I felt a little unplugged and unproductive at work yesterday, but I went on to have a killer leg workout and 9 to 5 rehearsal

Then I woke up today totally scattered and exhausted, so I took my first sick day in months. It’s hard to discern an off day from the onset of a depressive episode, but I decided today was an onset and I’m glad I called in sick and spent the day sleeping to an Alexa playlist of classical orchestral music. Because I woke up human again. Lingeringly groggy, but human. Onward!

Stop pretending to show compassion, Ivanka

I seem to be having a bit of a bipolar depressive episode today

I’m functional enough that I’m at work, but I’m dysfunctional enough that I. CAN’T. FUCKING. SIT. STILL. Being bipolar is weird.

Plus my boyfriend won’t even talk to me.

I’d forgotten about this post

I’d forgotten about this day, this episode, this helpless despondency ... probably as soon as it melted into the ocean of some-better-some-worse days, episodes and helpless despondencies that I’ve navigated my way through over the last decade. I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of starting THE med cocktail: the one that—while still not perfect—has kept me overwhelmingly functional and present and foundationally able to live and participate and just BE. I’m thankful for the pharmacology, I’m thankful for the determination of my family, I’m thankful for the understanding and support of everyone around me ... but it’s KILLING me that I didn’t proofread this before I posted it, and though it’s a perfectly preserved time capsule of a day and an episode and a helpless despondency, it’s taking everything in me not to go back and edit it today.

This is the face of near-catastrophic bipolar depression. This is also a brain dump of a Facebook post that may or may not be a shameless plea for affirmation or an embarrassingly disjointed documentation of my current inability to generate linear thought. I haven't decided yet. Because I haven't written it yet. And I don't know where to start.

I fell over getting out of my car this morning at work. I opened the door, grabbed the frame to pull myself up and immediately lost all sensation of the direction of gravity, spinning to my left, rolling against the rear door and hitting my head on the door frame on my way to the ground. I've felt a little off-balance all week since my doctor doubled one of my meds on Monday but this was the first time I went full-pavement.

My right hand is slowly losing its ability to function. Last week I couldn't push the button on the key fob to unlock my car door. Last weekend I couldn't hold on to a tube of chap stick hard enough to pull the cap off. Last night I couldn't pick anything up with my chopsticks at the restaurant where we celebrated my brother-in-law's birthday. This morning -- after realizing I was plummeting faster than I could manage to control at work -- I couldn't pull the key out of the ignition when I got home.

I have no idea if any of this is related to being bipolar, changing meds or something entirely unrelated, but it's the easiest to explain.

My depressive episodes are mostly about fogginess (I get lost physically and mentally, I forget stuff like things I promised to do or why my parents are gone for the night) and abject despondency (everyone I know hates me, I don't care if I live or die). Fortunately, I've been doing this a long time and I can look at it all objectively -- no matter how acute or systemic or visceral or urgent the feelings are -- and know with slightly foggy certainty that none of it is real and it will all pass and if I can just find a blanket and a dark corner and a couple of uninterrupted hours I'll be emotionally drained but highly functional.

I'm a 48-year-old man who after a 15-year advertising career in Chicago moved home to Iowa ostensibly to care for his blind father but more as it turns out to be cared for as a mentally ill person by his parents. On paper, I hate everything in that sentence. In reality, I'm currently sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree with both my parents and Bitch Kitty and I'm so thrilled I get to share so much of my adult life with them and that alone helps me rebound when I spiral out of control.

It has taken me over two hours of intense concentration to write this. But I'd already napped for five hours and writing this gave me something relatively constructive to do instead of stewing in self pity. I know I probably spend way too much time on here talking about being bipolar but it helps me clear my head and organize my thoughts and in some ways make myself accountable for my own mental health. And it's even helped me bond with a number of you who have confided in me about your own struggles with mental illness. You call me "brace." I call myself "unfiltered." But if any of us finds value in my ramblings, it helps compensate for the fact that I've probably scared away every eligible gay man in Linn and Johnson counties.

