(This is one of those things that has been sitting on my desktop mocking me for long enough. I barely edited this post. It’s raw and rambling. I apologize for that a little, but I just had to get it put to bed.)

I have bipolar disorder. The official diagnosis is BP-I. I was formally diagnosed when I was 16 and had a major crash after the death of my mother in that year, but I know that I had early onset BPD. It just went unnoticed for many years. This is not surprising. The Pierces are wading in the shallow end of the gene pool when it comes to mental health, and we each had our own raging problems to deal with. It only stands to reason that I could easily escape notice. What was to notice in the first place? I was a polite kid, and bright, and really fun to be around. Except of course when I wasn’t any of those things. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not going to air out the various diagnoses of my family members — it’s not my place to do that here. What I am going to write about is what bipolar disorder is like, at least as much as I can articulate from the front row.

What Does BP-I Mean?

This is manic depression we’re talking about here. I once told a girl I was dating that I was bipolar, and she just smiled and nodded. Realizing she didn’t comprehend what I was saying I clarified, “Manic depression,” and you could see the lights come on. She was appropriately dismayed that her boyfriend was one of those people.

I’m somewhat grateful that the current term is Bipolar and not Manic Depressive. Not so much for me, but rather for those whom the stigma of the old term still affects. Me, I’m cool.

Bipolar Disorder is like Depression Plus. Not only do you get all the fun of crippling depression, but you lose all lucidity swinging wildly through manic fits. Not all BP has severe mania, however. Many people suffer from hypomania — elevated moods without all the reckless behavior. Scan over these bullet points for a more comprehensive idea. These were taken from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Signs and symptoms of mania (or a manic episode) include:

• Increased energy, activity, and restlessness
• Excessively “high,” overly good, euphoric mood
• Extreme irritability
• Racing thoughts and talking very fast, jumping from one idea to another
• Distractibility, can’t concentrate well
• Little sleep needed
• Unrealistic beliefs in one’s abilities and powers
• Poor judgment
• Spending sprees
• A lasting period of behavior that is different from usual
• Increased sexual drive
• Abuse of drugs, particularly cocaine, alcohol, and sleeping medications
• Provocative, intrusive, or aggressive behavior
• Denial that anything is wrong
• A manic episode is diagnosed if elevated mood occurs with three or more of the other symptoms most of the day, nearly every day, for 1 week or longer. If the mood is irritable, four additional symptoms must be present.

Signs and symptoms of depression (or a depressive episode) include:

• Lasting sad, anxious, or empty mood
• Feelings of hopelessness or pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness
• Loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed, including sex
• Decreased energy, a feeling of fatigue or of being “slowed down”
• Difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions
• Restlessness or irritability
• Sleeping too much, or can’t sleep
• Change in appetite and/or unintended weight loss or gain
• Chronic pain or other persistent bodily symptoms that are not caused by physical illness or injury
• Thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts
• A depressive episode is diagnosed if five or more of these symptoms last most of the day, nearly every day, for a period of 2 weeks or longer.

People seem to understand depression, but there’s less known generally about mania. Many people I’ve encountered didn’t understand why mania was a problem. You have so much energy: it must be great to be able to get so much done. But it’s not like that. Some people are blessed enough to be super productive during manic episodes, but often when the person comes down, it’s discovered that they were productive all right, but their output was largely crap. Mania is boundless energy without much practical focus. That’s no boon.

I have a bonus symptom: I’m one of a small subset of bipolar people called rapid cyclers. Where most people deal with the cycles of depression and mania over weeks, even months, I can swing within a day, or every few hours. It’s disorienting, to say the least.

How Did You Discover You Were Bipolar?

