Sickness, Depression, and... Spirituality?

I got sick a few days ago... It's actually kind of difficult to accurately say exactly when I got the virus, but based on my mood charts, it was about two or three days ago (my mood went from having at least some symptoms of being 'elevated' to being totally absent of such symptoms, and rather leaning toward and dipping into depression.) Looking at it from a simplistic view, utilising numbers and images, I could track more than just my mood. I saw my mood dipping and dipping, getting duller, sadder, more lethargic, and even quieter to an extent (though, when I got irritated, I wasn't so quiet...) Life was looking bland. It wasn't quite hopeless, no, but it wasn't really hopeful, either. It was just... there. Life was life. And then the virus germinated inside me, spread like wildfire, and beat the crap out of me. Now, for two days, I've been totally miserable, both emotionally and physically. I'm totally drained, my life feeling like it's seeping out of my body.

Now, you might think that my list of symptoms aren't really that terrible - especially if you currently aren't sick. Stuffy and runny nose, soar throat, pretty bad, painful, dry cough, body aches and headaches. It's all pretty classic symptoms of that little, but awful, thing known as the 'common cold.' There's nothing especially tragic or dire about this virus, and everyone gets it eventually (unless you're a bubble boy, in which case it'd probably kill you! and then it really is dire.) But when you have a mood disorder, or potentially just about any mental illness, things are intensified. Things are amplified to levels that the average, healthy individual likely couldn't fully understand. When I get a 'common cold,' I dip into depression. Now, what are the symptoms of mild depression? Body aches, headaches, lack of motivations and energy, lethargy, tiredness, sleep disturbance, feeling like the life has been drained out of you... and those are just the physical effects! The psychological effects? Things are perceived as duller, you have a lingering cloud of sadness (sometimes becoming tearfulness for seemingly no reason), you lack the interest in things you used to like, or even love, you typically find less meaning in life, your perceptions are distorted so that essentially everything looks negative, at least to some extent... Now, I'm just talking about mild depression - not full-blown major depression.

So when you combine the symptoms of depression, which can be almost flu-like on the physical side, and which can be draining from the mental side, with the symptoms of a cold, you get a pretty volatile mixture. It's similar to battling both the flu and the cold at the same time, but with a somewhat different set of obstacles and symptoms. Your body goes from just drained and sub-par with the cold to drained of your life, of your soul, and feeling so miserable you want to do anything just to end the misery. This is how I've felt for the past couple of days - totally miserable. And I have been trying just about everything to get rid of the misery - from utterly disgusting teas to a range of over-the-counter meds and even somewhat less common tactics, such as nasal irrigation and a therapeutic humidifier. Nothing's really worked so far. So... I seemed to run out of options... and what do I do? Well, I made a radical decision - perhaps one of the craziest decisions I ever made! (and I've made a lot of crazy decisions.)

I accepted it.

Yep, just like that... I accepted it. I accepted that I had a cold and it wasn't planning on going away, despite all my efforts. I accepted that I fell into a bout of depression and that I felt awful both emotionally and physically. 'So you gave up!' you might think. But I didn't. Sure, I accepted it, and sure, I know that - at least at the moment - I can't really do much about it. But if more options appear, I certainly will try them to alleviate the pain and the draining effects. But I can't right now. Not at this very moment. So why constantly struggle, so hopelessly, over something that I can't so easily control? Why battle and battle when I don't have the ability to tumble this terrible foe? Now, with the depression, it's a little easier to deal with it. The cold is physical - another entity within me just gunning to take me down. I will feel miserable until that thing is dead, and I somewhat have to wait it out until my body does it's thing and finally kills that horrid virus. I have to have faith that my body will deal with it, which I'm sure it will.

Depression, as I said before, is a little easier to deal with if you have the right tactics. Normally, depression is like this massive stone wall that no creature - man or beast, land, sea, or air-dwelling - could possibly get over. But humans have this wonderful gift - ingenuity. What is ingenuity, exactly? Well, let's look at an official definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "a : skill or cleverness in devising or combining : inventiveness; b : cleverness or aptness of design or contrivance." So what does this essentially mean? Well, as humans, we have the gift of using our minds to adapt and conquer, to make the world be as we see fit. Mixing it with our natural willpower and free will, well... you get great - almost unimaginably great! - methods for adapting and conquering things we never thought we could adapt to or conquer. So why would depression be any different? As long as we utilise our gift of ingenuity, learn from others and the world around us, we can adapt to or conquer anything and everything. This can be good or bad, depending on how we deal with the situations in which we find ourselves.

