For the past several months I have been struggling with an array of ailments.  I have spent a lot of time in therapy and with clinicians.  A culmination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and a false sense of security led me here.  I was not prepared! I guess that the biggest and most ground-breaking element of therapy was discovering that I am a hypocrite.  Not without reason, mind you but a hypocrite nonetheless.  Let’s unpack this together.

Vulnerability is something that those closest to me and those who work with me would say I was comfortable with.  This is not entirely true.  The vulnerability I show is extremely controlled and like a tight-lipped NDA, I only release non-descript details.  I allow myself to leverage parts of me to show vulnerability but never the whole picture.  Snippets to show that I am open, supportive, authentic.

On the surface this is true, I’m not a complete fraud but rather very protective of an element of my life that I have a great amount of fear of becoming public knowledge.  I live to be kind, caring, compassionate, open, understanding, and accommodating.  I strive to provide a safe space for those around me to be who they are, without consequence and judgment.  I thrive in encouraging others and elevating their image of themselves.  I aspire to allow others to own their truth.

I am an avid supporter of mental health issues and fighting to end the stigma around them except, when it comes to my mental health.  Throughout therapy, I discovered that I am ashamed, bound by fear to put my truth out in the world in an uncontrolled fashion.  I’ve always been very selective about who I told and when and what purpose it served in the process.

Realizing how protective and guarded I was about this indicated that I am a hypocrite, and I am not okay with that.  How can I encourage others to own their mental health and speak freely about it when I am terrified to do it myself?  There was a lot of work to do on my end when trying to deduce what it was I was afraid of.  There were conscious fears and subconscious fears and in the end throughout It all, I realized to set myself free, I needed to own it and put it out in the world.  As I am typing this, I am riddled with anxiety. All the logic in my head knows it will be okay However, those who suffer from anxiety know that logic does very little to extinguish it.

In 2011, after a long series of sessions with a psychiatrist, questions about my childhood, adolescence, early adult years, and the full gamut of testing I was diagnosed with Type II Bi-Polar Affective Disorder.  This is usually when, If I did choose to tell someone, I would quickly explain the differences between Bi-Polar and Type II Bi-Polar just in case they thought that I had schizophreniform tendencies.  That said, I understand now that in owning this I do not need to explain the difference and if you want to know, you can easily find out with a quick search on Google.  This diagnosis was bittersweet.

You see, from as far back as I can remember, I always felt like there was something wrong with me.  This is normal for a lot of people to say, so it may not come as a surprise to you.  However, in my teenage years and early adulthood, I thought it was my affliction with my religious programming and the fact that I am gay.  Life was never easy, everything was always hard. A lot of my issues were self-inflicted and as wonderful life can be, it was just never easy.  My brain didn’t function the way other brains functioned.  When you spend your entire adolescence and early adulthood trying to be normal when you’re not normal, you tend to just burn out, repeatedly.  I spent a lifetime trying to fit a square peg into a circle.  Never understanding why it wouldn’t work, why it couldn’t work!  No amount of medication or therapy would make me normal.

The bittersweet aspect of the diagnosis was the ‘Ahh Shit, I’m Bi-Polar?’  Then of course the ‘I’m not crazy? There ‘is’ something wrong with me?’  The diagnosis was a form of validation, a window into understanding my brain, my thoughts, the reason things happened the way they happened, and a path to my version of normal.  I would like to say that things got better instantly but that would be a lie.  In society when you’re not normal, doctors try to fix it.  They do what they do best and throw medication and treatments at it;  sometimes haphazardly.  I became a human guinea pig and up until 2016, I ran through almost the entirety of treatment options that the pharmaceutical world had to offer.

Did you know that anti-convulsants are considered a suitable treatment for Type II Bi-Polar?  Or Anti-Psychotics?  Tranquilizers?  A combination of A, B, and C?  When I moved from Ontario to Newfoundland I was on twelve different medications, 9 of which were to help my brain function ‘normally.’  I was a walking zombie with the emotional range of a turnip and personality of a pothole.  Life sucked!  Of course, I had spent extensive time researching my disorder, learning everything I could about it and how to combat it with cognitive behavior therapy, recognizing the signs, the symptoms, and the whole medical journal on Type II Bi-Polar Affective Disorder.

