I have a lot of bipolar complaints right now. I have a lot of bipolar complaints about medication side effects, medication withdrawal effects
When I Want to Complain About Bipolar Disorder
The thing is, bipolar disorder sucks 24-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week. Bipolar disorder truly is complaint-worthy all that time too. That said, I’m used to it enough to not always feel like complaining about bipolar disorder. What I say to people is that you can get used to anything (you just shouldn’t have to).
So bipolar complaints are not always an issue. But sometimes things get really bad and I really do want to complain. I hate it. I hate that about me. I hate that I’m not strong enough to tell the pain to sit down and shut up. I hate that I’m not the one in control — the pain is.
How I Complain About Bipolar Disorder
But still, even when the pain has its iron-clad hooks in, I still know enough not to run around ranting about all the bipolar pain. Being nothing but a list of complaints about bipolar disorder isn’t me, even when it feels like that’s all I am.
So I usually say something to my very good friend like, “I’m having a bad brain day.”
She knows what this means. She doesn’t need to hear the litany because she knows I only say this when things are really terrible. The litany is unsaid but completely understood. There is something extremely comforting about that. If you can, I highly recommend developing your own unsaid language with someone you love. I really do.
And yes, sometimes I do tell her specifics. Sometimes I do have to complain out loud. It happens. I don’t like it. But I do. She lets me. And I love her for it.
Suggestions for Complaining About Bipolar Disorder
So as in my above example, I think complaining about bipolar disorder is okay sometimes. But I also don’t just want to be that “complaint girl.” None of us wants to be that. I know. So here are some suggestions when it comes to complaining about bipolar disorder:
- Allow yourself time and space to complain, but time-box it. In other words, set aside I set amount of time to complain. Make it five minutes, for example. And just give in to complaining. And then stop. You might be surprised at how this makes you feel better.
- Complain when you’re alone. Complain to your cats, dogs, plants, etc. This works well when you can hug the thing you’re complaining to, but, luckily, you can hug a lot of things.
- Choose who you express your complaints to carefully. Look, some people are going to understand and feel empathy for the
suckage and some people just aren’t. Now is not the time to try to convince people. Pick people who love you and want to be there for you. - Don’t overuse these people. Now, on the one hand, you have to trust other people to express their own limits. E.g., “I can’t be there for you right now because I have to pick my son up from daycare.” On the other hand, some people are extraordinarily bad at setting healthy limits so try not to put more on these people than they can handle. Check in with them. Make sure they are okay too.
- Respect boundaries. If your loved one can only be there for you one day a week, then don’t expect more (unless there’s a real emergency, and then that’s a bit different).
- Spread your needs out. In my case, it’s true, I don’t have a whole lot of people in my life I can turn to and complain. I just don’t. Nevertheless, I try not to completely rely on one wonderful person to meet my needs. Honestly, that never works.
- Therapists are a good option for venting your bipolar complaints. We don’t all have therapists, of course, but if you do, use them as a sounding board as you need.
- Don’t forget to share the positives too. Sometimes I ping my friend and just tell her that I’m having a good brain day, or, at the very least, a less-bad brain day than I had before. I don’t want to be an inky-black cloud with no edges. Even tiny positives are wins and nothing is too small to share when someone cares about you. And nothing is too small for you to focus on too to give yourself a bit of hope.
And don’t beat yourself up for needing to express the negatives about something that can be entirely negative. We all need this. It’s healthy.
Your loved ones need this too so make sure to return the favor. Let them complain about their kids or finances or ill-fitting shoes. Be there for them like they are for you. That’s really important too.
Image by Flickr user Dushan Wegner.
You really hit home for me – as you so often do – with this one. I am down to bare bones in regard to close, loved and loving, support people in my life. Granted, I have drifted away myself from many of my old friends and acquaintances, usually unable – but sometimes just unwilling – to expend the enormous amount of effort that is required to put myself out there, to paste on a smile no matter how lousy I feel, and to exhaust myself making small talk on topics that are just not meaningful enough for me to care about. I usually have so little energy to invest in other people, that the person that I expend it on has to mean something to me on a deep and loving level.
