Diagnosis
I am diagnosed with bipolar disorder type II. I have been treated for PTSD, and take pink little anxiety pills.
I experience highs (mania) and lows (depression). Sometimes those lows are suicidal. For me, it is all about channeling that energy into creative outlets that affect change in myself and the world.
Medication
Here is the amount of pills it takes me to get through a typical day.
I take 1500 mg of Lithium Carbonate, which is used to stabilize my moods. The side effects are that they are dehydrating, so I have to drink a lot of water throughout the day. I normally carry around a pink, blue or purple Nalgene.
I try and carry the pink one if I am feeling active (manic side). The purple is I am feeling reflective and tired (depressive phase). And the blue is my breath, what I use to express myself. Colors and music are truly incredible to me. They are always some of the best therapies for me.
Throughout the day I take Hydroxyzine, which is a little pink pill which helps people deal with anxiety issues. I take it as needed. Most days I don’t need it. Other days, I take it as much as I am allowed.
Very recently, I upped my dose to 80 mg of Latuda from 40 mg. I had a few days where I was hallucinating things and losing touch with reality. Hopefully the medication helps!
Therapy
I have a psychiatrist on call. I rarely go into counseling now. If I ever felt like I needed help, I would seek it. But I feel great now, and am my own best friend. When I am in need of help at three am, I am the best person for the job.
At my worst I had a team of psychologists and doctors who talked to me each week. Those people saved my life. But there is a lot more to the cure than counseling. For me, finding healthy, creative outlets have been the cure to bipolar disorder.
Resources
Below is a list of places that have helped me through my process of healing.
My friend from NOLS helped found a support network for mental health issues at Middlebury College. They are the inspiration for my blog. I first posted my story there in December 2015. Read some of the stories, you won’t regret it.
This is a website I found on my friend’s blog, Biscuits and Boots, who happens to have some incredible writing herself. It is a nonprofit that helps people with depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide.
I found this resource in Elanor Longden’s TED talk about her journey through hearing voices and schizophrenia. It raises awareness about people who hear voices. I have a voice in my head, his name is Kevin. He exists behind the bump next to my right ear.
Below is an essay I wrote to talk about my own journey and how I have dealt with it. Enjoy!
“Overcome”
Below is an essay on what how I made it through my life this far. But first, keep in mind, we all die, and none of this really matters in the end. In the meantime, let’s have some fun.
Stress
Stress. Stress is real, and it kills people everyday. The main killers in our society are lifestyle diseases, like cancer and heart disease. Through diet, exercise and a slew of other factors, we can control fifty percent of how likely it is that we will get these illnesses.
We aren’t dying of infectious diseases anymore, but we are killing ourselves by the way we live our lives. Now I am not saying everyone has control over what major illness they get, but we have so much power to affect change in our lives. That change can be in the best interest of our health. Health, not the absence of disease, but health in the sense of a vibrant, happy and meaningful life.
Now, let’s get some facts clear. Instead of me talking about it, watch this video on the HPA axis, the debilitating effects of stress and what you can do about it.
Stress can kill you. And the stories you tell yourself matter the most. The biggest challenge we have is creating an environment for ourselves in which we can thrive. Many times, we turn to smoking or drinking to provide an outlet for our stress. We become addicted to a feeling, and a chemical. As humans, one of our basic needs is to bond with each other. Many times, when we can’t bond with each other, we bond with things, activities or whatever makes us feel good.
Substances
In my life, I’ve bonded with alcohol and weed in the same way that I’ve bonded with climbing and running. Both make me feel good, but the latter make me happy in a long term sense. Alcohol and weed leave you happy in the moment, stripping away pain. But as the social researcher Brené Brown said when you drink you, “numb the dark and you numb the light.”
When I drink, I start and sometimes I can’t stop. That is the same way I feel when I first started climbing. And sometimes, I start relationships with people where I feel hooked, like a drug, addicted to a feeling. I love finding new sensations. That is why I decided to stop drinking and smoking. Substances can be healthy for some people in moderation, but they are not for me.
You can have fun without drugs, you just have to work at it. One of my favorite stories from my past is a time when I was dancing with two of my friends. We danced for five hours and we finished at around 4:30 am. My friend turned to me and said to me, “Charlie, you know we’ve been on a ton of cocaine.”
I had no idea and told her I was completely sober. I ran that dance floor, and was on no cocaine. Dancing is fun, with or without cocaine.
Now, there is a War on Drugs in the United States. Our government has funded programs like D.A.R.E. which have claimed to be beneficial to society with little or no evidence speaking to their actual effectiveness. Drugs can be risky, and they lead to unhealthy behaviors. However, the way we are currently treating addicts is dangerous.
My parents’ generation believes drugs r bad and we must eradicate them from our society. Drugs are a part of our society, and we need to rethink our ideas on them.
See this TED talk on how we could think about drug policy in a different way.
Now that you’ve heard about Bruce Alexander and the Rat Park, watch Johann Hari and his thoughts on what Portugal is doing with decriminalizing drugs.
We can bond to everything. Bonding helps us deal with pain. Alcohol and weed have been just as much of my healing process as climbing, running, boxing and whatever else I have found in my life. The only difference is that exercise gives back to my life and body, those substances tear me down.
