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Let’s Begin the Journey!

I’m so excited to have you with me in my journey. Be careful because it’s a bumpy one. Let’s explore all the sights to see!

My childhood starts the journey off on the right foot as I was bubbly and fascinated by the world around me. Life was so exciting. The first bump in my path showed up as I started to have panic attacks at the age of five. Aside from that, life was typical. I breezed through school and even discovered my talent for dancing along the way.

The next bump in my life appeared when I hit fourteen years old and the true saga of a life with mental illness began. After high school, come to Belgium with me as I take part in a foreign exchange program. I had a blast learning French, eating lots of waffles and chocolate and living an entirely different life. Unfortunately, all of the fun of life abroad came to a crashing end as I spiraled into psychosis and met the beast of bipolar disorder face-to-face.

Although the next bumps in my life are big whammies, I would love for you to stick with me through them because I have been very lonely throughout this part of my journey. I would love for someone to understand what life is like when it is filled with despair, terror, frustration, anger, loneliness, shame, delusions and even near-death experiences.

At that point, the bumps in my path became mountains. I remember staring at those mountains, having no idea what to do with them. Thirteen years later, I started to climb them. I found in myself, courage, discipline, strength and focus that guided my path. Over time, I picked the pace up and reinvented myself just in time to make it to the mountain peak. What a beautiful view up here. I would love for you to see it for yourself.

Since I scaled this mountain and conquered it, I don’t really have many bumps in my life. Certainly a few here and there, but I just hop over them. I want to share all that I know with you because there is so much to say and you are clearly so loved.

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.

My Parents’ Bumpy Lives

I am not the only one with bumps in my path! Unfortunately, by default of my illness, I have given many of them to my parents. After displaying clear signs of anxiety as a child and then struggling with bipolar disorder at the mere age of fourteen, my mom had her hands full. That’s when her road got bumpy. It was the beginning of her journey in helping her sick child.

My bumps were pretty consistent and somewhat manageable for many years. There were no alarm bells just yet. But everything exploded the day that I was diagnosed with a profound case of mental illness. Thus it began!

Once I found myself in the throws of bipolar disorder, the amount of bumps that my parents faced was jarring. I should name a few. I have to begin by explaining my irritability since it is the biggest marker of bipolar disorder. People can’t understand the magnitude of having to deal with such a thing until they have been there themselves.

The most hurtful bump was that I constantly tried to push them out of my life. During my episodes I sometimes even screamed and used profanity as the means to do it. As I clearly felt tormented every day of my episodes and even after them, I seemed unreachable by my parents. How awful of a situation is that for a parent to go through? My mom even told me one day that she felt like “I had died and she didn’t know if she would ever get her daughter back.”

The end of my episodes was not the end of the bumps that they faced. There were doctor’s appointments to be scheduled, medications to sort out and decisions to be made. It seemed like I would never work my way out of my moods. Grief surfaced as another bump in my parents’ way as they knew how worthless I felt. As I blended into crowds of people who would never do anything with their lives, my parents couldn’t convince me that my life was filled with potential.

Spanning years ahead in my life, I wrote my memoir at the age of thirty-six. Oh boy, is it filled with bumps! After reading it, my dad was shocked to find out that there was so much that I have been through that he knew nothing about. He wants all parents of children with bipolar disorder to know that there is so much more under the surface than they even realize. He told me that my book humbled him.

But I don’t live this way anymore, so what is the difference? The difference is how my parents faced their bumps. It wasn’t just their relentless strength and wisdom. It is all elaborate, seemingly a dance that they perfected. I would love for you to know all about how my parents fought their own beasts of my bipolar disorder.

Finding Maturity in Medications

I could talk about my medications for days. It was one of the first slaps in the face that accompanied my diagnosis, and it was a big one. Being expected to navigate a litany of psychiatric medications seemed like a joke. I wasn’t a doctor. I was simply an ill person fighting to make it through my day. Everything was a mess: side effects galore, landing on the right medication in the midst of seemingly twenty different problems, the frustration of not sleeping enough vs sleeping too much, endless blood work to be done, and constantly trying to figure out the dosages of nine medications that wouldn’t stay put. As quoted in my book: “I felt like my meds bullied me.”

Over time, amazingly, my resolve turned my bully into one of my closest friends. Thankfully, my childlike frustrations gave way to maturity as I partnered with my doctor to overcome my illness, one medication at a time.

I am purely blessed by God to be where I stand today in relation to my medications. There are few people who ever reach this level of maturity. It’s the nature of bipolar disorder. The enemy deceives us at our weakest point.

I remember being there myself, for fifteen years. Garbage piled into my brain as I was convinced that I would lose everything if I took any medications. At that point, my creativity blew people’s socks off. I was deemed a genius when I was in school. I had so much energy. I felt superhuman. I knew that medications would suppress all of that. I didn’t want to take them. For fifteen years, I fought the medication battle. Every day when I woke up, I debated taking them. However, it was in 2019 that God came into my life and that is when He started to teach me spiritual obedience.

You must understand that a system was established in my life since the time that I was diagnosed. Its foundation is my doctor and medication regimen. I remember that my mother taught me to take my medications at all costs, regardless of whether I wanted them or not. I was learning obedience.

Everything worth having in life has a cost. It reminds me of all that I gave up in seeking God for the first time. After meeting God, my next priority was gaining a sound mind. I learned that it takes surrender to God to find true healing. In gaining a sound mind, I made a choice to take my medications faithfully, and it came with a cost: giving up my mania, my big dreams, an obscene amount of creativity and everything that made me feel important. But what mattered was that I was learning how to push back on the enemy.

I will always remember one of my appointments with my doctor when he said to me, “See? Your personality is starting to come out.” He was only able to point that out after we had worked hard for nine years to perfect the medications that I took. People with bipolar disorder believe a lie that medications take away their personality. Mania isn’t their personality. It’s their illness. I am much more subdued at this point in my life and there are many things that I have lost in taking my meds, not to mention how sedated I feel all day long, every day. But, through this spiritual maturity of submitting to the system, God uses it for good.

I would urge you to do the same. I promise that you will certainly find so many treasures from God inside of this leap of faith.

Sincerely, Ruby

Please check out my website: iwillflyrubylucas.com