You Too Can Be Bipolar!
May 22, 2009 Help Yourself
Friday Night just turned to Saturday morning (I’m being deceitful because I sit on the East Coast while my website is comfortably hosted on the West. Some things I just didn’t have the heart to transition).
I’m sitting on my sofa. Laptop on my lap. After a days of extreme highs and lows, thinking about how I perceive the world, and how much the world has shaped me.
The highs I experienced today were manic. No caffeine rush, no sugar, and I don’t take prescriptions. These highs were natural, but there were no triggers that I recall to create them.
That’s when my wife said: “I wonder if you’re bipolar?”
Wait, what?
Never in my life has this been a question. I’ve never been hyper or suffered attention deficit issues. I have had boughts of situational depression, and know a good funk or two, but internally I never perceived myself as being anything short of mentally strong.
So I immediately dismissed my wifes suggestive reasoning. But, my subconsious never let go of her words.
“Bipolar?”
“HA! No way! Never! That’s genetic, not conditional.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hmm… now that I think about it….”
Now before you or I get ahead of myself and the rest of this post, I’m not about to go off and self diagnose any possible ailment based on a single observation. I have plenty of reasonable doubt that I would not meet the criterion for a diagnosis. Or even come close. But I will entertain the thought of a deep and thorough internal self evaluation. It’s great therapy to give yourself a reality check every once in a while.
Here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve been married to a bi-polar sufferer for 8 years now. The observations made of how she handles, diffuses, and manages anxieties and stresses have been spectacular. The highs and states of elation were also spectacular. It’s the violent swings in the middle that can be horrifying. This medical condition is very real regardless what recent controversies may suggest.
Somehow I ended up in marketing. But if dollars wouldn’t have influenced me, I would have easily ended up in the fields of sociology or anthropology. I’m fascinated by human interaction, cultural influence, religion impact, and the conditioning that occurs with individuals. I strongly believe that each persons unique identity isn’t really his/her identity and it really isn’t all that unique. It’s the result of the culmination of thousands upon thousands of influences being applied to that person over time. I think being in marketing isn’t too far of a stretch in a sense, as it’s all about finding wasy to influence certain demographics to take a certain action (buy something, consume something, interact with something). Most people herd in the same direction, you just need to find their triggers.
It is with this same fundamental core that I strongly believe that environment can create certain emotional imbalances and possible dysfunctions as well.
It is with this core that I feel that even though I’m a mentally stable, logic processing, emotionally level individual, that I can still be capable of firing internal and external indicators that I may be bipolar. I’m not, but after living with a diagnosed bipolar and intimately observing behavior during manic episodes for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours at a time, that I’m not at all surprised that I too can mimic some of these behaviors. Unintentionally. Subconsciously.
Today, my logic and processing were all still on cue. But my behavior and my energy were visibly manic to an outside observer. Internally, in addition being elated, even my heart rate was up. I was truly on cloud 9! And this is the only possibility I can have for describing it (unless I have a tumor. That’s always what happens on House at least).
I was suffering shadow syndrome symptoms. Fascinating!
Tags: bipolar, shadow syndrome