Bipolar

I just identified myself bipolar. Frances said, you’d better go to a psychiatrist.

Then, I disidentified myself of bipolar disorder.

My manias or depressions will only last for one day. I need them to be 4 days+ each to be qualified as disorder. I told her. She said, but it would be a new experience, visiting a psychiatrist. (Something you would like, she meant.)

“Why am I still alive?” As I woke up this morning, this is the first thought came into my mind. Daylight was shining on my bed. Very dim daylight. It was already 9am. I don’t feel particularly bad because I woke up late. I knew I needed a rest yesterday. The urge manifested itself so strongly when I was talking to Jia yesterday morning, blurring word by word because it was almost impossible for me to restore my chain of thought. I was just uncomfortably creating sentences that did’t make sense.

This morning, as the thought appeared, I wasn’t terrified or sad. I secretly felt accustomed to it.

“Why am I still alive today?” The same thought that frequented during my early 20s, almost every night and morning I was lying in bed. Sometimes I wish I could skip all the young years of working hard, searching and understanding the truth and wake up directly at 60 years of age —- I wish I could sleep through the best years.

Soon enough, my self-cherishing mind decided that, I’m not going to work today. I can work from home. —- I’m not sure if I’m creating excuses to escape from work. The idea “I shouldn’t go to work” stroke me hard with guilt.

Guilt started to push me to figure things out. Even though my mind is in slow motion today. I went to take some online free tests and watched some youtube videos about bipolar.

Hannah said, you are the type of people that, when you are high, you feel you win the world and you make everybody feels that you’ll win the world. When you are down, however, nobody has the possibility to save you. And you take everybody down.

Yes. I knew this long enough.

I finally confirmed myself that I have bipolar, but not that much to be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. So I’m still good.

As a child, I had moments when I felt unreal, the world is unknown, my body is strange, and I’m totally taken out of everything that I was used to. Everything was uncomfortable. My mom was dressing me up but I felt that I’ve never known her. At that moment, I cannot think. Even breathing was strange, something like using fork and knife while being a Chinese kid. I knew I should do that, but it’s so foreign. I was scared.

I didn’t known they were called, or labelled as, panic attacks. The panic attacks hit me with no regularity, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, until my teenage years, during which I was entangled in “complicated” love relationships I couldn’t undertake. All my sorrows and happinesses were too focused on those. I didn’t have the energy to suffer from panic attacks.

Then it came back during my early 20s. I had certain moments when I suddenly felt uncomfortable, not physically, just a feeling. I can’t talk, don’t feel that I could recognize anything or anybody in that environment (though I actually can, if somebody asks me). It lasts maximum one minute. A sudden frozen slow motion excerpt, filming a stiff girl that reacts slow to the world. But after the one minute, I’m energetic, efficient and out-going again.

I used to think I have depression. I proved myself wrong because several years later, as I checked all my pictures of those so-called “depression” years, I looked so happy. The happiness look on the pictures confused me.

Winter of 2012 was particularly hard. I would spend one weekend locking myself up in the room and cry, and then wrote, “I was so grateful of what happened these days. “

I would crying-walk 30 minutes to Frances’ office building for a hug and a cup of Starbucks. And then head home for a movie night.

I was hopelessly hopeful for life.

Ever since I moved to Europe in 2013, I’ve been trying extensively to cure, or at least alleviate, all these emotional upheavals through meditation. That year, the thought changed. The thought that always came up while I was lying in bed.

“I will always be as lonely as this. No matter who is lying beside me.” Now it said.

That’s probably why I like tatami beds. I have more space while staring at the ceiling, thinking about the upcoming lonely and scary life ahead, while being very hopeful both in front of others, and in front of myself.

The good news is, I found part of my cure in late 2015. I’ve been trying a lot of different meditations and finally cured my panic attacks. But my bipolar issue was still there. Around 1 out of 20 days on average, as I carefully noted in my diaries that scattered everywhere, I would be too devastated to move out of bed.

Then, in 2017, I finally met him. The master who talks about relative and ultimate truths. The first time I met him, he put those two ideas into my mind and made me understood that everything we are judging, and choosing, and living, are simply relative. When we managed to reach the other side of the river, by whatever means, we will emerge into the ultimate truth.

By whatever means. What does that mean?

For the past two years I’ve been believing that no matter what happens, he and his crew will save me from inside. It was like the huge mattress at the bottom of the building. No matter from how many floors I jumped, they will manage to have me soft-landed. It’s like a warm hug while you are heavily bleeding and you still feel the world is loveable.

Gradually I felt better, even on that 1/20 day. I could go out by myself, cook some light food, read slowly. I thought I was getting very close to be cured.

However, they also made me believe in impermanence.

The crucial ultimate truth of impermanence.

Believing in impermanence is the best thing that’s ever happened to my life.

Because the cure has lost its effect now.

Things change, evolve, aggregate. The better I believe in myself when I’m at good times, the stronger I doubt myself when I’m not feeling well. I’m back into a new loop.

“By whatever means you’ll finally reach the other side.” Now I secretly thought this is a way of him hinting at me that —- even though I’m teaching something religious, you don’t have to choose this way to achieve.

Because the other side only exists in our mind.

Am I right, master?

My mind paced forward. More and more often, I felt inexorably energetic or happy, for no real specific reasons. Is it a mistake to free myself up in this Internet time? I remember David used to send me home, when he sees me acting slow, starring at the monitor and could barely talk. I can still work 9 to 6, if I have a boss that understands my symptoms. I’m really fast when I’m at my manias.

Is it a mistake for me to take on the responsibility, formed a team to do something big? Things turned out to be easy and lovely at times, while the other times it simply kills me inside.

And then I’m a new me again.

In the middle of my slow motion thinking, I forgot the original purpose of writing this blog post. I’m admitting symptoms while not admitting the diagnoses. I guess accepting yourself is always better than avoidance.

Oh no, I’ve been lying in bed with food disorders the entire day.

Ok I’ll go eat something right now.