600 paragraphs ago, I said I didn't know where this post was going. Almost three hours later, I don't have a clear recollection of where it wandered to wind up here. And I'm not going to proof or edit it so when I emerge from this episode I can maybe see how the depressed me kicks through the brambles and strings together thoughts. In the mean time, I have my blanket and dark corner and I'm finally sleepy again. For those of you still with me, thank you for your friendship and support and kind words. And good-night.

Day 3 of 7

Seven days of black and white photos about me. No people. No explanations.

I've had another bipolar depressive episode

Another [STRING OF BLISTERING EXPLETIVES] bipolar depressive episode. It was bad enough to make me miss work and stay in bed all morning. That's two in six days. Usually they're more than a month apart. Usually I can fight my way through more than half of them.

Usually I come out of them with a hopeful attitude that each one makes me stronger and teaches me how to better manage the next one.

Two episodes in six days. I know intellectually that things like this can happen when the dosages of my meds get changed. But emotionally I feel so defeated. And scared that I'll lose control like I did three years ago.

I'm not always brave about this. Not right now.

I made it to 12

I tell myself I always know when a bipolar depressive episode is hitting me. I get achingly tired, but I also get TIRED. Despondent. Hoarse. Blurry. I can feel myself teetering off the precipice, but once I gauge the velocity of the free-fall, I know whether I can at least fight it or if I just have to give in, hide under the pillows and wait out the drenching storm. But at least I KNOW.

This morning I woke up profoundly exhausted. So I did my usual things that help pull me out of a rough morning fog: talk to my parents, eat something sweet, play on Facebook, start the momentum of my day by getting dressed for the gym and packing up my clothes for work. But ... nothing. I didn't feel like I was depressed, but I just couldn't un-tired myself.

My doctors have been making minute changes to the dosages of my psych meds since early summer (and if you've never had a cut-up fourth of a tiny, chalky little pill completely short-circuit your brain, you look like you're frolicking in the warm sunshine from the foggy window I've been peering through off and on for the last few months) and I've had plenty of exhausted mornings because of it. Again, in those instances either I've tried to push through and wander about the motions of my day or turn off the lights and hope I can sleep without the bipolar-attendant nightmares.

Today I gave in. I emailed my boss, I set my alarm for noon on the off chance all I needed was a half day of sleep and curled up in a ball. I could tell I was on the upswing when my alarm saved me from the amorphous demons prowling around in my dreams, but -- as is becoming the new pattern -- I couldn't gauge when or even how I was going to arrive back at normal. I just didn't KNOW.

Depression is not sadness. It's not a lack of happiness. The verbs "choose" and "decide" and "control" don't have anything to do with making it happen or making it go away. Depression is misfiring synapses and out-of-code wiring and we're still learning what else that cause fog and blur and despondency and sandbags and wet wool blankets wrapped around our heads and emotive responses that are completely unrelated to and sometimes completely inappropriate for the situations and environments and world around us. It's stupid. It's destructive. It's embarrassing. It's time-wasting and pain-causing and life-destroying.

It's exhausting. I'm exhausted. I'm STILL exhausted.

And the compass I've been using to steer my ship out of my exhaustion is suddenly fixed to new magnetic poles. And I don't know where they are. I can search for them only when I'm having a depressive episode, and I haven't located them yet. I. Just. Can't. Find. Them.

My life is pretty awesome right now. I'm surrounded by family and friends who love and support me. I have a job I love working for an understanding boss and a company I respect. I'm taking on writing projects that are big and small and fun and high-profile and just-because and I'm relishing every word of them. I'm not just doing tons of really awesome theater, but I also finally feel confident that I'm actually contributing to what's making it good. The city I grew up in and just came back to and will always love is rising from the destruction of a catastrophic flood to experience a full-on renaissance in everything from architecture to culture to public amenities to recreation to community redevelopment, and I love taking small detours and out-of-the-way routes and the time to stop and take pictures just so I can try to see and learn about it all. Plus I keep getting told I don't look anywhere near my age. Which when you're my age is HUGE.

