Bipolar & the Seven Deadly Sins: A Manic Essay

The first panic attack I ever remembered having I think I was around twelve. The details of the triggers or the event itself are hazy. But, oh, how I remember my current ones. I lose time as if I’m outside myself. My brain a misfiring of billions of neurons, I recognize them for the way my skin feels. It’s like it’s not…mine. Foreign and cumbersome, almost like a cheap suit that’s too tight and the legs too short. Millions of bugs crawling beneath my skin. I pick, scratch, attempt to hurt myself for it to go away. It’s only when I skip my count, my prayer beads don’t spin as smoothly as I roll them between trembling thumb and forefinger that the rage starts.

Hallucinations form with the building crescendo of every labored breath—each more ragged and painful than the one before it. Time ceases and I’m frozen, skinning the flesh from my arm, setting myself on fire, removing fingers, and driving 100 miles per hour into oncoming traffic and it doesn’t stop. Seconds, minutes, maybe an hour goes by and I’m back, yet always a piece missing. I know I should feel terrified, no, horrified at what my mind devises for me. Yet I’m not.

Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorder isn’t like an illness to me. They’re my one constant. A masochistic comfort. My own deranged security blanket. Some of you who may read this might find the previous sentences horrifying and others they’ll just…get it. They’re the first sting of the razor. Sizzling skin under the cherry of a cigarette. Nails digging into tender skin. It’s the burn of alcohol. The drain after 3 thick rails. Sex with a stranger you won’t see after a few hours.

I left the self-harm and addiction behind, but it’s always there. As many teenagers did, I had experimented with the usual things. I was quite fond of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) back in the day. Traditional anything never worked for me. Now you’re probably wondering why you’ve read through almost 400 words, well, as you can tell from the title I’m manic. Mania is exhausting but that frenzied state is where I feel the most at home. Amphetamines and Cocaine, they were my self-medication devices of choice for that torturous hours and days of lows.

Down to me equals depressed. There is no middle ground for me. I’m either high above on the tightrope or plummeting to the ground without a safety net to catch me. You see when I’m Manic my brain is an endless supply of creativity and a constant fight against my lack of impulse control. Although, there is one thing that doesn’t change my mind bounces from one subject to another. Like tonight, I’m thinking about my lack of faith.

At no point in my recorded memory have I had religious faith. I read the teachings of Buddhism. Enjoy the philosophy of being disconnected—of the freedom from attachment. I think that’s more a symptom for my inability to form lasting emotional attachments. You see, I don’t invite permanent emotional relationships. Emotion is an odd thing for me. I understand the concept, but it’s so hard for me to let people in; always ready to wear out my welcome.

I studied Islam, Hinduism, I was obsessed with the ability for people to have religious and spiritual faith. I find Christianity the hardest to accept in all its denominations with over an estimated 2500 recorded deities. But people only think one true God exists depending on religions/philosophies where more than one is worshipped. But we’re going to focus on Christianity.

Cardinal Sins or the Seven Deadly Sins, no one has ever existed and not sinned. But you might ask, how does my mental illness relate to these edicts and I will highlight these points below. And they’re not some well thought out dissertation on the many facets of religion. No, you’re about to see inside my head and how I process—see myself. I will apologize in advance.

Pride – Writing, I take pride in the words I craft into stories—books—and I do so because I feel I bring something unique. I celebrate bodies in all their forms. Love transcends the superficiality of our world. And in some ways that’s naïve of me. As a species we’re conditioned by media induced expectations. I’m prideful for the fact I see past the bullshit. But where does Pride come into relation to my mental illnesses. Pride is related to selfishness but isn’t self-care selfish. Where we put ourselves and mental health on a higher echelon. We’re crushed under the weight of expectations. And some of those are outlined in following Sins. We’re urged to strive for the best and if we fall below the status quo then we’re not taking enough pride in what we do. Mental illness strips it away. In a sense the moment I start feeling good about something the doubts form. Every word I create is shit. Every success a potential failure.

Why do I do it? That's a question I ask myself a lot. The potential for a story tanking his high. With mental illness that heightens my inferiority, opening myself to judgment seems counter-productive. I share my words to maybe touch the people who understand. Who are like me with the way they think and feel. I feel pride when I make someone see themselves differently. There's nothing more flattering to me than a reader who took a chance on my stories and acquired a new prospective. Yet there's the other side too, the one where my every word is loathed and judged. My stories are me, I'm proud of how far I've come, but a one-star review will leave more of an impression than that five-star. Lingering and torturing me with how I could've and should've been better.

