Quote:
Originally Posted by BirdDancer
It happened to various degrees at various times, with periods of forgetfulness (thinking I was over it "like a flu") many times along the way. Despite my official bipolar diagnosis at 32, I only uttered the words "I have manic depression" the first time while sitting in Human Resources with my boss and the director of HR a minute after they threatened to fire me if I didn't get help. That was after six people waged formal complaints against me to HR. The next day I was in the hospital for the first of 10 times. That was at 34.
Acceptance doesn't always fully happen with uttered words. It took years to really accept. I went through stages of bereavement thinking I was the illness. Luckily that passed. It's hard finding the "you" in a lifetime of untreated bipolar. But I did. Maybe around 43 or 44. I accept that I "have" an illness called bipolar disorder (or manic depression), but it no longer has me as it did before.
It's a long history and journey.
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I also had periods where I thought maybe I had bipolar then would revert to denial or the belief that I had an epileptic type illness (a neurological rather than a psychiatric illness) because I get strange headaches and can pass out from florescent lights when I am very sick.
It was easier when my pdoc put sza on the table after a decade of a bipolar diagnosis. It seems my psychoses started leaking outside of mood episodes so I am somewhere on the spectrum. But when I am very ill I don't accept that my delusions aren't real so it is a situation without ordinary reality as a firm boundary.
I also got into lots of difficulties at work and ended up being placed onto long term disability rather than fired. But they also barred me from returning to the work place or using the affiliation in any public way. So I was banished but not thrown into what would have been poverty without the disability payments.
I have a had a hard time finding the 'me' in the past decade as my life has more or less fallen apart first with this diagnosis then multiple hospitalizations then losing my ability to work then having police banging on my door multiple times a day for months, then my panicking and not stopping the car for one, which landed me in a forensic psychiatric ward for a month and criminal charges that were eventually dropped, thank goodness.
On top of that i have been dealing with a lung cancer diagnosis and the long term side effects of chemo. So I feel rather lost as a person and the identity I had built over a lifetime has been stripped of me. I don't tell most people I meet about what I used to do because there is so little connection to my present life. But I was an accomplished professional and leader of a team of people.