Or maybe I should just stop making excuses.
I didn't write yesterday, and I'm trying not to feel guilty about that, but feelings of guilt can be tough to deal with. It's even tougher because I am trying to make writing at least a little bit on this blog part of my routine.
It's still a struggle to get through this hypomanic state. On the one hand, I do have lots of extra energy, but on the other, there's a sort of irritable undercurrent and it's more difficult to wrestle my temper. I am a bottle under pressure type with my temper, except during manic periods. That's the addition of heat to the pressurized contents of the bottle that blows it up and shoots glass in every direction.
Lately I've been working on expressing frustration and annoyance to the people who have frustrated or annoyed me rather than stewing and blowing up. It isn't easy all the time (okay, most of the time) but it turns out to be better in the end. Let out the irritation or annoyance before it turns into anger and hate.
Letting go can be one of the hardest things to do with this illness. Ruminating about the past, negative thought spirals, and anxiety about small things are apparently very common symptoms of bipolar disorder. If people who don't have to live with this can have trouble letting go of things, then it should come as no surprise that people who feel every emotion magnified might also have some difficulties with it.
Unfortunately there is this notion that letting go is just a simple matter of saying to yourself 'I'm letting ___ go.' The only time I have ever seen this work was in movies and on TV, where people solve all of their problems in the space of an hour or two. It would be lovely if the world worked like the movies and we were all amazing action heroes who looked perfect all the time, but there's a reason that media is unrealistic: it's meant as an escape from reality.
I don't have any solid solutions for letting go, except perhaps for therapy. The problem with therapy is that it's not a miracle cure, and it doesn't only take place in the therapist's office. If you're not working on the things you talk about in between, you're not going to benefit from it very much. Yet there are plenty of people who lie to their therapists, refuse to discuss their problems, and most of all do not work on anything outside of their sessions.
No one can achieve anything if they refuse to work on it. Even celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who many people think is just famous because of who her parents are, have to work to stay famous. Ms. Kardashian has to put in a lot of time to keep her appearance up, not to mention how exhausting it must be to have camera crews follow you around your everyday life, and you can't show up to every paparazzi event unless you do some research and nurture a vast network of connections. So in order for her to become and stay famous, Kim Kardashian has a lot of work to do, even if it seems to some people like "all she does is pose for the cameras."
The point is that managing an illness like bipolar disorder is a lot of work. People who aren't willing to put in the work, for whatever reason, inevitably find that the disease manages them instead of the other way around. And who wants to live like that?
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