Like all bipolar depressives past, present and hopefully not much longer into the future, I tell myself that I won't let my depression control me, that I won't allow it to interfere with my life, that I'm better and stronger and more willful than it is, that I'll never let it win. And through pharmaceutical powers whose lingering uncertainties and dartboard guesswork sometimes feel almost Medieval, through a potent mix of hope and willpower and sometimes desperation, through the immeasurably therapeutic benefits of broadcasting all my battles on social media and my blog, through the light that eventually pierces the fog to remind me about the wondrous life that awaits me when I get back to my normal -- and especially through the tireless and certifiably saintly effort and devotion and support of my mom and the rest of my family -- I've learned and I'm going to keep re-learning as the poles change how to manage this ... if not beat it.

After years and years of bipolar episodes that left me hidden in my bed, I still always feel guilty when I miss a day of work because of one. But it happens. And it's going to keep happening. And it happened today. Even though as of this writing the fog has cleared enough for me to write ten (and counting!) paragraphs about it, I'm still not sure what exactly happened today or where it falls on the exhaustion-depression continuum or what I was able to learn from it that I can use when the time comes to fight my way out of or give in to or maybe just try to manage the next episode.

But I have that awesome life to live. And I have that wonderful, fun, creative, educational job to go to. And I have lines to learn and music to memorize and tap classes to take and show tunes to listen to. And I have people counting on me. And I want to be there for them, for whatever it is they're counting on me for. So even though I'm still foggy and still trying to suss out a viable coping mechanism from today's episode, I'm up and moving and participating as hard as I can so I don't miss a moment of anything.

And this one-sentence closing paragraph takes the count to twelve.

Seizing the day

I was supposed to leave this morning for my annual summer vacation to visit friends in D.C. and stay at their best-porch-on-the-planet beach house in Rehoboth, DE, but I had to cancel a few weeks ago due to work issues. A lot of cool things have popped up on my calendar here in Cedar Rapids this weekend though, so I'm more or less OK with missing my trip.

But I still missed work this morning thanks to a rough descent into a bipolar depressive episode that started last night. I talk a lot about being bipolar on here and on social media, and every time I think I should stop someone messages me out of the blue to thank me for being so open and honest about it. Enough people have confided in me the stories of their struggles with mental illness that I sometimes worry I won't remember everyone in my mental checklist of kindred, struggling spirits. I've developed close, supportive friendships with a lot of these people though, and our check-ins and conversations and even drives across town just to give hugs are so dear and so valuable to me that I'll probably never stop talking about my own struggles.

So here's this morning's report: I woke up at 6:00 in a motivational black hole with a fiery headache and enough disorientation that I knew enough to skip the gym -- which is huge because some days working out is the only thing that keeps me human -- and to let my boss know that I'd come in after lunch, if at all today. Then I went back to the kind of non-sleep that feels like you're staying awake getting more and more exhausted compounded by the stress of feeling worried about getting more and more exhausted. But when I woke up around 11:00 my head was clear enough that I could look at the episode objectively and summon the coping and pushing-through skills I've learned over the last decade and I showered and ate and made it to work, where I've been surprisingly productive ... albeit profoundly exhausted.

So to all the people I know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the people I don't know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the rest of you curious enough about my struggles today to have read this far: You will fight this battle all your life. You will get meds that don't work, you will get meds that actually make things worse and you will find meds that you'll notice start to make improvements ... though you'll spend ages waiting cynically for them to fail you. In the mean time, learn what helps you stabilize yourself and what helps you push your way out of the wet wool blankets and the rolling fogs that trap you. As soon as I felt coherent this morning, I texted one friend who right now is in a bottomless depressive episode so we could both not feel alone in our struggles and I texted another friend who as far as I know is not having an episode just so I'd know that someone who deeply understands what I'm going through is at the very least thinking about me. And then I picked out a shirt that says carpe diem on it and I know that it's totally goofy bordering on stupid, but if I'm wearing a shirt that means something to me on a certain day or in a certain situation, I feel compelled to go out in the world and show it to everybody. 

