5 Year Update: Post Diagnosis Learnings
Am I still loving myself, yes.
Is life perfect, no. However this jumbled beautiful mess is coming out to be, I wouldn’t have life any other way.
Having a mental illness is tough. It’s tough because you never know what the day will bring, let alone month or even year. But thus is life, right? I feel really lucky to say I’ve gotten to a place in my life of stability and even content after starting this disorder in my 20’s.
Hey, life could always be better, (anyone have the winning lotto numbers?), but when you live with gratitude and constantly in the moment, you’ll see there’s so much in life to be thankful for. That utmost positivity radiates wonder and awe.
After 5 years of having now a sane stable mind, one gets a lot of time to reflect on life and how the illness has transformed one’s life. As for me, instead of focusing on the negative, I like to focus on the positive. I find it helps keep me going amidst having something that will as for now, never go away.
So here are a few takeaways I’ve found from years of having Bipolar:
1) It’s Taught me humility
Whether or not it was the bipolar symptom of grandiosity that may have gotten to me, when I was younger I felt like I was on top of the world. I had hardships, but I never knew hardships if that makes any sense. I felt like the universe spoiled me into that magical manifest it thinking. Everything I wanted, I went out and received. But when a mental illness struck me down, I lost full control of reality. It was the first time I couldn’t be independent. I couldn’t take immediate action to will something away. It brought me to my knees and in it’s own right humbled me. It took me a long time to be okay with that, but now I’m even thankful it did and dare I say I needed that out of life to learn to be content. There’s really not much in life you need to make you truly happy.
2) It’s Showed Me That real strength comes from within
As the point above mentions, I couldn’t will anything away. Just pray, my culture would say. Unfortunately, that doesn’t cure depression. Nothing “cures” depression. It’s learning patience to overcome it. It’s learning awareness of your symptoms. It’s sometimes years of torment of taking the wrong medications, some that make you feel like a zombie, void of all emotions, like you’re trapped in a constant fog.
It’s when you let go and and let the inner work come forward that you can truly start to make progress in getting better. You have to be the driving force, the advocate for yourself to become better. No one can do the work for you or pull you out of it at the end of the day. Others can only do so much, but they can’t read your mind. Which is why mental illness is so different than other illnesses and I truly believe that though it’s not physical, it takes some of the strongest people to pull out of it.
3) Taught me not to need validation
Maybe it’s that I’ve been in therapy for years now, and not specifically about having bipolar, but in the days of social media likes I’ve learned to live to make myself happy. I don’t need validation from anyone to do what I love. I post what makes me happy and could care less about the likes or even dislikes. The comparison bug doesn’t hit me, because I’m happy in my everyday IRL life. I’ve learned and am constantly learning self-love it it’s purest form.
Now how about you, what lessons have you gained?