For anyone who has not watched the TV series Killing Eve and have not heard the incredible song “Crash Boom Bang” by Unloved… You seriously need to hear it. It’s incredibly good! You can listen to it here.

But, I’m sorry to say, today’s entry is not about music… It is an idea, though, for a future entry. Hmm… Now I’ve got myself thinking… Well, I’ll save that for another entry if I don’t forget that I had the idea. Chances are that I will forget. My brain doesn’t always work really well when it comes to memory these days. There’s so much going on in there, I feel like I’m all over the place. These things happen…

Actually, today’s entry isn’t quite “random”… Not like my other ones, anyway…

I’m one of many people who suffer from bipolar disorder. There is a lot of stigma out there about mental illnesses, so I’d like to clear a few things up… It’s not all in our heads, at least not in the way some mean that. We’re not making this shit up. No one could make this shit up… But, in a different sense, it is all in our heads. More specifically, our brains don’t function the same as normal brains because we don’t produce enough of certain chemicals (like serotonin). The image of these dice, I think, perfectly depicts what it’s like to be bipolar and how you’ll feel day to day or even minute to minute. It’s a real crap shoot…

There are three main faces of this illness…

Depression is one most people seem to understand, to a point… But bipolar depression is soul sucking and there isn’t always a cause for it like a death or money troubles. And it sucks all your energy and you find it difficult to do anything but lay like a sack of potatoes on the sofa, curled up in a blanket as if it protects you from the world. In contrast, you have mania… Hypomania is a state in which everyone and everything irritates the living shit out of you and to say you’re grumpy is a massive understatement. Now mania… That can go different ways. People can either be hyper sexed, experience feelings of invincibility and engage in dangerous behavior, or… they can be like me and be incredibly productive. Most of the time I’m in either a depressive or hypomanic state. But I love manic episodes. My house gets so incredibly clean and organized every time I fall prey to it!

The thing about these mood swings… You never know when they’ll hit or how long they’ll last. It could be minutes, hours, weeks… who knows.

You don’t make plans in advance, not even hours in advance because you just don’t know if you’ll feel up to the socialization when the time comes. And if the person you made plans with doesn’t understand you, well… you’re either going to lose friends or stop getting invited to events. So sometimes, you just have to out on that “happy face”, the mask you wear to fool people into thinking that everything is fine even though you’re screaming inside…

But manic episodes have their downsides. Even the awesome productive ones that just make you clean like crazy…

On more than one occasion, I can recall being in these productive manic moments for days and days on end. Yeah, it’s great that I get shit done, but then, all of a sudden, I decide I don’t feel like doing anything that particular day and I just feel kind of meh…

But the day after that… That’s when I meltdown like a nuclear reactor…

Let me tell you… it can get real ugly when that happens.

Suddenly, everything that’s been bothering me even slightly rears its ugly head. My brain doesn’t even dwell on things; it obsesses… I start thinking I’m the most hated person in the world. I feel my friends, family, even my pets, hate my guts. At that point, I’m not even sure my stuffed animals like me. I start thinking that the world would be a much better place without me in it and maybe I should just disappear. I cry hysterically until I realize… this is just the crash after the mania. And this, apparently, isn’t just something I alone experience. A lot of people experience the same phenomenon after a manic episode.

And so you just continue on, day in and day out, hoping that you’ll have at least a few good days when you feel relatively normal.

And for those days that you don’t, there’s always the mask, the “happy face” to slap on…

Hey, at least you can put up the front of having a normal life like everyone else. It’s better than nothing, right…?