When my mother died when I was 16, I crashed. My depression was profound. At the time I was attending college through the TAMS program at UNT. My mother had moved closer to Baylor where she was awaiting a liver for a transplant operation. Like I mentioned before, I had turned 16 a few month before, and I was starting my freshman year in college with 199 other 16 year olds. And my mother was living in the spare room of a family friend, working on her PhD in all of her spare time, and not allowed to drive anywhere. So, not only did I have to try to deal with maintaining my course load, I was responsible for driving my mother to and from her house, taking her to her oncology appointments down at Baylor Dallas. I had to wear the pager that would inform us when her transplant liver arrived. I did this from October through January.

Funny story: when the pager finally buzzed the arrival of her liver, my mother was nowhere to be found. She was working on some research at the TWU library, but she didn’t tell me where she was. So I was left on my own for a couple of hours desperately trying to find her so I could drive her down to the hospital to prep for transplant surgery.

Many of you may be asking, Where was my father during this time? Beats the heck out of me. I think he was somewhere down in the Rio Grande Valley deep in South Texas. But all I know is that he wasn’t anywhere near us.

So, I took my mother to get her operation. I drove to see her every day when she was recovering. I took her back to her apartment so she could recuperate. I helped changer her dressings. And when she crashed months after her operation, I took her back to Baylor. My father showed up by the time she was in the ICU. I watched her die.

My mother was everything to me. Though she was an overbearing perfectionist with her own undiagnosed mental illness to cope with, she was a constant force in my life — for good and ill. My father started to leave when I was still in kindergarten. He would go for a year, come back for a few months, and leave again, citing his own depression as a reason for him to hit the bricks. I remember when he said goodbye to me in a parking lot when I was fourteen. He explained that his choice was simple: he could leave or he could kill himself. What a choice! And to tell your son such a thing!

So I was always with my mother. When she decided to drive cross-country to take another job because the one she was in didn’t do it for her anymore, I traced our course on the map. When she stayed all night at her elementary school job working on her corkboard displays, I would sleep on the beanbags in the school library. When she would stay up all night at the college computer lab, I would crash out on the floor. When she would spend the food budget on a new wardrobe for that season’s new job, I would figure out how to do amazing things with Bisquick. When she tried to kill herself by taking a whole bottle of tylenol with codeine, I called 911.

When she was gone, I was devastated. I went from 150lbs to 120 in a matter of weeks. I stopped going to classes. I broke up with my girlfriend. I slept all the time. My friends were able to talk enough sense into me to get counseling, and the university psychologist quickly turned me over to a private psychiatrist. I was prescribed prozac in the first meeting, and I took it dutifully.

I don’t remember the next two weeks of my life.

I do recall vague glimpses now and then. I know at one point I was lucid enough to call my counsellor and she told me to stop taking the prozac, which I did, and I came down in a few days. When I saw the psychiatrist again, he started to write me a prescription for a different antidepressant, and I walked out of the office. In my head it was simple. The antidepressant screwed me up. I wanted to talk about it, but this guy wanted to foist drugs on me. I went back to counseling, and turned my back on medications for years until Heidi convinced me to try again, and I finally found a cocktail that worked for me — but that’s another story.

Before I was done with my TAMS program, another doctor was able to diagnose me bipolar. She was a kind sort who offered me medication in conjunction with counseling, but my mind was made up. I was determined to do this without pharmacological assistance.

If my parents hadn’t been so screwed up in their own rights, I might have been more prepared for this, but I grew up when mental illness was still taboo. I didn’t know about my parents’ problems because a person simply didn’t talk about such things. They didn’t notice my problems, either. Too busy in their own heads, trying to survive.

I was reading the Bipolar Child with Heidi when Christopher was still a baby, preparing for the possibility of passing this thing I have along to my kids. We came across a passage about the sorts of things bipolar kids dream about — horrible visions of death and destruction. When most people dream about falling off a cliff, they wake before they hit. When bipolar kids dream of falling off a cliff, they not only hit, they die. The kids watch themselves die.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “One of my earliest dreams is where I’m walking in a wax museum, and I see an indian standing there, hatchet raised, ready to strike. Only it’s not an indian, it’s my sister. And she comes to life and starts to chase me around. I run up some stairs and get cornered against the railing of the balcony, and I fall off the edge. And I hit the ground, and lay there, broken and bleeding, and my sister comes down to finish me off.”

