This is truly the season that taxes the souls of the bipolar and the mood disordered. Even “normal” people find this time of year to be a psychic burden needing if not Herculean strength to get through it all- then at least a steady supply of prescription drugs (alcohol will do for most) to dull the unhappy sensation of the requisite familial confinement, the enforced conviviality, and that very worst of the worst: the dashed expectations for magical “Christmas” moments. I’ve been lucky so far- cutting my Geodon (anti-psychotic) and my Klonopin (anti-convulsant) down to half keeps me on the small, though not unguilty buzz of hypomania. I do love Christmas, really. I love the way the lights slur like an impressionist painting; it can turn the most unlovely streets and cardboard subdivisions into something truly wondrous. The rain or snow heightens all of it, and glazes it all over like a dream. There truly is something magical in this time of year.
I am missing my family, even when I’m with them, I still feel really absent from them when I’m on the full load of meds. It’s a hopeless feeling- a choice that’s not unworthy of Hamlet: to either feel things in real time with the attached risk of becoming psychotic once again, but to really and honestly feel them, or to live life inside the plastic bubble of the meds that keep you “even” and insular. Forget about asking for what purpose and to what end you would want to sustain this drug-induced “normalcy” indefinitely- presumably just to feel more distant from your emotions with each passing day? The more my view of the world skews with the meds the more it tilts on it’s axis toward the belief that there are many things that are presumed to be real are actually illusory- like a “normal” state of mind. Whether it’s real or illusory, I still love the bright lights and compulsory optimism this month always brings; it’s like a breath of life in the dead of winter.
