More Rage

This feeling of rage that’s unattached to anything going on in my life can go away anytime it wants to.

On World Bipolar Day I would love to say everything is golden. It really has been lately in many ways. But in so many other ways it’s just not.

Being bipolar for me means taking lithium, which causes a thirst that no amount of water can seem to put down.

Being bipolar for me means that good emotions are not to be trusted. Is it real? Is it good and true? Or is it a start of the insidious mania that flips me over into paranoia, self-harm, or rage that I can’t control?

Being bipolar for me is being convinced that deep down, the world is one huge grim cosmic joke, that the other shoe is going to drop any second, that everything I love can disappear in an instant when the moods shift again, and that I can make a mistake that costs me everything.

I’ve had that feeling once in my lifetime already–when I ran away from home, was diagnosed bipolar, and lost my sense of myself as a competent adult making her way in the world. I do not want it to happen again.

But I also don’t want to live in the paralyzing fear I’ve felt on and off ever since I was in the hospital in October. And I am so thoroughly sick of it that whenever I feel it, the rage at everything and nothing isn’t far behind.

I’m living in fear now. And I want it to stop.