Unfortunately, and heartbreakingly, I have, like you, also had many people who I loved with all my heart, walk away from me. I believe that the majority of these individuals – who consisted primarily of my 4 older brothers and sisters-in-law – had no idea how to interact with me, and were even afraid around me, as though I were as fragile as a China doll. I have never understood how they could not see how good it was for me to be with them, or how lost and abandoned I felt as they became more and more absent from my life.
We were once an unusually close family, we all stayed in this area so that we could stay close to each other, we truly liked as well as loved each other, and spent a great deal of time together. My kids grew up close to their aunts, uncles, and especially their 10 cousins, and when we were together we all spent a LOT of time laughing.
In addition to our regular 6 or 7 times a year when all 24 of us got together, two of my brothers and their wives were close couple-friends of mine and my husband’s, and we spent a lot of Saturday evenings with one or the other couple, visiting and playing pinochle, hearts, mahjong, or board games, and laughing constantly together while our kids had a blast with their cousins.
Then, when all of our kids moved into their teens, the twelve of we adults began – in addition to our usual family get-togethers – to go out to dinner together every couple of months. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we never once had a dinner out together where our waitress wasn’t surprised and delighted to discover that we were all family, and never failed to ask if we always laughed so much, and had so much fun together. The answer was invariably a resounding “yes”.
And I honestly never once, through all of our years of closeness, took any of them, or all of us as a group, for granted. I knew how rich I was in having them, and couldn’t imagine a time or a reason that we wouldn’t all be together. And I couldn’t even contemplate not having their love and friendship in my life.
Then, of course, at age 38, I became mentally ill. And everything changed, and changed pretty rapidly. Our dinners out together went by the wayside first, then even our big family get-togethers started to drop away. I still don’t really understand what happened, and find it very difficult to believe that my big, wonderful, laughing and loving family fell to pieces just because I got sick. I have been telling myself for years that the timing had to have been a coincidence, but there just wasn’t any other damn reason why such closeness, such warm, enveloping love, and such a secure sense of permanency and belonging should simply dissolve and drift away. But I have never recovered from what was the greatest loss of my life. I still have a huge, hollow place inside of me where my family’s love and companionship used to live. How do you get over that kind of abandonment when you’re having to struggle just to get through each day?
So who do I have left close to me? My two children, ages 42 and 38, my two closest girlfriends of many, many years, and my little brother. He and I are only two years apart in age, while our next older brother is five-and-a-half years older than me. Our mother always referred to the two of us as “the little ones” and, while we often fought like cats and dogs while we were growing up, we also spent a large percentage of our childhood playing together. He has stayed in my life in a significant and constant way. He and I are the only two in the family who are divorced, so we spend wonderful, often laughter-filled, and sometimes poignant, time together. He has been coming to my house every Tuesday evening for at least ten years. We watch tv series together, four episodes a week, except for the frequent Tuesday evenings when we start talking – about books, about movies, about life, about our shared childhoods and the emotional baggage we were left with, and sometimes even about where our family has disappeared to, and why. I love him as deeply as I love my children, I have felt protective of him all his life (yes, even when we were trying to kill each other over some childhood nonsense!), and he is my best friend.
But I don’t really talk to him about my bipolar. I might mention something like the increasing trouble I have with word recall, or not being able to remember new information without going over it again and again (it’s far worse than cramming for an exam ever was!). But I don’t talk to him about the near constant mental agony, or the fear I have of someday completely losing my mind, my accumulated knowledge, and my intelligence itself. I feel very fortunate that I flip into my very mild, very gentle, and actually somehow happy version of hypomania when I am interacting with people that I love. So when we’re together, I don’t feel miserable, and don’t feel compelled to dump my pain on him.