I remember for two-and-a-half years being in such heavy and thick darkness that all I did to survive was going through the motions.  I remember wanting to die, yearning to die, praying to die.  Work at the time was the only thing that kept me alive.  It was an 8 – 12 hour per day distraction that kept my mind focused on something other than the darkness that surrounded me or the downward pulling that kept me underwater.  In 2016 I couldn’t see a future that was free from the darkness, I couldn’t see any light or hope, it had been gone from me for so long.  I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life having to work so hard to get through the simplest of tasks.  The idea of staying strong for just one more day seemed impossible and in vain.  What did it matter that I chose to live for one more day?  It wouldn’t make a difference!  It had been two and half years of darkness and me trying everything to fight it away and restore my light.  Anything that once was fun, seemed pointless.  Anything that once brought me joy seemed another desperate ploy to convince myself that life would be okay.  What was the point?  That was the running dialogue for two-and-a-half years.

One day, with complete resolve, I attempted to complete suicide.  I failed!  I spent several days in a short-stay unit on a twenty-four-hour watch.  While being watched I realized that I had one of two choices.  I could pretend that I was okay, get out, and do a better job at taking my life or I could accept the help, get out and make some drastic changes.  The problem at the time was that I didn’t think there was anything else I could try.  As you have probably guessed, I chose life.  That said, it wasn’t easy!  Perhaps one of the hardest things I have ever done.  It started with the immediate removal of ‘ALL’ medication.  Yes, you read that correctly, all medication was stopped.  My doctor at the time was not in agreement and I stated, ‘I’m doing this, either way, so you can help me and be a part of the process or not.’  The one medication I added back rather quickly was my anxiety medication. 

The second phase of my last-ditch effort to get to my normal was I needed to completely reprogram my thought patterns.  While withdrawal from the medication was turbulent, reprogramming a thirty-five-year-old brain to change the way it processes information was a nuclear fallout.  That said, every day I would mindfully catch every thought that left my brain and reword it from a negative observation to a neutral or positive one.  All my thoughts were negative, self-loathing, unkind, mean, destructive.  I started practicing self-kindness, gratitude, and acceptance.  I remember very clearly that it was roughly six months later that I noticed I had a slew of neutral and positive observances without force.  The work wasn’t over, only just beginning but that was a great day.  I went back to the doctor and told her the one other medication that I would like to add back to my regime.  Two medications, down from twelve and both were below therapeutic value.  Just enough of each to keep me somewhat balanced.  Remember, I was still Bi-Polar, my brain needs medication to sustain my normal.  I finished school that year, started a job, and have been gainfully employed ever since.

So what is Type II Bi-Polar Affective Disorder?  Well without getting too technical I’ll give you the primary points and how it affects me as a person.  Most people will live on a pretty even spectrum their entire lives, they feel little blips of ups and downs and discomfort.  Situational depression and anxiety will play parts but as a rule, they are not chronic.  With Type II you live sixty percent on the depressive scale, lower than normal.  This is true for me as being lower than normal is my normal, however, I function highly when I am in this state of mind.  If zero is the baseline for leveled emotions then I am most often at a negative one point twenty-five to a negative one point seventy-five.  When I go beyond a negative one point seventy-five I consider this my low, the kind of day I’ll take as a sick day because I’m too low to function.  For the last five years, I have a low day between five and six times a year.  If we keep with the zero as a baseline for emotions, when I go into an upswing I rise to a plus one point fifty to a two.  An upswing is categorized as hypo-mania.  This is where things get a little tricky and also why Type II Bi-Polar goes undiagnosed in many adults far too often.  When you are in an upswing you feel quite good in the beginning.  You feel like you are on top of the world.  You can do anything.  You sleep less, you feel energized, you become socially and sexually active, you take on all the tasks imaginable and you just go for the top.  Why would anyone go to the doctor when they are feeling so good?

When an upswing comes about you begin to rise from the ashes but not as a beautiful phoenix but rather an irritable, irrational slightly out-of-touch pigeon who has to conquer the world.  Who will conquer the world!  Without knowing it, you begin to find people, places, things, and work irritating and beneath you.  That they are standing in your way of true excellence and that they must all be removed immediately.  While I am not this way with people, I am with places, things, and work. I cycle through upswings and downswings five to six times a year.  So, five to six times a year I want to rage quit my job, terminate my lease, move houses, provinces, countries.  I have this compulsion to purchase things that I have “needed my entire life”, be active, social, outgoing, have adventures.  All of this without thought of consequence.  This was my life until turning thirty!  Giving in to these urges and compulsions because I didn’t know how to manage them or what they were.  For the last five years after choosing to live and dramatically changing the landscape of my life, I can handle all five to six cycles per year.  All while no one ever knowing that I have a disability, to begin with.

