What do you do to commemorate a week dedicated to mental illness? It might seem strange, but I think Mental Illness Awareness Week is something to be celebrated.
Now, I’m not shooting up fireworks or popping champagne, but as mental illness continues to lose its stigma with each day’s passing, we should acknowledge and celebrate that landmark.
When thirteen percent of Americans take antidepressants, the stigma recoils even more and more every day. Bipolar has even been featured on something as quotidian as a soap opera. Stories of mental illness are being made into movies and TV shows, something is afoot: a greater visibility and understanding of the illness.
That’s cause for celebration. In reality, we should be proud of our mental illness. It’s like a red badge of courage.
I was scrolling through one of the threads on Bipolar Coaster, a support group I belong to on Facebook, and I came across quite the divisive question: Is bipolar disorder a gift or a curse?
In honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week, I decided I’d address this question.
If you know me, you know I am an eternal optimist — a half-glass-full kind of guy. So you know I’d pick the former.
Bipolar disorder is indeed a gift. Why? Because we who are bipolar have the ability to feel emotions more intensely than anyone else in the world.
We know how to bottle passion, brew imagination. We have the power to caress music and untangle fear. We love with the deepest level of affection. As Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison would say, we are “Touched With Fire.” We are superheroes. I am a proud mutant, akin to an X-Men character.
Creativity is just one of the character traits that go along with bipolar. We write, act, sing, play, dance, paint, sculpt, chisel, build, and perform with exuberance and excellence.
When we are manic, we sometimes lose touch with reality, but we come back to earth with a wealth of creativity to show for it.
Sometimes we swim through life amid the excruciating pain of depression or anxiety, but we always keep swimming and we always pull through in the end because we are intensely resilient.
We with bipolar are extremely empathic. We feel your pain because we’ve been there before. We’ve gone through the netherworlds of hell and come out alive on the other end. So we can relate to your own agony.
In the early years of your diagnosis, every powerful emotion is new and can be scary at times. But once you’ve got several years under your belt and your illness is under control — the right medication regimen, the right lifestyle changes — your illness no longer controls you. You control it.
Granted, there are one-off days when all of us feel crappy. But stability is achievable.
In my view, bipolar is indeed cause for celebration. If I could choose whether or not to be bipolar, I would choose bipolar. We’re special. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