And after what my head put me through this morning, I need everyone to know -- no, I need to SHOW everyone -- that I'm seizing the hell out of the rest of my today.

Meowch

I woke up in a mild bipolar crash that was still bad enough that it gave me a powerful headache and what felt like a fever. I decided to skip the gym to sleep so now I feel fat. Then I decided to take the morning off to sleep so now I feel guilty for missing work. Then I got a raspberry seed wedged in my teeth when I finally ate something. Then I somehow nicked the top of my ear while shaving the side of my face. Because WHO DOES THAT? Now I'm at work and I'm groggy but functional and here's a funny cat picture:

The tenacity and the fortitude

Sometimes being bipolar means waking up with your head covered in a gray wool blanket in the middle of a hot drenching rain and the weight of it is practically crippling but you know you're not depressed and you know you're not confused and you know you can breathe and you know you're invested in fighting your way out so you treat every blink and every word and every thought as fuel that sparks the next blink and the next word and the next thought and even though you're foggy and slow and maybe even late you're MOVING and no matter how long it takes and how hard you have to work just to achieve your minimum for now you know that it's just for now and you'll sooner than later find your way out of that hot wet scratchy gray wool blanket and you'll know from hard-fought experience that you may not have the power to make the rain go away but you have the tenacity and the fortitude to outlast it and find your clarity and focus again in the warm, restorative sunlight it was trying to hide from you and even though you're never entirely sure you know exactly what that unclouded sunlight feels like you'll always get close enough to know what you're fighting for and how to be stronger and smarter and even more certain of your indestructibility the next time.

Tra-la-la!

Sorry about last night's Greek-tragedy pity party, for those of you who had the intestinal fortitude to read it. After a whopping 12 hours of sleep -- as Ratbert clearly illustrates here -- I'm back to my burst-into-song-with-no-warning-but-always-with-context-because-I'm-not-a-monster-like-Ratbert ways.

Plus I'm going to get my tires rotated today! And I'm going to try again to get my phone fixed! But not at 7:01! Because 7:01 is now and forever The Hour of Minute-Long Heartbreak. Never again. Always remember. The struggle is real. And so are my wobbly-feeling tires. And so is my shattered iPhone screen.

And so is this glorious new day.

In which I whine like an entitled first-world child

(Self-indulgent navel gazing ahead. Plus words. Lots and lots of words. With a tinge of judgey misanthropy. Plus some legitimate stuff so I don't come off as some asshole judgey misanthrope. If I've already bored you by this point, you're gonna be hating my by the time I get to the closing parenthesis. Assuming I ever get there. I'm clearly in a cranky mood though, so I can't help you. Or is it won't? Anyway, abandon hope all ye who read from here. You've been warned.)