So, with the depression, I accepted it. Easier said than done, certainly, but I got to this point of realisation - an epiphany of sorts - where I realised that I can just accept that I was depressed rather than toil and fight with it. Rather than see depression as an enemy or something to rid myself of, I realised that I can utilise it, learn from it, accept it... and, if necessary, stop believing what my mind was telling me. Not everything I think is truth. Just because I thought something about myself or my surroundings does not make it fact. And when you are depressed, your thoughts can be extremely distorted, and you start to become blind to the truth, and accept all of the lies you tell yourself as absolute fact. So, this acceptance, acknowledgement, and even ability to realise that not all of the things your mind tells you are true, or to at least question the integrity of what you think before accepting it, are all mindfulness. Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on, but taking a more passive stance, rather than struggling and resisting what is going on. With bipolar, in particular, sometimes... a person just has to accept that they are going to have down moods, up moods, and in-between moods, or even mixed moods. If it happened even just once, it'll most likely happen again... and again after that, and again after that. To deny this, to resist this, is just unnecessary and exhausting labor that could end up being the actual downfall of the individual with bipolar.

Now, you don't want to be so passive that you do absolutely nothing. That's a dire misconception. Rather, you want to be unbiased, rational, aware... You want to be able to identify everything that is going on within and without, to be understanding, and to not let your irrationality or natural defence mechanisms get the better of you. When we give in to the lies, the defence mechanisms, the coping mechanisms, and believe everything our minds tell us, we become slaves to our bipolar. Bipolar can be good or bad, but it all depends on how you deal with it. Often, it starts out terribly bad, primarily because we don't understand the bipolar, what's going on with us and in our minds, and we can't control it or appropriately deal with it. Bipolar appears as this looming monster trying to swallow us up. And, in some cases, this might be exactly what happens. If you don't learn to adapt and grow, to appropriately deal with the bipolar, it will likely swallow you up whole in one way or another.

In this bout of mild depression, I had several revelations. I also happened to be watching the History Channel show, The Bible, which shows strong spiritual struggles, conflicts, both within and without. But do you know what the difference between the 'protagonists' in these stories versus the 'average' person? Those protagonists know how to deal with those struggles. In the end, they are victorious. They adapted, conquered, and accepted. As I watched these biblical stories being enacted in a stunningly engaging visual re-enactment, I realised just how similar these great protagonists, these great historical figures, were to someone with bipolar who mastered mindfulness. They knew misery, they knew great joy, they had ups and downs, they had great inner conflicts, as well as outer conflicts. But what was so different with them? They accepted. They believed. They sorted out what was right from what was wrong. They denied the lies generated in their mind - however good their mind's intent was in creating these lies - and they accepted the truths. They were masters of the art of mindfulness. They were... aware.

So, even after finishing watching the show - the first episode, at least - I started looking at my own struggles, within and without. I started to become more mindful, but it was just plain rationality, logic, and science, even. It was something spiritual. And I experienced a spirituality which I hadn't felt in a long time. When did I last feel such spirituality? Before I got on meds. And what changed in my life, now? I got off meds. I let my bipolar free. I gave it back its potential. Sure, there may be some permanent changes, or even some rehabilitation needed - what do you think would happen after 5 years of being trapped in a cage? My bipolar was like some fierce, exotic animal trapped in a cage, restrained, for 5 years. Sure, this creature could be vicious and deadly, but it can also be beautiful - one of God's very own creations. You look at a wolf from a distance, and you think how beautiful, sleek, and powerful it looks. But, up close, you fear it. You fear the very presence, whether or not it is malicious.

Man once lived in the wild. We were hunter-gatherers. In terms of biology, history, and cosmology, this wasn't very long ago. But we adapted so quickly, we became such clever, ingenious creatures, that we outran our biology by miles and miles. We are still biologically similar to those hunter gatherers. We are still primal at heart and in our very DNA, but modern society and advances came so quickly and so rapidly that our biology couldn't possibly catch up. Being bipolar is much like being a hunter-gatherer. You can either succumb to nature and die, or you can thrive and survive. With bipolar, you can tame the wild (but at what cost?) or you can learn to live amongst it. While I won't be going out of my house to live in the woods anytime soon, the metaphor still stands. Psychologically, I'm a hunter-gatherer, and my bipolar is my wilderness. I tried to tame it, I tried to cut down the forests and kill all of the animals, but that truly does not work. As modern humans, we're starting to learn this. We're starting to realise the costs of advancing so quickly beyond our biology, our very own nature. So I let the wilderness be. I let it start growing back, start becoming what it once was in all of its glory. I may be frightened by it to some extent, but I'm learning how to survive. I'm learning how to adapt because I'm a human, and humans have the gift of ingenuity.

There are a couple of great blogs that I read (coincidentally right after all of the things I just wrote about) that describe various areas of what I talked about to varying degrees: Finding Value In Depression and Mania, Are You Missing a Piece of Your Happiness?, and Untreated Depression in Pregnant Women

That's in order of what I think is most relevant to least relevant to what I've talked about. They did also influence some of what I said, primarily in a syntactical way. I thought it was so bizarre and amazing that I'd stumble upon those blogs right after all of these revelations and epiphanies I had. If that isn't a sign of something greater, I don't know what is. The stars seemed to have aligned and dropped a little gift right in my lap. As the first blog says, I found 'value in depression' (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, mainly because I'm not currently manic) 'and mania.' I took what I always knew deep inside and fully realised it. I accepted my bipolar, and I found the value behind it. Perhaps I can truly begin to make progress... Perhaps I truly laid down the start of a great foundation to build from.