Assessment after assessment has pinpointed the onset of my disorder to around the age of thirteen.  For twenty-seven years I have lived with this and when I was diagnosed I chose to not be defined by it.  I also chose to not acknowledge the fears I had surrounding the diagnosis and what it could potentially mean for me if it was open and on display.  I believe that those fears were magnified once I was able to restructure my life, find stability, consistency, learn to love parts of myself, maintain sustainable employment and settle down.  I hadn’t had those things before, they became very important to me and I am proud of the life I have built.  I realize that I feared being treated differently.  That if people knew the truth that they would only see my diagnosis and be fearful of socializing or creating connections with me.  I feared that people would default to the diagnosis any time I stepped or spoke out of turn.  “Well, he’s bipolar you know.  They can be like that.”  This would make it difficult to be taken seriously when I was upset, being assertive, or emotional of any kind.  Furthermore, I feared what my employers would do if they learned of this information.  Would I be fired?  You know, not straight out but an around the bush ‘let go’ as I have witnessed countless times in my life.  “It’s a business decision!”  Would they deem me a liability to speak with clients, to handle sensitive information, or unfit to lead?  Would my co-workers be fearful of collaboration?  Would they treat me differently because of it?  Would they walk on eggshells because I have this diagnosis?  What opportunities will I be exempt from because of my diagnosis?  What will I miss out on? While on paper they may seem innocuous but they are very real and immobilizing.

I have been working on this paper for weeks and my anxiety has peaked so violently I had no choice but to walk away.  To not have one diagnosis but two is another pill to swallow (perhaps a pun intended here).  I have debilitating anxiety that often causes me to miss out because it is simply too much.  I can say that in many ways I handle my anxiety better now than I have before.  I consciously put myself into vomit-inducing situations as I try my best to limit its control over my life, but it still wins.  Speaking up in front of a large grouping of my peers is perhaps the biggest trigger.  I’m great in one-on-one situations as I have less to manage.  In a group, I have to manage the reactions of everyone, ensure each word, syllable, phrase, and point is perceived the way it was meant.  I have to ensure that I am not saying something completely stupid and showing the group that I am a complete idiot.  I have to say something that is meaningful and adds value otherwise everyone will know that I am an imposter.  I have to read and decipher every single person’s verbal statements and non-verbal communications, analyze tone and intent with each word spoken.  Project all future variables for every minute thing I notice within the meeting and forecast the potential blowback on the words I choose to say or if I choose to say nothing at all.  When the meeting is over it does not end there.  Then begins the memory playback to ensure I haven’t missed anything and if I noticed someone was off I have to reach out to them to ensure that they are okay to concrete that it had nothing to do with me.

This is the same with every email I send, every message, every interaction at work and not at work.  The only reprieve I get is with my best friends and family.  Ninety-nine percent of the time I can just enjoy them apart from that 1% where I might have said something insensitive.  My mind is constantly analyzing, forecasting, catastrophizing every single element of my life.  I have lived millions of lives out in my mind, ever adjusting for variables and new pieces of information or experiences that were not calculated beforehand.  I have been this way for as long as I can remember and I am used to it.  When I cannot see the outcome it releases chemicals in my head and I begin to unravel.  Panic attacks are manifested in physical responses, ones that cripple me.  For the most part, anxiety manifests itself in me by way of stomach upset and there begins a vicious cycle.  I have issues with using public bathrooms or being too far away from a bathroom.  The ‘What-if?’ factor is paramount and when I get anxious my stomach gets upset and if I’m not in a safe place or near a bathroom then I get anxious that I will have an accident because there are no bathrooms around.  The cycle starts and it takes a lot of grounding and self-talk to work through it.  My best friends know this all too well.

In December of last year, I began a new role within my organization.  I began to feel off, unaccomplished, out of my element.  I had worked hard at achieving this role and it was as if now that I had it, it didn’t feel right.  At first and well into this year I thought that work was a primary component of the tumultuous year I have had.  Now I realized that work played a minimal role in it all.  As I mentioned before when going through my two and a half years of darkness the only thing that kept me going was long hours and responsibility at work.  Up until December of last year, I had worked approximately three years with insanely high weekly hour counts.  At my job before this one and shortly after I started at my current organization I would work sixty to seventy hours per week.  I loved it!  Every day I felt accomplished, my mind was kept busy, I had a purpose and zero time to be alone with my thoughts.  The issue wasn’t the job change, it was the termination of my primary source of avoidance.  I could no longer bury myself into countless hours of work and avoid what I was feeling, thinking, the issues that were festering inside me.  Three years is a long time to go without truly checking in or spending time alone with our thoughts.  Then of course pandemic fatigue, isolation, and watching the world burn just outside my window.  Lastly, if things were not bad enough, along comes an upswing except instead of being a one-point-five or a two, it was a five.  I wasn’t prepared!

