Living with a mental illness is a study in survival. Every day, every emotion is questioned. What is this? Am I happy or am I starting to head towards mania? Is this an honest sadness or is my brain breaking again? Why is it breaking now? What is so different now than yesterday? Why me? Why this?
To say it’s frustrating is to minimize how paralyzing it can be. And then there’s the shame. Having to decide who to reveal to and when. If I meet someone I’m interested in, do I tell them that sometimes I shrink away or do I wait until it happens? Revealing too much too soon can end it before it begins. Waiting too long results in confusing behaviour that ends things as well. No matter how you play, someone isn’t going to understand.
I’ve had legitimate concerns in a relationship and have been dismissed as “getting bipolar again.” I’ve entered 99% of my relationships while in hypomania. I don’t even know what it would feel like to enter one healthy. I wouldn’t know how to act. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like for “normal” people.
Bassey Ikpi: Does That Make Me Crazy?: Living with Bipolar II @ xojane, who is killing it with the mental health articles lately. (via rivertrash)
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like for ‘normal’ people.”
this. always this.
(via tangledandguilty)
Um, yes. I’ve been so far from normal people my whole life that I don’t trust them. Why would they want to deal with me? I don’t know what it’s like to be normal. I haven’t known since the day I sat at circle-time and asked myself what the point of living was and couldn’t come up with a suitable answer. Haven’t understood how normal people think since I started being asked if I was drunk or high all the time before I entered my teen years. the second I realized there was something wrong with me, it started—is this me or it? My mind or its parasite? It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.(via amstibovvered)