But then, on November 13th this past fall, I made my first – and hopefully only – suicide attempt. I changed my mind and freaked out within 10 minutes of taking the pills, but I couldn’t get them to come up on my own, and ended up in an ambulance followed by the compulsory 3 days in the psych ward. And my little brother disappeared from my life. Not only have we not had a Tuesday night together since then, he has stopped communicating with me altogether. He stopped replying to my texts and, while we saw each other on Christmas Eve at my son’s house, and had a little stilted interaction then, it looks – and far worse, feels – as though he has just drifted away like the rest of our family. I am in agony. I burst into sudden, uncontrollable sobbing which, while I do spend most of my life depressed, just doesn’t normally happen to me. I have no idea if he is ever coming back, but I can’t even touch on the idea that he may not. And damn it all to hell, I did NOT dump my bipolar crazies on him!!!
Actually I have spent years and years very rarely sharing my pain with anyone at all. I do, once in a great while, open up with my closest girlfriend of over 40 years. Before I became ill, she and I shared everything. We saw each other through our divorces, we talked on the phone – and sometimes cried there as well – every single day, and often more than once a day. But, even though she still loves me dearly and deeply, she has continued on along the path of emotional and spiritual growth that we traveled together for many years, while I became incapable of more than day-to-day survival. Self-actualization just isn’t in the stars for people with a severe mental illness. She went back to school when she was 45, and turned her R.N. into an M.S. as a nurse practitioner. While I was becoming incapable of even continuing with my dearly loved teaching career.
So blah, blah, blah. I feel like all I ever do on your wonderful blog is whine about what a nightmare my life is, how much pain I’m in, how much worse that pain keeps getting, and how I feel as though if I lose even one more thing or person that I love, I’m really NOT going to be able to go on anymore. I did find – after allowing myself to go for years without – an excellent therapist when I got out of the hospital last fall. I don’t know how I got along without her – or anyone like her – for more than six years, but I’m on-my-knees grateful to have her now. If I weren’t a virtual pauper scraping by on disability, I would spend the money to see her three times a week. As things are, I count every day, just dying for my Friday appointments with her. And SHE is strong, resilient, and more than capable of whatever bipolar crazy I need to dump on her.
In fact, it was my wonderful new therapist that urged me into the online digging that led me to your blog – which literally did change my life. You are the only bipolar person I have ever talked to, through 22 years of illness, and I’m pretty certain that this is why I end up composing a novella every time I respond to one of your blogs. You’re the only bipolar person that I have ever been able to share with, and commiserate with and, once I begin talking to you, it’s so damn hard to stop.
I sent my little brother a very mature, very well put together text (my therapist was extremely proud of me when I read her what I had written to him :), telling him that I missed him deeply, but that I have no idea what he is feeling, or what he is thinking, and I won’t push on him. I told him that I was leaving any initiation of contact up to him, and that he should contact me if he ever wants to talk to me, or see me. I sent the text 12 days ago, so two more lonely and agonizing Tuesday nights have come and gone in silence.
So, how much does it really matter whether or not you share your pain with the people you love? They dissolve and disappear even when you don’t. I miss my family so badly that it still causes me pain every day of my life that they were capable of leaving me sick and abandoned, and now even my little brother, who I have adored literally since the day he was born, has abandoned me as well. And just when I needed him the most. There hasn’t been a single loved one – not even my kids, as close as we have always been – here for me since my suicide attempt. And it’s a really long wait between Fridays. Thanks once again listening to me ramble to someone who actually understands. Keep up your wonderful work, Natasha.
Georgia
Natasha. I would like to see you write about the feelings behind the complaints….the thoughts, the beliefs you hold while going through the pain, how it may cloud your judgments about yourself, your situation, and others. It would be interesting to see you have a dialogue between the “complaining” Natasha, the Natasha who is pain, and maybe even from the still, deeper wisdom of your true self Natasha. That would be something special to get in touch with
Just something to consider. Give it expression. Give it life. You might surprise yourself. I’m sure I couldn’t be the only one here wanting to here you get behind the complaints and go into the depth and share at that level. I know that’s probably not what you were going for in this article but I would read and support you if you chose to go on that detour.