The Monster Inside Me

I am a happy person. A very happy person. Over the top happy actually. I'm very confident. I love who I am. I KNOW who I am. I embrace who I am. Every part of me. And from what I can remember, I've pretty much always been this way. Which made hearing the news at 19 was especially hard for me. You need back story to really understand what a huge thing this was.

I'm very family oriented. My mom is my best friend. My siblings are my entire heart- well they were at that time, now my own babies actually have that spot, so my siblings have to share :) But I liked being home with them. So it was pretty shocking to everyone, my poor baby sister who was only 7 especially, when I packed up my stuff and essentially disappeared. I decided to move out. Without any warning. Without an explanation. Without a goodbye. It was weeks before I would return calls. And when I did, it was only to my dad. I became very impulsive during this time with just about everything in my life. I had lots of "boyfriends" ( really they were just boys that gave me attention that I craved, but because my heart belonged to Jay, they never went anywhere). I had friends that were horrible influences on me, and encouraged my impulsive behavior. I had several jobs. I had ONE through the entire thing, but I took a second and hopped from restaurant to restaurant.

To be honest, I don't remember a lot of what happened that summer. My mom has told me that they thought I was doing drugs because I was acting so strange. I was literally not recognizable. Not to my parents, not to the man that I loved, not to my true friends, not to my siblings, and certainly not to me. I was destructive.  There was a "trigger event" that put all of this into motion. I won't go into those details, but it was traumatic, and something I could not ever recover from if  I hadn't made the decision to nail it to the cross and leave it there.

But before I was brave enough to nail it this is what happened......

I don't remember when I moved out. Probably Mayish. Im pretty sure the kids were in school when I left. And I moved back in with my parents the end of July. When I moved back in, my mom told me that things couldn't be the same. She told me she wanted me to go to a meeting with her at the hospital. I don't remember this at all, but she told me that it was a meeting about bi polar. Basically an informational seminar. She said that at the break I told her that the person speaking was describing me. Mom agreed, and said she thought I should see a physchologist. I agreed to go. The first one we went to tried to make me think it was my moms fault that I was acting this way. It made me angry, and I refused to go back to him. So mom found a new one. We met only a handful of times, but she knew at the second meeting that I was bi polar. This is when my diagnosis happened. I didn't believe it. I refused to believe it. I mean, PART of me knew that I fit the symptoms, but then part of me also felt like I had gone through a lot in the last 6 months and I was reacting.

In August, Jay asked me to marry him (yeah, I guess we knew we were suppose to be together because in June when he came home from college, we were barely even talking. It happened very fast.) Then Jay went to boot camp. My family had decided to go to Colorado and wanted me to go with them. So off we went. J graduated in October and I flew to Chicago to watch him graduate. Things were going very well. All the bipolar nonsense had stopped and I was back to my normal self. In December, Jay flew out to see me, and we went to the court house and got married. Of course, that meant moving to Florida where he was going through training to be with my new husband.

Our first year sucked. Not even gonna sugar coat it. It was awful. I don't know how we made it through. Well, that's not true. God's Grace got us through it. Still no signs of any of the bi polar crap. Just normal newly married stuff. We transferred to Washington when I was about 7 months pregnant with our first son. This was the beginning of something beautiful. Our marriage has done nothing but grow since our transfer to Washington. And the bi polar became very real to me here.

Jay deployed for the first time. Leaving me, without a job, in a place that we'd only been for a few months, alone, with a brand new 7 week old baby. I didn't feel out of control at all, but I felt extremely sad. I called my mom sobbing on multiple occasions because I didn't wanna do this. I didn't wanna be here alone with my baby in OUR house without my husband. Mom flew me home a couple weeks later. I visited for about a month, and returned to my happy self. During this time was the first time that I remember talking to my mom about being depressed.

See, heres the thing.

Im not NORMALLY on the depressive side of the scale. My NORMAL is manic. so the overly happy, that didn't raise any red flags to anyone because who goes to the doctor because they're happy??  But the sad side was new to me.  I cant tell you how many times i'd call my mom in either a manic or a depressive state and tell her I was swinging again.... she always told me that the light was there, I needed to look at the light. I needed to get my sleep and remember it would be over soon. This happened pretty often while we lived in Washington. Mom says its because of all the rain there. Which I thought was silly until we moved to California.

In California, I was manic. Basically the entire 4 years we were there. I didn't have a single depression episode. I did have a 3 month period that I decided that I needed to seclude myself from my friends, and focus on my kids. But I wasn't depressed. I was focusing too much on my friends and not enough on my boys or myself.

Now were in Chicago, and guess what. The depressive side is rearing its ugly head again. Joy. Its gonna be a fun 3 years!

I don't write this because I want sympathy. I write it for this reason.

I love that I am Bi Polar.

Yep. I said it. I don't love that it turns me into someone who is short with my kids. I don't like that it makes me lose sleep. I don't like that I feel out of control. I don't like that its labeled as a bad thing. or as something that makes one weak. This is what the purpose of this blog entry was.

Having depression is not a weakness. It is a chemical imbalance. Its serious. Its not something that you can just snap out of. It doesn't go away if you stay in bed and eat chicken soup and watch trash tv. It doesn't go away by ignoring it. Depression is something that needs to be handled. With meds, with counseling, with oils. With whatever it is that works for you.... as long as its legal.

I am bi polar, but my bi polar does not define me. It is something that makes me stronger because I have to deal with it. I am not medicated. I will never be medicated. Not as long as I feel I can control it to the extent I do now. I am all about the oils tho, lets try those! But I like my manic. Im a clean manic, so if im swinging, 9 times out of 10, I will deep clean things. this is a dead give away to the man that I am manic. And he knows how to deal with that. Were still working on figuring out the depression swings because those don't happen as often. I believe with my entire heart that I am one of the strongest women that you will ever know. And I have bi polar. I fight this battle on a daily basis. It doesn't defeat me. It doesn't wear me down. It makes me amazing.