Over the last five years, I have allowed myself to enter into a false sense of security.  I thought that through all the work I put in I had a good handle on my Bi-Polar.  I mean cycling five to six times per year would lead you to believe that you got this and while it might be hard sometimes you had a systematic approach to handle them.  The first rule of engagement is that once I notice I am in an upswing I inform my family and my friends.  How do I notice you ask?  Well the analytical side of me that processes every neuron and synapses in my brain, as I told you a couple of paragraphs ago, will register when something bothers me that normally doesn’t.  As an example, a colleague asking if I could help them with something or an employee making a mistake.  My default is yes and no problem, every mistake is a learning experience.  When my response is, ‘Seriously, they can’t do this themselves?  Do they know that I have a full plate?’ or ‘Really, how long have they worked here?’  These are not normal reactions and my brain files them as red flags.  It might take a few days or rarely a week or two but it will register as an upswing.  This is not to say that I don’t have the occasional bad day not related to my diagnosis because they can happen too. However, even when I’m having a bad day my default is kind.

An excellent metric for me to gauge if I am having an upswing is Mima, my cat.  How do I view her at this moment?  When I look at her do I have nothing but gratitude and love or do I cringe because she’s so needy and chatty.  My default is that she Is one of the best things to have ever happened to me.  However, I go through phases (upswings) where I am so annoyed by its existence and that I have no choice but to care for it, I consider putting it up for adoption.  This will never happen!  The second rule of engagement is that I do not allow myself to make life-altering decisions of any kind until I am entering my downswing.  This means I am not allowed to quit my job, freak out at a colleague, terminate my lease, walk away from a financial contract, move to Hawaii or Mexico, get a dog, get a tattoo, make any large purchases that were not previously planned before the onset of the upswing.  These rules are written in stone and I have learned that I can and will stick to them because while I’m in the upswing I know that I’m not saying no to moving to Mexico, I’m just saying no to right now.  The third rule of engagement is to talk it out, have an open dialogue with my friends and family.  I have a wickedly wonderful support system who know me, love me, and accept me for who I am.  The fourth and final rule of engagement is to hunker down and bear through it.  It will pass and I need to be kind and patient.

When my category five hit earlier this year I immediately reverted to a state of victimhood.  It was a trigger to some form of PTSD that I didn’t know I had.  Why was this happening and why at this magnitude?  I thought I had this figured out.  I unraveled and desperately tried to fight against it.  I let myself fall victim to this blitz attack almost immediately but I fought back, perhaps the first of my mistakes.  If I have learned anything in life is that when trauma comes, pain, sadness, depression, upswings it’s best to acknowledge them and let them run their course.  Sit with it and be in the moment, express and embrace the waves of emotions, and don’t use what little energy you have trying to make it stop.  All my coping mechanisms, tools, resiliency, work, techniques were like little twigs snapping off during a tornado.  Could I have handled it better?  In hindsight, perhaps! I was simply blindsided by my false sense of security.

That sense of security has gone and in its place now sits radical acceptance.  The biggest theme of 2021 for me is that I will always have Type II Bi-Polar Affective Disorder and while most of the time I can handle it, there will be every-now-and-then a cycle that takes me out.  I don’t pity myself, I don’t wish for change, and yeah some times it sucks but that’s one of the beautiful parts of life.  The ups and the downs, the ebb and flow, the yin and yang, the darkness and the light, the love, and the hate.  Without the two sides, we would never appreciate the beauty we possess and the power we wield.

I know how it feels to suffer and to do it silently.  It has always been my hope that the stigma around mental health would go away.  I have and will always support those who need help in finding their voices, owning their truths, and normalizing mental issues to a point where it is okay to just tell someone, “Hey!  I’m Schizophrenic! I’m medicated and regulated but sometimes it’s just hard” or “I’m not okay right now, I feel like I falling apart and I need to talk to someone.” A day when heard no one thinks anything but ways in which they can support.  I can’t believe a day like that will come if I am too afraid to share my truth.  So here it is!

I don’t know what will come of this post.  The logic says nothing will come of it and the anxiety says your world will be reduced to ashes.  Funny how anxiety is always so apocalyptic.  In any case, I’m free.  Free from the fear of people knowing that I have a disorder, a mental illness.  Will I have heightened anxiety between now and when I finally post this?  Heck yeah, I will!  It’s part and parcel of life for me.  I’m not fragile though.  With how many times I’ve been knocked down and around in life I consider myself to be a pretty robust heavy-duty military-grade strong.  I might not remember that in a moment of distress but it’s one of my truths.  As for this truth when I first endeavored to set it free I didn’t anticipate it manifesting into a forty-five-hundred word essay about how at the end of the day, I’m not okay, and that’s okay!