The Difference

Now I watch my bipolar traits from a safe distance. I observe their strangeness. I keep the vagaries and velleities immured.  Strange to write, "from a safe distance" when I am inside that bipolar brain. But there is a distance of reflection now.  So much of this is the four years of solid recovery. I have such incredibly good periods. I look to the future. And yet I am a guard. I am my own guard. Constantly. I have stellar periods when I need to police myself so much less. And then I still have periods when I mandate hypervigilance for myself. But the important thing is, it works. Nobody knows this process but me. I really don't need to put anyone on notice but myself. That's real progress. But it's there. Always. Because through no fault of my own, I was born to this. I have the cognitive dysfunction which is sometimes downplayed in descriptions of bipolar disorder. I think ultimately this is the real culprit when it comes to emotional distortion and dysfunction, and what always ended up causing the social dysfunction in the past. I really try to be as careful of others' feelings as I am with my own. Sometimes I think I'm even more careful with their feelings than my own.  Because I am generally okay. But what lurks beneath must be acknowledged and greeted each day with a tiny dose of healthy terror.It's not self-pity or puling or even moroseness to say I understand with complete empathy V. Woolf's stones in the pockets. I understand the words she wrote, understand them in a visceral sense: "I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times." I think now and then, too, of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, and how quickly it followed upon a single relapse after years of sobriety. I have much gratitude, but I have even more wariness. A house divided can indeed stand. And virtually all houses are divided up into rooms. Some of the bipolar rooms are just a little more haunted than those you find in more "ordinary" houses.