Starting Concsiousbipolar.life

Published: Jan 27, 2020

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed starting this blog. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and intuitively it felt right to start it over the weekend. I trust that’s all coming together perfectly.

Also, I don’t really know what I’m doing on the blog management front. It’s been basically 7 years since I’ve used wordpress, and wouldn’t say I was even mediocre at website management back when I remembered how to do stuff. I’m feeling frustration at not knowing how to do it all right away. But, where’s the fun if I don’t have anything left to learn?

I’m also not really letting myself feel into the gravity of what this site could be. I’m not one to give advice directly – I talk often about my owned experience in the hope it can help others, and that’s what I plan to do here, instead of telling others what they should do. But I’m aware that people will look at this site, and may want to follow parts of what I’m doing.

What kind of responsibility do I have here? Who’s my audience, exactly – fellow people with bipolar diagnoses, who might be feeling extreme suffering and could be close to suicide? Psychiatrists who might get really offended by the way I question dogmatic practices? Integrative or functional medicine professionals who share a resonance with my perspective? “Anti-psychiatry” activists who think I’m untrustworthy because I currently take prescribed psychotropic medications? Researchers or news outlets who are looking for a fresh perspective? What if I say the “wrong” thing? What if someone in crisis reads my writing, and then chooses suicide?

I can hold the cognitive understanding that what I’m doing here and now feels really important – not just to me, but potentially all the others impacted by bipolar spectrum disorders. A rough estimate of 2.4% of a global population of 7.7 Billion fellow humans means around 185 million people on this planet could exist on the bipolar spectrum. And how many lives are impacted by one person’s mental instability? How many people are hurt from one person’s suicide? (cue self-critic: am I experiencing grandiosity? No, I don’t think so…)

What I haven’t allowed myself to fully feel yet is the emotions around what it could mean to other people. That seems too big, too weighty to feel into right now. In touching those emotions just writing about it – I feel anxiety in my chest, a bit of breathlessness, a tension around my solar plexus. An airy, ungrounded feeling in my head.

I notice my mind and ego feel a desire to keep writing, to pour myself into these characters on the screen, to fully feel into the emotions and use it to fuel a high output. There’s a disowned part of me that desires to trigger a hypomanic episode to boost creativity and output. That might feel really good, actually. It’s also playing with fire, and could fuck up my tomorrow / this week / my entire life if I lost control.

What my body is telling me is to slow down, start my nighttime routine, meditate with some infrared, and try and go to sleep at a reasonable time. To remember that I go to work tomorrow in a good job that needs me to be stable and clear-headed. I have no particular timeline for this blog, and I don’t even need to publish anything tonight.

And wow, I didn’t realize until now this was live-updating on the “About Me” page. I guess I already have published something tonight. And I have more to learn about what I’m doing here.