What Are the Bumps in My Path?

So, my life is full of bumps. At this point, I have explained when these bumps happened and even mentioned that they eventually turned into mountains. But these bumps are yet to be explained. I should dive into my diagnosis to give you an inside look.

Bipolar disorder is described as a mood disorder. People with this illness have moods that swing from the dark despair of depression to the exact opposite, which is mania. Depression is pretty self-explanatory but many people don’t know what mania is. Mania causes a person to have energy levels that are bizarrely high, which is quite dangerous for many reasons. When these moods get extreme enough, they are classified as “episodes.”

The illness is broken down into two categories: bipolar 1 and bipolar 2. People with bipolar 1 have mostly manic episodes and people with bipolar 2 have mostly depressive episodes. I suffer from bipolar 1.

At the first onset of my illness when I was a teenager, I fought manic depression, which seems like an oxymoron. It was a combination of my mood being high and low at the same time. The best way for me to explain it is that, even though I was depressed, my mind was running a million miles a minute. It caused me to cogitate intensely on my depressive thoughts and then everything would snowball. I lost my best friend because of it.

After suffering so long from manic depression, my mood swung in the other direction and I had two manic episodes where I became delusional and was hospitalized for quite a long while. That’s when these bumps turned into mountains. I have become such a seasoned hiker as I have scaled each one of them.

But the important part is that, over time and through many frustrations, I have made it over these mountains. The landscape of battling bipolar disorder these days does not resemble anything that it used to be. I want to tell you all about it.