For me, bipolar is a lot like a big island coastline, a small island coastline, and a bit of ocean between the two. The goal much of the time is to get to the other island without any boats, any aircraft - just swimming there. Now, the waves can be strong and attempt to push you right back to where you came from. Sometimes, fighting the waves, you wonder if it's really worth the effort or if you should just turn back and be content with the little island you came from. On the little island, you're much more alone, but it's land. That big island holds all of the opportunity, one could reason, and all you have to do is swim a little ways against the rugged waves.
It's not easy being tossed back and forth like a helpless rag doll. And this back and forth motion can apply to so many things. For me, indecision, opinions, beliefs, goals, likes and dislikes, interests, lifestyle, progression and retrogression, and many, many more... It's very easy for me to counteract myself through this being tossed around, trying to go in one direction and then being pushed in another, or going along with the waves. And then once you get onto that bigger island, it's not what you thought it would be... Your little island was comfortable, had no dangerous animals, had no great cliffs to fall off of... You're alone and driven crazy by your loneliness, but if it weren't for yourself, it would be exceptionally underwhelming. That big island, however, is the opposite. You're out of yourself and suddenly surrounded by something much larger than yourself. There's a population to keep you company, resources, but there are massive cliffs to fall off of, vicious predators who'll eat you alive... You regain your sanity, but you just trade one danger for another.
Perhaps if you could go back to your small island, lonely as it may be, but bring some of the resources back from the larger island. You get yourself a little boat, some food, tools, and goods, and you travel back to that little island. By doing so, you become internal again, but things are a bit better. You have the boat - a safety net - so that you can go back to the island whenever need be. The journey doesn't have to be so brutal, anymore, as you don't have to swim against those crashing waves each time. When the loneliness becomes too much, you can get the company that you need for a little while and then go back to the comfort of your home, where you came from.
The boat would essentially be meds in this metaphor. By using the 'boat' to go to the big island, you return to the harshness of sanity. By using the 'boat' to go back to the small island, you return to the paradoxically comfortable and unbearable insanity. It's difficult to bear either one, but with each one comes some kind of benefit, as well as its own set of difficulties. With sanity come tools, stability, but also the harshness of reality, intimidation, anxiety, and external struggles. With insanity comes unique outlooks, a paradoxical security, tools few people have, but also loneliness, a lack of interpersonal relationships, and instability.
My mom remembered my last psychiatrist saying how most people in my current age group (older teen to 20s) most commonly stop taking their meds. But my reasoning for wanting to stop taking my mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics is different. Most of those people want to stop taking their meds because they think they're 'cured.' They feel better because of the meds and think they don't need them anymore, while they're usually quite wrong. Once they go off of their meds, they sink back into their pre-med state and fall into instability once again. The difference here is that I'm actually discontent with the stability my meds have brought me. I crave instability, and know that I'll probably never be 'cured.' Instead of wanting to drop my meds because of a misconception, I want to dive head first into the nasty, gritty, grotesquerie that is the reality of insanity. But I don't want to do it completely blind. I want to go in with the things that I've picked up on in my time spent with sanity, go in with new strategies and tools.
I won't be that scared little kid who had no idea what hit him, who he was, or even what he was. I'm quite clear on that, now, even if it's fuzzy. I know that a dire lack of sleep for the coarse of two to three years was probably a likely cause for most of my worst problems before I was on meds, so I want to maintain sleep with as little mind-altering medication as possible. I don't want to be shaped into something I'm not naturally. Anti-psychotics and moods stabilisers were like tactical nukes followed by an insurgency - 'peacekeepers' - who obliterated anything that could've even potentially caused a threat, and in itself created a contradictory instability in ultimate stability. Humans aren't meant for such things. Order can only exist with chaos, and trying to remove all of the chaos in the world could only remove all of the order, as well. But, because this isn't truly possible, ultimate order would simply create an eruption of chaos. Better to balance the two out than to try and force one completely over the other. Through insanity, sanity. After all, reality is relative.
As I said, reality is relative, and not everyone's reality is the same as mine. Some people get on meds and never even think about turning back. Some people find meds to be a miracle, even if it took great amounts of tinkering and experimenting to finally end up at that point. I'm not saying that everyone who is on meds - particularly those for mental illness - should just stop. Some people literally need meds to live. And I want to keep meds available if I do need to get back on them again, primarily as a safety net. Who knows - I might go off of my meds for a week or two and find myself needing to get back on them. Brain chemistry is a tricky, fickle thing. Even the minutest change in brain chemistry can send a person spiralling toward their demise. Perhaps I'll even go back and forth between being on meds and off meds, weathering only so much before returning to the relative order, simplicity, and safety of meds, but then returning back to the chaos after having gotten my footing once again. I want to play it by ear. Life, it seems, is really just one big experiment for me. I'm a Petri dish of human bizarreness, constantly going through trial and error in an attempt to 'get it right.'
Well, time to sleep and rest this... strange, strange mind of mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment