Who I am

 I’m going to be controversial here. I don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but I will speak my mind.

A common discussion at my support group, DBSA Boston, over the years is the difference between being bipolar and having bipolar. In introducing myself as a facilitator at the newcomers’ meeting, I soften it even further, saying, I have bipolar disorder.

Most people reject the idea that they 'are' bipolar and opt for 'having' bipolar. But about eight years ago a young woman I know declared, "No, I am bipolar." I puzzled over it, wondering which felt truer to me. At the time I wasn't prepared to embrace her statement. I felt it was limiting.

As research for my memoir,, I just finished is it me or my meds? The author David Karp (whom I know through DBSA Boston) describes a support group meeting:

The meeting began with brief introductions during which nearly everyone said something like, “My name is Joe and I’m a depressive." After all the introductions, a young woman suggested that it would be far better if people said, “Hello, my name is so and so and I suffer from depression.”

A woman David Karp interviewed said:

Every time we take the medication it keeps constructing your identity as bipolar, or as whatever diagnosis, but you know, that is not who I am….It’s not, in any way, the whole of me. It’s a part of me. I am a teacher. I am a writer. I am a lover. I am a woman. [Mental illness] is just [something that] gets in the way a lot.

I have no intention of constructing anyone else’s identity, but lately I’ve been thinking that I am bipolar. (I actually hate that term, but for different reasons than the usual. Manic depression is so descriptive in a way that bipolar is not. I’m not a toy magnet, I don’t consist of two poles. I experience mania and I experience depression. However, I don’t particularly like the term ‘manic depressive.’ That does seem reductionist, as if I am totally in the thrall of those two states. I haven’t come up with a better noun (please suggest some), so for now I’ll use bipolar.

I checked out Word Hippo and found 273 (yes, I counted them: slow-news day here) adjectives for "vacillating between two extremes" and 49 "involving or having two extremes." Nouns are bipolarism, bipolarization, and bipolarity. I suppose it was too much to ask to web-search to satisfy me. (Give it a try, Matt. I so loved wrenmimic!)

Certainly when I’m psychotic or in a debilitating depression, there is something wrong. My life would be better, I could be more productive, better at relationships, if that didn’t happen. But the tendency to mood swings, the highs and lows (the 7-out of-10s and the 3-out-of-10s) seem to be ingrained deeply into the fiber of my being. The woman David Karp interviewed identifies herself as a teacher, writer, lover, woman. None of those identities is the whole of her but they are deep parts of her. They are parts of her identity. My manic depression isn’t the whole me, but it goes deep, very deep.

For the curious, Word Hippo suggests:

volatile, mercurial, oscillating, vacillating, capricious, spasmodic, undulating, two-faced, variable, unpredictable, changeable, unstable, erratic, inconstant, fickle, impulsive, tempermental, flighty, fluctuating, inconsistent, whimsical, mutable, fluid, unsteady, irregular, changeful, uncertain, unsettled, skittish, wayward, flickery, flakey, quicksilver, flaky, blowing hot and cold, irrepressible, wavering, excitable, protean, kaleidoscopic, moody, giddy, labile, active, movable, elastic, up in the air, unreliable, up and down, ever-changing, mobile, yo-yo, up-and-down, undependable, fitful, arbitrary, changing, random, varying, jerky, desultory, quirky, freakish, faddish, ungovernable, wild, haphazard, chance, vagarious, crotchety, constantly changing, ephemeral, shifting, transitory, frivolous, momentary, fleeting, peaky, short-lived, transient, impermanent, full of ups and downs, uneven, fluctuant, aimless, hit-or-miss, indiscriminate, unmethodical, casual, intermittent, chameleonic, sporadic, turbulent, along with waffling, fluky, directionless, orderless, blind, lost, reckless, offhand, iffy, sketchy, unsupported, off-and-on, objectless, quick-tempered, unreasoned, pointless, and more.

Not quite on the mark.

Winter sun

January 25, 2022 

All day I’ve experienced an overwhelmingly warm and powerful sense of wellbeing.

I love the Indo-European root kailo-. From that root we get so many nourishing words: wholeness, health, hale (as in hearty and...), wholesome, healing, hallowed, and holy. A depth of wisdom is expressed in a language where health comes from the same root as whole, and where healing and holiness are bound into that same family.

I’m a Self-help Junkie and am perennially dissatisfied with what I can accomplish in an hour, day, or year. This weekend, in yet one more attempt to harness my potential, and very aware, painfully aware, that I’m running out of time and personal resources (on turning 65), I devised a schedule for the week, mapping out what I would do each half hour of the day, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Jim looked at my list and asked if it were punishment. I can see where he’s coming from, but I really didn’t think it was.

And this first day of the experiment bears it out. I’ve somehow given myself permission to actually accomplish my aspirations, from mundane but satisfying housework: laundry and sweeping and meal preparation, through answering emails, writing up board meeting minutes, and on to my greatest aspiration: writing.

Last winter, with so many activities cancelled or relegated to Zoom, I wrote about Fierce February Light and sunlight Piercing the Windowpanes. Activities still aren't back to pre-pandemic 'normal.' I find myself home all day on many days. I follow the sun's progress, rising in my south window and then falling to the west. It feels like magic. Distinct from a month ago, the sunlight pours into the windows all day with a different substance to it. I can feel without measuring that the sun is reaching higher at its zenith. All day I can tell it will set later than a week ago.

It has now set, making the woods behind the apartment buildings look soft and furry. I’ve always had that false impression, that the winter hills of New England and Pennsylvania (place of my nativity) are covered in brown sable fur and not made of prickly twigs and branches and hard trunks. It's a beautiful illusion.

The sunshine instills me with a deep and peaceful hope. Something is coming unstuck inside me.