The Rat Park is a place where social support and play can take the place of drugs. That place of warmth is where I try to be, at all times. My dream is to live in love with the people around me, and I’m doing that everyday. Unfortunately, there are some things in my life which has driven me away from people around me and plunged me deep into my own head.
Mental Health
Sometimes, my head is pretty dark. I am alone in my head. Actually, I’m not. I hear voices everyday and so do many people around the world.
Many times in my life I have experienced so much pain, that those voices get really loud. They have told me end my life many times. However, I now know that they are just a product of the trauma I have experienced. They only have the power that I give them. Give Eleanor Longden a listen, she’s a huge inspiration for me.
Having a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, I hear voices. Not the same as people with schizophrenia, but they are there just the same.
My life is about managing stress in accordance with my diagnosis. Exercising, laughing and crying are a part of it all. Having a support network is important. But I also live big. By that I mean, little things are not important to me. Little people who have tried to hurt me are simply irrelevant. Those small things don’t matter.
Self-affirmation is a technique I use all the time. When I am faced with a stressful event, for a second I hear voices. They tell me I can’t do it. They tell me I am worthless. But I can quiet them by reaffirming my presence in life. I ask myself, who loves me in the world? What is important to me? What makes me want to live? What is more meaningful to me than anything else in the world? What lights me up? What makes me feel absolutely, unquestionably alive?
Spending time with people I love and going outside are incredible outlets for me. And I plan to live intentionally in pursuit of those things.
Social Support and Relationships
I’ve lost people in my life. But the only way I know to memorialize them is to live my life to the absolute fullest. That means making new connections, and moving fast.
Nothing exists without trust, loyalty and respect. Love, compassion and empathy pale in comparison to trust. You can’t have any of the niceties without a solid chassis.
Love heals. But I’ve met a lot of people don’t know what that love means. For me it means a few things. Love is when someone supports you no matter what. Many people conflate control with support. Many people in authority positions, including parents, believe it is their duty to tell someone what to do. That couldn’t be farther from my definition of love.
My friend, Puru, talks about love in his family in Mumbai, India. It is a community there, and if anyone needed anything, the community is always there to help. He always uses the example of his brother. He always says, if his brother asked Puru for all his money, he would give it to him in a second. Unconditional, unquestioning support. That is love to me. Showing up big when someone most needs it.
Support comes in many different ways. A lot of time, people support me without them even knowing. I call it invisible support. One time, I was having a horrible day and started to cry on my way to class. I went to the bathroom and contemplated not going. However, I went, teary eyed and torn up. I sat down next to my friend and we just laughed and goofed around all class. She had no idea what I was dealing with, but she helped me more that day than she ever knew.
That is love to me. That is what heals us after all this pain we can experience. Loss and pain are real, however, what is more present is truth, support and love.
I challenge you to think of your relationships as a third between two people. Think of a little tree growing between you and the other person. You have to nourish it and leave room for it to thrive. The relationship is separate from both people, but it requires both of their love and support.
And never forget to listen. Listening leads to empathy, not sympathy. Big difference, check out Brené Brown’s video to learn more.
If you can work to agree with the statement that people are always doing the best they can, you can start to look at the world with much more compassion and empathy, even those you hate.
Individuality
Now that I’ve ranted on love, I want to clarify one thing. I am an individual. I wake up everyday and decide what to do with it. I tell my feet to move where I want them, and if I don’t feel like moving them, I don’t move them.
Every relationship needs space. It is my belief that we place too much on our significant others. They can’t be everything we have traditionally wanted them to be. And also, I have a last name. There’s no way in hell I’m giving it to someone else. My significant other will have a name and I would love her to keep it.
In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, she shows how Howard Roark creates a vision for his life and chases it to unbelievable lengths.
“I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.”
Howard Roark says this to Gail Wynand, a powerful tabloid producer. No one can live your life, except for you. Make decisions that you are proud of, and they will build on each other.
Respect yourself. Do things that make you happy and proud of yourself. Don’t sacrifice your values for anyone around you.
The worst thing someone can do to another person, is to think of them as inhuman. That can be through exaltation or criticism. Abuse and gaslighting reduce people to nothing. However, so does placing someone as perfect or god-like. Everyone has flaws, or cracks. And in the words of John Green’s character Q in Paper Towns, light always shines through those cracks.
Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
Light is a funny thing in the sense that it bends, refracts and reflects. It makes dark places bright.
What is the meaning of life? Huge question, not answerable. But, this story from Robert Fulghum’s It was on Fire when I Lay Down on It starts to answer the question for me.
Light shines, even in dark places. It is your job to create and reflect it, even when it’s hard to see.
what did he say?
TLDR
Stress can kill you, find a way to reduce it. Try going outside, exercising and laughing with friends. Drugs r not bad, our way of addressing them is. Addicts are not criminals, they are people, just like everyone else. Let’s treat them that way.
Live intentionally, find who and what you love and chase that dream like it’s smoke drifting out of your hands. In the words of Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Live every second to the fullest, and those moments will build on each other to a life worth living. Create connections and take care of yourself, because no one can live your life but you. Your body, mind and spirit are important, feed them everyday and watch them grow. And hey, don’t forget to breathe. Because in the words of You Won’t :
oh remember dear, this too shall pass
and it always ends the same.
have fun,
CR
Adventures of a Little Boy 