Quote:
Originally Posted by BeyondtheRainbow
This is the opposite of how I see this.
I do not choose to be ill. I fight very hard to be wel but often don't succeed.
I cannot distance myself from my illness but in controlling it I can succeed. If I distanced myself from it my self-care would cause me to fail at everything I haven't already failed at.
There is no way that doing anything but fighting against the bipolar is going to give me direction or stability.
Bipolar is not my friend nor is it something to seek out and enhance in any way.
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That might work best for you. It might not, I wouldn't be able to tell.
I am not saying one "strategy" is better than the other. Distancing from emotions (something that should really be part of your personality somehow, maybe, to be able to use it) and going on without depression
can be worse than depression. Easily. But not always.
It's just realising that depression might be a good thing allows you to feel a little better being depressed and allows you to spend that time being depressed more constructively. It is a paradoxical thing depression. Just always fighting it might not be the best option. Timing is everything: stop fighting, make it feel more comfortable and just think with some Stoicism and focus, then only if you feel you can win, start the fight. A balancing act is required, I very much believe, for something so paradoxical, good and bad.
Maybe try to see the full dynamics, different stages of depression requiring opposing behaviours.
I just give alternative choices here. In any way you know you have a choice (so not feeling, because that can be deceptive, of course), try the alternatives, I'd suggest. You don't know what'll help beforehand. I didn't. And the right choice changes with time.
Seeing it as an illness is probably the least damaging. I wouldn't recommend it, but I see how it can help and you could argue it is, easily, it's just the implications of that assessment which might be wrong.
Thanks for your perspective.
