Bipolar Me

I’ve been beating myself up for years. Feeling blame and shame. Not just for years, really—literally for decades. That’s a long time to carry the weight of those feelings.

I was in college, when many people make bad decisions as a function of venturing into a less restricted, more adult life. I certainly made my share of bad decisions.

I wrote papers the night before they were due and didn’t make a second draft. I skipped reading Moby Dick, even though it was on the syllabus for the course. I took Russian instead of Japanese simply because it was offered later in the morning, and I wanted to sleep in.

I switched from being a linguistics major because I thought there were no jobs in it, despite not researching the field or asking my advisor. I floundered, considering hotel management and landscape architecture for no particular reason.

Then there was the worst decision I ever made, the one that has haunted me all these years. I met a man—we’ll call him Steve—and went home with him that same night. A few months later, I moved in with him. This led to a year of gaslighting, depression, and more bad decisions about prescription drugs.

So, how can I explain my bad decisions? Some were simply the kind of decisions that a person out on their own for the first time makes. These don’t affect me the way the relationship with Steve did. Steve told my parents about our relationship instead of letting me do it in my own time, in my own way. That soured my interactions with them for quite a while.

Why did I behave the way I did? An avowed feminist, I let this man take over my life. I put up with emotional abuse for almost a year. I denied that I was mad at him for all I’d been through. I put all the burden of blame and shame on myself. And there it sat for decades. I had flashbacks and bad dreams. I had difficulty with further relationships.

Then, recently, a new idea came to me. At the time when all this happened, I knew I was depressed. I had never heard of bipolar disorder, much less been diagnosed with it. Now that I do know and have been diagnosed (and seen therapists and been properly medicated), my disorder has still leaned largely toward the depressive side. I do remember having hypomanic jags in which I spent too much, and a larger one when I got wrapped up in writing and tried to market a novel to 100 agents and publishers.

But the one aspect of bipolar disorder I never considered was hypersexuality. The idea that could be the reason I dove into the relationship with Steve so quickly and so deeply was a revelation to me. I hadn’t had any lightning-quick sexual encounters until then. I hadn’t thrown myself into them so wholly and so destructively.

Of course, I can’t blame hypersexuality for the whole situation. I did what I did, and I chose to do it at the time. That’s on me.

But the decades of shame and blame? Now that I know what hypersexuality is and what it feels like, I don’t have to carry that burden with confusion, devastated by what happened, and wondering why it all happened. I can see that I have carried those feelings with me for too long. I can perhaps lay down that burden, understand why it might have happened, and move on.

I have made plenty of bad decisions, but I don’t have to cling to one of them and beat myself up for it. Perhaps, with this new insight, I can at last move on, chalking it up to a bad decision under the influence of hypomania rather than a lifelong journey of guilt.

Perhaps, now that I understand how hypersexuality may have played a part, I can forgive myself.