Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘dealing with emotions’

Bipolar Disorder Has Turned Me Into a Pouty Child

I am blessed with many friends, online and off, who are as dear to me as anyone can be. We have laughed together, cried together, eaten together, danced together, sung together, joked together, mourned together, and loved together.

Now that I’m back in my cycles of depression and hypomania, hurtling around like a marble in a shoebox, I haven’t heard from any of them.

A lot of the contact I have with friends is on Facebook, and I have almost entirely stopped posting or replying, or otherwise interacting there. No one seems to have noticed. At least no one has called or IMed to check on me.

Am I ghosting them? No, because I don’t want the relationships to end. In fact I very much want them to continue. My scattered moods, primarily depression, have sapped my ability to reach out. It may be that they assume since I post my blogs every Sunday, I am all right.

I desperately want someone to reach out to me. This is selfish and childish and unworthy. If I want human contact, I should be able to reach out and initiate it myself. But I haven’t been able to. Between the exhaustion of depression and the exhaustion of hypomania, it’s difficult to make any kind of effort.

The memes say that if you have a depressed friend, reach out to them, even when they can’t reach back. And there have been times when my excellent friends did that, back when I had been in the Pit of Despair. And they kept reaching, even when I didn’t respond.

I guess I miss those days – not the Pit of Despair – but the little parachutes of care that rained down and demanded nothing. The phone calls “just to check in” or to distract, the invitations that I was never going to be able to make myself go to or reciprocate, the awful jokes that I might not even be able to laugh at.

I understand that everyone is fighting their own battles these days, with isolation, anxiety, panic, and other reactions to the pandemic, the lockdowns, the vaccines, the separated families. Mental health struggles, especially including depression and anxiety, are spreading to people who have never experienced them before. A lot of people are suffering, and a lot of people don’t know what, if anything, they can do about it. People have had to resort to Zoom weddings and funerals and outside-the-window visits to relatives in nursing homes.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I have been so relatively stable and functional for so long now. I made it through a tornado and a year of home dislocation and all the associated disruptions and bureaucracy without having one of my famous meltdowns. So, now, when even I have not been expecting or experiencing any psychological trauma to speak of, it’s easy to understand that no one else has seen it or noticed.

Then there’s my husband. He is my rock, my caregiver, my “emotional support animal.” Ordinarily, he takes up most of the slack in making me feel seen and heard and cared for. But unfortunately, he is having depression and anxiety of his own right now. He has recently had health problems, has changed jobs, and has physically strenuous activities he must complete, within a deadline. Of course, he is reacting with depression and anxiety of his own. And when both of us are depressed and anxious at the same time, it’s not pretty. We don’t have enough psychic stamina to help ourselves, much less each other.

So, I understand why it isn’t happening. But I miss the check-ins I’m not getting. The calls that don’t come. The personal long-distance reach-in. The wave from outside the window.

I’m not quite to the point of, “Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I guess I’ll go eat some worms.” But close.

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Mental Health

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Stuffing Your Feelings in a Box

We all know it’s a bad idea to stuff your feelings, especially if you then pile food or alcohol on top of them.

The thing is, sometimes you need to suppress a feeling, for just a little while, in order to get through a difficult situation. When that happens, I put my feelings in a box.Cardboard box with the zipper isolated on white background

Here’s an example. My father was dying, and had only days to live. We all knew it. My mother, who didn’t drive, asked me to take her shopping for something to wear at his funeral. “Do you mind if I don’t wear black?” she asked. “If you don’t mind that I do,” I replied.

It was my first encounter with a close family death, and I had to get through this awful, wrenching shopping trip. I had to keep my composure so that my mother could keep her composure. I had to steer her away from a flowered dress, which would have been fine for church, to a navy suit and a lighter blue top, which would be suitable for a funeral but not so somber that she couldn’t wear it for anything else. All while my father lay in the hospital, dying painfully of bone cancer.

My feelings were complicated and I absolutely could not afford to feel them at that time. I had to stuff them in a box and close the lid on them until my mother’s needs had been met. Then I could let them out, in a time and place where it was safe to, in the presence of a person I could trust with those feelings.

When such circumstances arise – and they will, in one form or another – I recommend using a box, one in which the feelings will be out of sight for a while. A box is small; only a few feelings will fit in it. If you think the feelings are going to leak out, you can sit on the lid. Then, when it has served its purpose, you can rip the box open (or gently lift the lid) and feel the feelings. Cry. Rage. Grieve. That’s the important part.

You have to experience the grief or fear or even the crushing weight of guilt in order to come through it and heal.

But why put feelings in a box instead of something stronger? Who wants to feel those negative emotions anyway? Aren’t we better off without them? Shouldn’t you just build a wall around them to keep them from breaking out?

We’ve all tried it. It works for a while. But a couple of consequences go with the practice. First, all of your feelings get trapped behind that wall – the good as well as the bad. When you find yourself disconnected from all your feelings, life is a gray blur. In your depression or anxiety or fear or rage, you may not have had many good feelings. But when you build that wall, you cut off even the possibility of having them.

Second, you’re only postponing the pain. The wall will leak sometimes; your unpleasant feelings will come out some way – in your dreams, around your eyes, in sudden spurts, or trickling back into your everyday life. Worse, the wall may shatter – fail altogether, releasing all those feelings in an unstoppable torrent, only stronger and more concentrated from having been confined. They overwhelm both you and anyone in the vicinity. It’s not pretty. And it’s destructive – to you, your mental health, your healing, your employment, your relationships – to every aspect of your life.

If feelings are behind a wall, you may be able to tell yourself they don’t exist. But if you stuff them in a handy box, you can choose the time and place to open it – and yourself – back up.

 

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Mental Health

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