I wrote this because I think it's interesting to write about my bipolar disorder in different phases and since it's been almost 3 years since my diagnosis.

I'm crazy.

Unlike many of my mentally ill peers, I don't have much of a problem with that word. Perhaps it's because I am of the generation that uses it to simply mean more of something: crazy awesome, crazy awful, that's crazy. In that sense, it doesn't retain its typically negative connotation. In fact, it looks a little naked when I refer to myself like that. Like I should say that I'm crazy something rather than just crazy.

But I digress.

I wanted to write today about what it means to be crazy. I didn't really know until I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I had in my mind a vague idea of mental illness, but I had never known someone with any sort of mental illness (that I knew about). The most contact I had was with the homeless people that lived near my university campus, and I don't know for sure how many of them were mentally ill. To me, that's what mental illness looked like. I thought that if you were seriously mentally ill, your life was basically over. You weren't you anymore, just your illness.

That meant that I spent years downplaying and rationalizing my symptoms because I knew wholeheartedly that if I was actually mentally ill, I wouldn't be able to function. I spent years suicidally depressed because my mother didn't believe that teen depression actually existed. I couldn't even tell her I was suffering because she would've said that I was just seeking attention. I spent years becoming so manic that my body felt out of phase with my brain and I hallucinated ghosts or bugs or people tapping me on the shoulder. When you're nearly blind without glasses and you see things while you're in bed at night, it's really easy to say it's a trick of the light. Plus, I think all of us have experienced that feeling of something brushing your skin when there's nothing there. Tactile hallucinations are not exactly the same, but you can definitely write them off as that.

All this is to say that I didn't know that crazy comes in different forms. I was perfectly sane for some of the time. I thought that meant that I couldn't be crazy because crazy people are alway crazy. I didn't know that mental illness isn't a constant thing, at least not for everyone. It's definitely not constant when you're bipolar.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I had a problem with my meds recently and experienced mania for the first time in a while. I forgot what it was like. There was this insistent trembling at the base of my skull. I couldn't get comfortable anywhere because that jittering feeling forced me to move. When I finally focused on something, I did so single-mindedly, forgoing food, water, breaks. It's like not recognizing the person in your body, but you don't realize that until after.

After this period, I reread a lot of the things I wrote. They were awful: run-on sentences everywhere, an incredibly diminished vocabulary (that is only slowly returning), leaps of logic that are entirely illogical (or missing huge chunks of the in-between parts). What I actually wrote by hand took on that characteristic handwriting style of all of my manias, namely, an illegible scrawl. I'm always too focused on the rest of the thought to take a moment to write more than a scribble for each word. I can typically only read about 1 in 10 words written during these phases.

This makes me really angry. I was doing everything right and because of a drug interaction, I was left unprotected. But it also makes me so ridiculously thankful. I had to experience what it was like to be mostly off my medication. I remember really clearly right now just how crazy I was a few weeks ago. I remember not feeling in control of my mind. I remember not feeling in control of my body or my choices. Even when I was manic, it was like someone else was directing my thoughts, I just didn't care at the time.

As I sit here, I wonder if other people grew up thinking of mental illness as one thing. I'm always terrified to say that I'm bipolar when I'm speaking to people face-to-face. I'm terrified to see that awful shift in their expression that tells you they've just changed how they perceive you forever. You become your mental illness, if only in their eyes. I wonder if I would've reacted the same had I not experienced it myself.

I'm not my mental illness. I work every day to get to that place of clarity that is stability for me. It's been a hard road and the struggle is never-ending. That's the awful thing about being crazy: there's no cure. You just have to put in heaps of effort to get to the place everyone else is naturally. You have to pump yourself full of medication with unclear or decidedly awful side-effects and long-term problems. You have to fight the comfortable pathways in your brain to force new habits of eating, drinking, and sleeping that parodoxically are unnatural for you. I do this every day. I fight for sanity every day.

I'm not always successful, but I try.