• Everyone at Kohl's tonight was either moving too slowly, chatting in front of the extra-large clearance shirts so I couldn't get to them or stupidly looking in the wrong direction as they bumped their carts into me.
• Stupidly.
• Plus Kohl's didn't have anything I wanted. At least that I could get to.
• The cute guy who waited to hold the door for me at Barnes & Noble and circled the CD racks with me and ended up right in front of me at the checkout told the clerk that the CD he was buying was for his wife.
• Dinner at Cheddar's was accompanied by a full 30 minutes of bloody-murder baby screams to my right and a bellowing right-wing redneck hawking up gallons of phlegm and emitting an almost visible effluvium of cigarette stench in the booth behind me.
• I got a Facebook memory reminder this morning with my dismayed post about just having shattered my iPhone screen. Which means I've been using and squinting through and whining about my shattered screen for a whole year. The Verizon guy tonight told me I had to get the screen fixed before he could do anything related to my warranty, so I let out a long dramatic sigh and reluctantly decided to suck it up and give up my phone for 24+ hours to finally get it fixed and I drove over to the fully lit screen-fix-it store just as my phone clock ticked over to 7:01 pm. Guess why I'm telling you this. Just guess.
• Aside from a few blips, I've had at least three full weeks of good and engaged and productive and present and functional and relatively happy days. Which is an almost unprecedented record over the last 4-5 years. So the new bipolar med cocktail that initially made me black out and sent me lacerated and bloody to the ER seems to be actually working. But the uncomfortable and frustrating and embarrassing side effects have steadfastly dug in their heels, and I spent the morning wiping miles of spider webs off my face and loudly chomping on invisible gum. And trying everything in my power to sit the goddamn fuck still like a normal fucking adult.
• Plus I seem to have stopped peeing. Both in frequency and volume. Plus I just told you about my pee problems. Which just compounds the embarrassment. Nice going, me.
• Our lying, petulant, willfully ignorant man-boy of a horrifying national embarrassment of a president gave a morally and intellectually infuriating press conference packed with accusations and excuses and insults and tantrums and laughably implausible generalizations yesterday that continues to send shockwaves through the media and the educated class and the reasonable voices that he's well into his second year of attacking relentlessly with a conspicuous and alarming and desperately pre-emptive level of defensiveness. The last four weeks have made my family and my ex and many of my friends almost physically ill with worry and discouragement and deep, profound concern. And yesterday -- when I heard a staunch man-boy supporter sum up the press conference with a thoughtfully nuanced "he sure told 'em" -- it finally broke me too.
• I have so many shoes and shirts and shorts and pants and belts and socks and probably layers of flattened desiccated cats piled up in my bedroom that I don't even know how or where to begin sorting and inventorying and letting go of any of it. Sometimes it makes me feel all cozy when I climb into bed surrounded by jumbled mountains of all my stuff. But mostly it makes me feel paralyzed with panic and shame.
• All my real-life and Facebook crushes are pairing up and getting engaged and getting married and are mostly straight anyway. Fuck.
• When I blacked out and cracked the tile floor with my face last December, I bit most of the way through my lip. It's still swollen and hard like it's healed as scar tissue and I have a difficult time drinking through a straw or eating without getting food all over my lips.
• Hey, paired-up and engaged and married and mostly straight anyway crushes who've been bored enough to read this far! How ravishingly sexy am I right now? You should date me! It'd be fun!
• Actually, dumping all this whiny shit out of my head and posting it here after everybody's bedtime where it probably won't be seen has alleviated most of my crankiness. Thanks, Internet!
• Except I'm still furious and incredulous and devastated about the petulant, inarticulate man-boy.
• And frustrated and embarrassed by the spider webs and invisible gum and whatever fresh indignities tomorrow has in store for me.
• Plus Bitch Kitty will sleep contentedly on my clean laundry but won't exist in the same room with me unless she can draw blood or crush spirit. And sometimes it just quietly destroys a little bit of me.

Blackouts and ERs and Cops, 2.0 My!

OK. First of all, I swear I am not trying to make Facebook my public diary of dramatic medical catastrophe. That's why I frequently pepper my posts with whimsical stories about our sick cat or my parents' pending mortality. But -- aside from selfies, cat pictures, way-too-easy Trump jokes and long folksy narratives on the let-me-tell-you-an-amusing-yarn importance of family -- dramatic medical catastrophes seem to be all I have to work with on this, the last dying gasps of the carnivorous year that ate all our beloved celebrities. And you have to admit that bipolar depression is so stupid fucking dumb that all you can do is laugh at it. And with my surgically redacted filter, my meandering sense of humor and my location deep in the bipolar trenches, I like to think I'm able to find what's funny, dig deeper to figure out the least appropriate way to look at it and present it to you in the way that's most likely to embarrass my family. So there's that.

Now. On to the gruesome scabby stuff.

