'He's Been Institutionalised'

In The Shawshank Redemption, there's a line that I always remember, where Morgan Freeman, 'Red', tells his fellow inmates about why it's such a bad, frightening thing that the elderly man, Brooks, is being released after 50 years in prison. He says, "He's been institutionalised" (or the script probably had 'institutionalized.') Red continues to explain to the younger inmates who can't quite understand that, after 50 years, prison is all Brooks knows.

Normally, when I explain my strange, rather nonsensical longing and reminiscence of what I call the 'bad old days,'  I've been saying that 'bipolar people can't stand to be in chaos, but can't stand not being in chaos.' Over the past few months, I've been having such urges and reminiscing more than previous times of those days before I got on meds, when my bipolar peaked and my life began spiralling out of control. Maybe that's not true for all people with bipolar - I often say that nothing is different and that just about everything that I say that sounds definite is actually a generalisation.

Well... I just thought of a better example, and that's the quote from The Shawshank Redemption. In a way, once a bipolar person has dipped their feet into the well of chaos too long, they get a taste for it - it becomes all that they really know, and it's hard to adjust to a 'normal' life. But the more and more that I get a taste of that chaos, the more the I have trouble denying it. Sometimes, I just want to jump head first into a whole pool of chaos. There's a reason why all bipolar people - and almost all people on psychiatric meds - drop there meds at some point. Typically that reason is that they started feeling 'fine,' but, in the case of a bipolar person, it's usually feeling 'dull' and wanting to go back to their lively self.

Bipolar is very much like a drug - a drug that the brain naturally and readily produces. Meds, essentially, are supposed to act as inhibitors to this bipolar drug. However... people who get high once are likely to want to get high again, even with those horrible, horrible crashes. That rollercoaster can both be utter agony and surreally high. Without those highs, I'm constantly seeking some sort of supplement - video games, romance, opiates are always nice - but nothing illegal (by opiates, I mean strictly prescription pain meds) or reckless. No reckless sex, no illicit drugs, no gambling, and so on. I've always thought that I'd bee too shy to do hard drugs, anyway!

My 'rock bottom' is somewhat ideal, really. I've never been (truly) suicidal, never done anything dangerous... Really, I typically hide under a rock until it passes over. Anyone who knows depression probably thinks this sounds pretty good for depression. But, just because some of the classic 'bad' symptoms aren't there - the most self-destructive - doesn't mean that it isn't still horrible. It's just horrible within different constraints.

My hallucinations, my misfit friends, my more outward personality... Some parts of me think I was better off then, some (more sane) parts of me say that I'm way, way, way better off now. Despite the obvious rational and irrational sides, one is always persistently trying to convince the other. Everything in life has two ends - yin and yang, good and evil, heaven and hell, mania and depression. Bipolar is a crash course lesson in that aspect of life, even if not everyone accepts that or sees that. Without the devil, how can there be God? To see heaven... I keep on seeking hell.