate to my down and when I’m down I can’t personally relate to my up. I become my mood and my mood transforms everything in my life to reflect its current state. From bright wonderful days to dark lonely emptiness, my sense of self shifts and my personality becomes a temporary notch in cycle of ups and downs.

Since I was about 17 years old I’ve known that there was something a little different with me, but I never thought for a second that it was Bipolar Disorder. Bipolar people are crazy aren’t they?

It’s amazing how our perception and understanding is shaped by stigmas and ignorance. What did I actually know about Bipolar Disorder until I was diagnosed? Nothing. I knew it was an illness that affected the mind, but I had no idea about what it looked like or more importantly how it felt. I went through my highs and lows year after year without a clue. I knew that when my mood was low that I was depressed, but I thought that when my mood was high that this was me, my normal state. I felt great when I was high. People loved being around me. I was full of energy and I had a never-ending desire to experience life. I was wild and didn’t care about anything. I wanted to be everywhere at all times. I didn’t want to miss anything. This was the person I wanted to be all the time and I was convinced that it was me, until the low mood would eventually kick in. This is where my excited energetic self would fizzle away and I would be left feeling empty and detached from the world. I would disappear for 4 to 6 months of the year. No contact with friends, no going out, no laughter and no energy. The only thing I desired was being alone.

This cyclical pattern of highs and lows would continue year after year and each year the intensity of my highs and lows appeared to increase. My highs would bring on dangerous erratic impulsive behavior and my lows would leave me feeling helplessly empty and detached. I thought this was just me. This was my personality. It wasn’t until I lost all my friends and began seriously damaging my marriage and family life that I realized that there was something wrong with me. I was out of control.

I began searching the internet for answers. I searched for my symptoms and it wasn’t long until Bipolar Disorder began to reveal itself to me. I filled out a bunch of online Bipolar screening tests and scored extremely high on them. I bought a book on Bipolar and it felt like I was reading an autobiography. I knew there was a good chance I was suffering from this illness.

I contacted my family physician explained my situation and got a referral to a psychiatrist. After four weeks of appointments, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder II.

Looking back now on my life so many things that happened over the years make so much sense. If I only new then what I know now. Everything is 20:20 in hindsight.