So what do you think happened to me?
1) I got in a rake fight with an Amish guy.
2) I sandpapered my face so Kellyanne Conway and I would look alike in our smash Broadway reinterpretation of "Twins."
3) Bernardo really banged me up in the rumble under the highway at that part where the music gets really atonal.
4) I've always gotten dizzy after standing up too fast. Twice in the past I've blacked out and hit the floor, but it was on carpet and I landed on my back in that flattering S shape like when Donna Reed, the wholesome Hollywood actress from rural Denison, Iowa, might get slapped by Joan Crawford, the weirdly manly Hollywood actress from Wire Hangers, Ever, in an impassioned living-room quarrel over men or hemlines or eyebrows and lipliner or whatever it was that women with their hair pulled back too tight used to slap each over back then. So anyway, this, my 798th cocktail of bipolar meds, don't do jack fucking shit for my depression but they do an award-winning job at making me super-light-headed. And this is the awesome part: Monday evening, after emerging from a particularly demoralizing depressive collapse, I was trying to be all productive and shit and the washing machine ended so I jumped up to put the laundry in the dryer, took two steps, felt another dizzy spell start to hit, grabbed the walls to steady myself, completely blacked out, fell Timber! forward, slammed my face into the white ceramic tile in our hallway, lacerated my right eye and the right side of my face with my broken glasses, bit mostly through my upper lip, loosened a tooth, bled like a whatever, scraped an odd snakeskin texture into the back of my left hand -- which is weird because all my other injuries were on the right side of my face -- and gave myself my first concussion. And let me give you a little insider knowledge, just from me to you: Concussions aren't a glamorous football badge of honor; they are insidious fuckers that hurt longer and deeper than you can imagine plus they give you this gruesome sensation that you can feel every surface of your brain, especially the parts that you've maybe permanently injured.

So the takeaway from all this is pretty obvious but I'll say it anyway for all you fellow concussives out there: Doing laundry can fucking kill you.

There's so much more to this adventure but I've been typing this post two or three painfully cross-eyed sentences at a time -- on the still-cracked screen of my iPhone, no less -- before getting so exhausted I needed yet another nap -- and you'd better appreciate that Joan Crawford sentence because staying awake long enough to write it was like slamming my face into a ceramic tile floor -- so I'll tell you the rest in mercifully brief -- but in reality probably tiresomely long -- bullets. Even though my Google search lied to me about how to make bullets on my iPhone so I'll have to use their lesser-and-more-embarrassing-because-they-eat-marshmallow-fluff-right-out-of-the-jar-and-wear-blingy-jeans-and-voted-for-Trump cousins, the hyphens. Sigh.

- I came to in my sister's car on the way to the hospital thinking Christmas hadn't happened yet and -- for one brief glorious moment -- not knowing I'm bipolar.

- I had an ABCDEFG -- or whatever it's called -- at the hospital to see if I'd broken any bones in my face. They told me I didn't, but from the lingering and sometimes breathtaking pain in my head I think they're playing some kind of cruel hazing prank on me to initiate me into being Bradley Cooper's boyfriend.

- My sister wouldn't give me my phone for fear I'd take lurid selfies and write embarrassing-to-the-family posts on Facebook about my adventures (DUH. I mean HA HA! AS IF!) so I joked -- joked! -- with the nurse that he should send in some cops and silly clowns and a circus band to accompany their wacky hijinks that would distract my sister from the fact that they were secretly taking my phone from her and giving it to me. AND HERE'S THE PART INVOLVING THE COPS THAT I VAGUELY HINTED TO YOU ABOUT: Soon after the nurse left, there was a knock on the door and THREE COPS WALKED IN in response to a complaint over a cruelly denied selfie opportunity. I -- the consummate actor -- played right along with their clever charade, demanding they wrestle with my sister to get my phone back. When they politely demurred, I -- the consummate stealthy flirt -- asked the cutest cop to take a picture of me and I'd give him my number (do you SEE what I did there? even with a fake not-broken face!) so he could text it to me. And then we could text each other a romantic location to meet and pick the colors for our destination wedding as soon as my face healed. But he -- pretending to be oblivious to my stealthy ways -- politely demurred and we all had a hearty laugh and I went back to the business of I-just-smashed-my-head-into-a-ceramic-tile-floor bloody pain.

