Inside the Quiet Room

Today was really, really strange. I've spoken before about how I've spent what seems like half of the time I've been on leave at the psychologist's, and I've probably mentioned that I was working on some things that were extremely difficult. But I've purposefully stayed away from specifics for several reasons. The first is to maintain my privacy and sense of security that those conversations are totally private. Another is that I don't really know how to explain aside from saying that when I was diagnosed I focused so hard on finding treatment and adjusting my thinking to try to have a positive attitude about my illness that I never let myself deal with a lot of the anger and sadness and loss. All that had built up over the years so that I could no longer ignore it. And it turned out that for much of what I faced, the hardest part was facing that I can't make those things better. I cannot push myself to have more energy, and I cannot push the parts of my brain that don't operate properly to fix themselves. That hasn't been easy for me to accept.

I only discovered the final reason today. This blog is the only place in my whole life where I publicly say "I'm Just Me and I'm bipolar and I have some ugly symptoms, I do weird things to cope, and either you accept that or you can leave". As may be obvious, otherwise I pretty much hide. I tell close co-workers a little bit. For all the years I've been diagnosed and the years before that when I should have been, I've spent most of my time pushing very, very hard to seem absolutely normal. Over the last year or so this has worked less and less well, but I've never done anything else so I've continued. Ultimately it got me in trouble because I refused to say that I couldn't do something because I knew that if I did not have bipolar disorder I would be able to do it. Therefore I used up every ounce of energy I had, and kept working long past when a sensible person would have said no more. So I have spent a lot of this summer fighting with the fact that I'm sick and this means I can't do everything I want to, or even need to, do and that I have to quit fighting this.

So today I was sitting there curled up in my chair as per usual talking about returning to work in SIX DAYS and how I was scared that I would not be able to seem ok. I thought that "ok" was a reasonable place to aim for (it's less than normal, after all), but the psychologist told me that's not it. He told me I'm not ok in terms of being able to do the same things everyone else does, and I need to focus on doing what I can do, not on what some standard I'm setting is. Or something like that. But I reacted much like he had slapped me; I was really startled by this concept put quite that bluntly. I have no idea how to not push as hard as I can; it's not just my coping technique, it's my personality.

And then, to make it harder although I know he had absolutely no idea, in the last few minutes of the hour we were talking about the last few requirements I have to meet to go back to work with my company and disability insurance, and I said the psychiatrist had told me before her vacation that the last second approval is up to the psychologist. (I really should give these people some names, huh?) Anyway, he tried to say something nice and it scared me to death. He told me that right now I'm the best he's ever seen me. Now, I haven't seen him for all that long, maybe 6 months, but at the beginning I thought I was doing relatively ok, even though I was having some issues that at that point were thought to be physical and not related to bipolar. So saying that probably is with the additional knoledge that everything at that time was bipolar-related, but I think he also is telling me what I know deep inside, that I was pretty manic even then. But I also know that now is still far from top-notch, and if this is the best in 6 months, meaning really the best in about a year, then it's been even worse than I thought.

Thus proving that I can never again be Superwoman.