Greed – Most of the time we’re judged for what we materially possess. Our successes. First impressions mean everything in today’s society. Greed for me is not for money, it’s time. Time for self-reflection and care. Sensory disorders make my life miserable and I require downtime to recharge, in order to do so, I need to be covetous of my time. But if we look at the biblical meaning of greed it’s about wealth, but aren’t we encourage as humans to be successful in monetary means. We’re asked a lot of questions in our lives, but the one we’re never asked is: are we happy? We’re asked in many ways how successful we are. If we’ve achieved the suburban home with the significant other and the perfect kids. But we’re never asked if the life we live fulfills us. It’s an odd concept as I’m happy with my life to a point. I’m writing which was always my dream, but am I excelling at it. Have I sold a bestseller yet? Have I had a movie adaption? We’re asked to accept some facets of greed, but also shamed for following our dreams and coveting our happiness and contentment.

Lust – I’m about to get personal. All the Cardinal Sins seem to deal with excess. One of the symptoms of bipolar and BPD are a lack of impulse control. It’s not all about being hypersexual. Yet that is the main one. It’s clarified as doing anything in excess. I buy things in threes or multiples of three, I don’t know why, I just do, even if I only need one. Now, let’s discuss lust where it relates to my mental illness, which is what this rambling post is about. One of my many issues is touch aversion. I loathe to touch of someone else. Hugs can send me into a panicked rage, which I’ll expound on later in my musings. This following statement will also be explained in more detail later, but I miss the days of drugs and alcohol. Fucks were so easy to find. Enjoying each other, reveling in the sexual oblivion. The self-loathing came later when the buzz faded, but in those few glorious moments I need a sense of being connected to another human. Enjoying something most people believe is a party of humanity.

I lived many years in the closet, surrendering my body autonomy for a fleeting moment of pleasure—ecstasy. There are times in my life where I’d give anything to be able to go back and repeat, to have the strength to accept myself. But in doing so I would erase all the things that made me…me. People lose themselves in hedonism. Embracing the basic of human needs, touch and closeness. I experience lust on occasion, but my aversion to the even innocent act of touch makes me accept my abstinence for the safety of disconnection. We’re shamed for this act of lust and want. Slut-shamed for it. Why are we beaten down for wanting something we were designed for? Why must we choose morality or lust? Excess isn’t always a bad thing, from experience, denial of the excess is just as detrimental.

Envy – I am envious. We all are, we covet what others have. We look at someone who appears to have it all and ask ourselves, why not us? It’s basic human nature. But again sinful is equal to excess, it’s always we strive for too much. From my point of view, I’m envious that I’m not as acceptable as an author. Part of my brain, the one that chides me constantly that I’m not good enough causes me to compare myself to that person who has more success. I’m human. While jealousy isn’t natural for me in a romantic sense, in other departments I understand envy. As I said above I take pride in the tales I tell and it’s still not good enough. I’m jealous that other people can go through the day and not know what it’s like when they brain turns on them. I’m resentful I can’t just be happy. While I’m accepting of how I process things that in no way diminishes the fact that at times I wish I was different.

I’ve lived almost forty-one  years with mental illness. I’ve learned to adapt to what I see as my limitations. I respect those lines that I can’t cross and what triggers the crippling panic and inferiority that I live with daily. I lack contentment in anything I do. It’s just never good enough. I’m always too fat. Too butch. Too Masc. Too stupid. It’s old lies from the past coming back to haunt me and while I’ve come to be happy with myself it’s still an eerie whisper from the other side of the ether. The demeaning voice of imposter syndrome. We’ve all felt at one time in our lives that we were fake. Blending into obscurity as we molded ourselves into something resembling acceptable by society standards. I repeat to myself every day that mediocrity is a symptom of conformity. Envy could be a symptom of terror at being the same but compelled to be just like everyone else.

Gluttony – I’m an alcoholic and addict. This certain sin is usually relegated to the consumption of something. Mine was drugs and drink. I have several years under my belt of being sober/clean. But each day I struggle with the compulsion to regress. I don’t like the word recovering, I’m just one bad day away from Day One all over again. To fall off that proverbial wagon. Even years later I still struggle with my sobriety. I remember the way it made me feel. That first rail or bump, the exhilaration. The freedom from the blackness that I found terrifying. I always needed more. Anything to keep me from the edge of the abyss. I won’t lie, I miss it—everything about it calls to me.

Being blasted out of my mind made it easier to be me in world where I didn’t feel as if I fit. I still don’t and it’s not more apparent when I’m among people—my peers, people on the street. I’m like that weird thing in those this thing is not like the rest collages. I used so I wouldn’t choke on my social anxiety or feel as if I was that disposable part of the scenery. There yet unnecessary. I long for the back in the day times. The beautiful moments of oblivion after I put the straw to my nose. I want those days back more than I want to breathe more often than I want to be sober. Yet I know what happened in those days of chemical elation, the bruises I became adept at hiding. The self-loathing displayed in marks of self-harm and domestic abuse. Because in my druggie days I could forget for a second here and there that I was not who I was and that I wasn’t okay.