- I joked with the stitches doctor that with every 10 stitches I should get a chalupa and he gamely -- and adroitly -- played along for quite a bit of superlatively clever banter as HE STUCK NEEDLES IN MY FACE and gave me 13 stitches divided into three different locations, none of which individually totaled 10, which I assume is the reason I didn't get my damn chalupa.

- At one point, I heard myself tell the stitches doctor I had no aspirations to be a model -- which is sadly true -- so I didn't care if he left scars -- which I guess is also true -- so the net-net of this harrowing experience may be enough facial scars that I get to play Thug #3 who gets thrown off the yacht by Jason Statham, who, after the director yells "cut" gently towels me off before we sit down to pick colors for our destination wedding.

WHEW! I somehow managed to tell a relatively short story -- in fits and starts between barely restorative naps -- in the godawful longest way possible. But I leave you with a more current selfie of my disfiguring wounds taken right at the scene of the crime: the white ceramic tile floor I slammed my face into four bottles of Tylenol ago.

Since dear, spunky, inspiring, heavily bipolar Carrie Fisher -- a woman I truly respected and adored -- has now drowned in the moonlight, strangled by her own bra -- as she requested her obituary to read -- I will be honored to take up her mantle as a celebrity bipolar poster child. Except without the celebrity part. And more face scabs. And I'm more of a filter-compromised blogger than an international poster child. But still.

I know all of this jumbled verbal coda is a stretch -- and I know I've managed to write another 10-mile post between naps -- but this entire adventure happened because of a little bipolar pill -- and the deadly evils of laundry! -- so I want to end this with two iconic Carrie Fisher quotes:

“I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you.”

"Being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge ... so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of."

Depression will tear you down. But the world can help you up.

Depression will tear you down from happy to despondent in a matter of minutes and will pin you there with its hands on your throat and its knees on your chest so you can't breathe and you can't move and you can't think and you eventually can't even summon the will to care.

It will override your sense of reason and convince you that despite any evidence to the contrary everyone hates you, you're better off dead and you'd better figure out how to get that way soon or you'll just prolong the agony and the hopelessness and the fact that you just don't matter.

It will destroy you from within, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, certainty by certainty, and leave you battered and bloodied and empty and profoundly profoundly profoundly exhausted whether it slinks away like a fog or sprints away like a wolf with a ripped-up part of you in its teeth so it can hide and feast and grow stronger and lie in wait until its next attack.

It will make you lonely and defeated, desperate for some semblance of validation through a lunch date or an actual date or a party invitation but too scared and awkward and exhausted to follow through until people stop inviting you anywhere because they know you won't show up.

It will dig in its claws and fight to the death the drugs and the counselors and the hospitalizations and the electroconvulsive therapy you eventually turn to in desperation as you endure irritating and embarrassing and possibly permanent side effects and withdrawal effects on your frustrating, endless quest to remember what normal feels like and to attempt to reclaim it.

It will compel you to write alarming texts to your friends and repeatedly, off-puttingly post your graphic, brutal, unfiltered, unapologetic thoughts on social media in a futile attempt to explain yourself, empty your head, get to sleep, try to normalize whatever the fuck is wrong with you so you can finally overcome your choking sense of isolation and think readily and lucidly and productively and walk the earth with confidence and never never never spend another moment foggy and dark and despondent and immobile and alone and sleeping sleeping sleeping and fucking scared you'll do something stupid when you should be breathing and laughing and eating and participating and loving and feeling loved and just goddamned fucking LIVING.

But you know no matter how bad it gets, it will still give you moments and days and maybe even weeks of reprieve where you can see where you need to be, feel what you need to feel, do what you need to do, and memorize this precious knowledge so you can hopefully look at your next attack objectively and learn how to ride it out and minimize the damage and maybe even be embarrassed enough to apologize for the profanity and the disturbing imagery you use when you're buried up to your neck in lava and you're trying to claw your way out and explain yourself so people will understand and maybe help you or at least embrace you flaws and all and help you regain your footing, your dignity and maybe your place in this bright, friendly, joyous world filled with people and places and experiences eagerly waiting to welcome you with wide open loving inviting arms.