It's taking me a long time - at least it feels like it a long time. Five months since before. It's kind of how I've been referring to things lately. There's now, five months since the day I tried to kill myself and then there is the period - my entire life - before that day. In a way it feels strange to define it that way, after all, I have lived with mental illness, experienced other events throughout my life that have made their mark in my journey, but for some reason this time has effected me more than any other. It's changed me.
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Change isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is hard. Especially when you are changing yourself, changing your behavior and the way you have both acted and reacted to things throughout your entire life. You see, I didn't wake up one day and suddenly have bipolar disorder. It's something that when I look back, I can see affecting me as far back as high school and my teenage years. It wasn't as obvious, but when I was younger I definitely experienced milder forms of the same symptoms. I didn't know it at the time, but I spent years battling myself, not understanding why I would slip into depressive episodes and then shoot back up into highs. I didn't understand why I would start projects, ambitious and motivated only to come back down from a high into a low where I could barely keep up with the day to day tasks of life. I didn't understand the borderline traits that would cause me to see things in black and white thinking, pushing aside those who I cared about because I was scared of losing them. Even back almost four years ago now, when I was first diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder after an overdose on sleeping pills that caused me to wind up in the hospital, I didn't fully understand it.
So it makes sense that it's taking a long time. Because really, five months isn't really that long after all. Five months to repair a lifetime of behaviors, of ups and downs and explosive tempers. Five months to adjust to the way it feels with the new meds, with tools in place to help me deal with things in a healthy normal way. It also makes sense that there are still up days and still down days, days where I feel like I'm never going to be mentally healthy and days where I get so frustrated with things that I can't control. Because really, five months out of the last thirty years isn't really that long at all.
So it's okay. It's okay that it's taking time for me to adjust and to find the new me. It's also okay that my mental health is one of my priorities right now, that I'm learning new ways to both fight it and live with it and that it's probably going to take time. It's okay that I still get tired and frustrated and up and down on my way to level. It's okay.