Wrath – I live in an almost state of rage. I’m angry over the littlest of things. A voice with a tone I don’t find pleasing makes the bugs writhe beneath my skin. A sharp noise that puts me on alert. Sensory Processing for me is a nightmare. And in the end, everything that I can process makes me angry. I’ve favored bruised knuckles many a morning after they meet a brick wall or the unforgiving surface of steel.

Rage is this constant, something I can count on to feel when everything else in me is numb. I hurt myself, want that shock of pain to drive it away. Focus that anger in another direction. I feel the irritation every moment of my life, hiding it behind a well-practiced smile. Faking those normal emotional cues that everyone else finds so easy. I know fury, depression, mania, the overwhelming, exhaustion of mania, but happiness and contentment those are the things lost to me. As an outsider, someone who never feels as if they belong, I study humanity and what it must like to be normal. To feel ordinary things. To smile with true joy. All of that is rare for me. Somedays I don’t feel as if I am human.

I am a construct that doesn’t belong, and while I accept that, I’m still enraged by it. Like why can’t I be like others, feel the way they do? Why is the simple act of being human so hard for me to process? Part of me thinks that I wasn’t supposed to be here. That my birth was a fluke. And I’m angry just because I’m here in this existence that I loathe.

Sloth – This sin is in relation to absence of interest or in a sense, laziness. I spend days in bed only getting up to use the bathroom. Forgetting as days pass that I haven’t eaten, showered, brushed my teeth. All the embarrassing things associated with depression. I haven’t drank enough to sustain me and my kidneys prove just how dehydrated I am.

I want to lie there and be forgotten. Ignore the messages from my friends who demand proof of life. Friends that I don’t understand why they stick around. I recently wrote a line in a story that perfectly sums up my thinking, I’m just a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead yet. Life is never how we want it. There’s always something missing. I part of ourselves we hide in order to make everyone else comfortable with our presence. Because our greatest shame is not conforming. To make the ones around us uncomfortable. We put on a façade as we move through life to not be the bother we feel we are. Being depressed is a taboo. We avoid the question, are you okay with bullshit answers only to soothe others while we die inside. Our mental illnesses are taboo, something to be left unspoken because it’s not acceptable to not be okay. Because being broken is bad. To feel anything other than happiness is frowned upon. What we have or have earned in our lives doesn’t erase the lessons we’ve learned or rewire a brain jumbled from birth.

We are expected to conceal our pain and sadness because it would make others feel bad. Our dark feelings should have no bearing on other people’s happiness. Yet we’re made to be something we aren’t and in the end, it only makes us more depressed. We require I days in bed to recharge and maybe find our center for at least a day. A simple twenty-four hours of being at home in our skin. I need it. I need to be forgotten, to fade into the nothingness as time and people move on. It’s better to have the separation unspoken as I wear out my welcome and become just another bad memory to be erased by time.

All these words probably rambled on too long. Make sense to some. Maybe sounds crazy to others. This is my life. My brain. These are the thoughts in my head. I thought it would be easier to break it down and put it into words. But it was more difficult that I anticipated. While I live with this brain with its faulty wiring, I get it on a base level. Decades of studying it in all its facets. Sometimes I examine it as if it’s not me, but a separate entity. Doing and saying what it wants, trying to perform conflicting programs and throw up errors.

I wanted to be more than this brain housed in a body that I struggle sometimes to love as much as I hate my brain. Being who I am is objectionable to society. While I accept my privilege. I acknowledge what makes me undesirable to society. I’m Lesbian. I’m Gender Nonconforming. I’m fat. I am that square piece that will never fit in the round slot. In essence, I want to be more, acceptable in a world and community I don’t feel as if I belong amongst. To be good enough as is, with all my perceived flaws, but my the standards that we must live I know the impossibility of it.

(Note: this opinion piece took over a month to write. I added words as my brain attempted to process my every day. The idea which popped up interested me. A few lines here and there of so-called philosophical manic-induced wonderings.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.M. Dabney is a multi-genre author who writes Body Positive/Diverse romance and fiction. They live with a constant diverse cast of characters in their head. No matter their size, shape, race, etc. they live for one purpose alone, and that’s to make sure they do them justice and give them the happily ever after they deserve. J.M. is dysfunction at its finest and they makes sure their characters are a beautiful kaleidoscope of crazy. There is nothing more they want from telling their stories than to show that no matter the package the characters come in or the damage their pasts have done, that love is love. That normal is never normal and sometimes the so-called broken can still be amazing.