The spiritual despair of bipolar disorder

I’m not particularly good at writing anything personal. But I feel it is time to be more open about my mental health, specifically because bipolar disorder is little understood, and that there is also a existential issue that gets overlooked by most discussions on this subject.

I have bipolar 2 disorder. It’s a fairly regular cycle of manic, irritable and depressive states. There is the occasional panic attack and sleep is a battle. There are other physical aspects, such as feeling paralysed for days. I take a mixture of medications, some daily, others when a certain situation arises.

What makes the disorder difficult is the constant disruption of my routine. A regular routine is necessary to smother the impact of acute manias and depressions. A 9–5 day job, three regular meals a day and a hobbies such as reading and writing should provide a structure, but often collapse into a depression with no discernible cause. Even the things I enjoy can trigger an uncontrollable mania.

But working to reach a regularity of working, eating and sleeping can result in a spiritual emptiness. Always pursuing a norm limits a spontaneity in my life. I’ve not stayed longer at a job for more two years (although I’ve been fortunate to move up to better roles each time). I lose and gain weight, resulting in a unhappiness with my body that lingers onward.

Sometimes I reach the feeling that I’ll get to the point that I can’t hold down a job. I lean on manic periods to complete the work that depressive states prevent me from doing. It halts my ambition and leaves me feeling I can’t do anything else, either the job I currently have or one in another field.

Others in my life are left to shoulder the burden. I’ve read about parents having to carefully watch young children and partners having to watch over their loved ones every day. I fear I may be dependent on others, or that I will drive anyone away in a need for independence and head down a path of total isolation.

It’s easy to feel fatalistic and I have a tendency to do that. But at this point in my life I feel at my weakest. The moods are hitting me harder and the dosage on my medication is only going up. It’s a worrying trend.

And all of the work of going to therapy or work with a psychiatrist is all to get to a stable state. At times I feel what is the point: it’s exhausting. A tiredness further compounded as I watch the things I dream about doing in the future vanish. In my twenties I felt invincible, now having turned thirty recently I am fearful of everything. I look back into past failures and see from a new perspective what the disorder has done to me.

But I don’t want people to worry about me. I work with a psychiatrist and a therapist, both of whom are optimistic. I am fortunate enough to have never been hospitalised. I have a large friendship network in both the UK and US.

If I tell people about my condition I’ve only received offers of support. Whatever stigma remains about bipolar I am lucky to have been spared being on the end of such prejudices (though I do not deny a stigma around mental health exists).

What I do worry about is that I am on a journey devoid of a destination. I’ll simply be fighting forever towards a stasis. And it results in a powerful numbness, a spiritual despair, where everything I do, everything that I am, is geared towards managing this disorder.