By this time, Heidi is looking at me with her mouth open.

“Isn’t this normal? I mean everyone has dreams like this.”

She shakes her head slowly, No.

“So, when I hit the bottom of the cliff and see myself torn to shreds, bashed against the rocks…?”

“That’s not normal!”

“Oh.”

And so it goes. I remember major breakdowns at many times in my life. The first time I remember crying uncontrollably over my feelings of worthlessness I was four. So many times when I couldn’t get out of bed, or when I became particularly destructive, I can’t begin to recount them all. Not could I. Major chunks of my memory are missing, a by-product of of the extreme states of depression or mania or perhaps a defense mechanism to distance me from sure mortification. Though every now and again I get flooded with a recollection of a long-lost episode. I think I can safely attribute the time when I burned down the backyard to an upswing. The time when I ditched school for a week when I was a teenager — not sure if that was a depression or a manic episode.

I never attempted suicide. I thought about dying all the time. Wishing for death. But without the get up and go to make it happen for myself. Instead I started to make some lousy choices, trying to screw up my life as much as I could without actually dying. That way I could compound my misery because misery was all a miserable person like myself deserved. Except when I didn’t — and then I would frantically run around and try to better my situation any way I could manage.

During this interim period of diagnosis and Heidi, I actually did try medication one other time. That wasn’t so bad. I had more lucid days. I inexplicably started putting on weight. My normal 165 by the time ballooned to 185 in a matter of weeks, even though my appetite dropped precipitously. I didn’t like that at all. I told some people that the weight gain was the reason I went off it, but the real reason was far more distressing.

With my newfound lucidity, I was productive as never before. And I was able to plan more than a couple of days in advance. That sounds like a great thing until you realize that I was still — not suicidal per se but — acutely aware of my own mortality. I realized that I was planning suicides. Good, working plans. I took myself off the medication before I had the chance to act on anything.

If there’s one thing I hold against my parents it’s this: I wish they could have gotten their heads on straight enough to see my vector and take appropriate action or help me prepare for it at the very least.

So, What’s it Like?

What’s it like living with Bipolar Disorder? That’s easy: My life is perfectly normal, just like yours.

My coping mechanisms have been developed for my life over many years of trial and (mostly) error. I’m comfortable with my trials, and I wouldn’t be foolish enough to trade them with anyone even if I could.

I’m not currently on any medication. I don’t recommend that anyone with bipolar disorder stop taking their medication. That’s just… crazy.

I was able to find some stability on a lovely cocktail of a mood stabilizer with a mild antidepressant. Heidi insisted that I try again when we became engaged, and I love her for that insistence. I got back on my feet, found a decent job, entered into counseling again, and generally found a good groove. That’s not to say I didn’t have my swings. I did. Especially in the beginning. For the first several months of my new job, I took almost every Friday off as a self-assigned mental health day, for instance. I was also still falling victim to my own habits of distorted thinking, but perhaps there will be more on that later.

The point is, I was able to gain enough lucidity for long enough periods, that I found some real stability in my life. I augmented the medication with good sleep hygiene, exercise, and dietary considerations and kept making solid progress to a mental harbor I could consider sane — not that I set the bar particularly high.

Zip ahead to Christopher’s birth. I was still on the medication, but I was hating the job, so I gave my notice, and poor Heidi in the throes of PPD agreed! We picked up and moved back to Texas without any prospects, just a decent savings account, an inexpensive place to live, and a few assorted freelance contacts I kept in touch with. Doing this lost me my insurance, however, and I eventually ran out of my medication.

I told myself that I would just try a little experiment and try to make it on my own without the medication, but I wouldn’t tell Heidi. If she noticed my behavior changing, I would put myself right back on. If she didn’t… I would just have to see how long I could go without it before she started noticing.

We were speaking to a mutual friend about my bipolar disorder some weeks later, and Heidi mentioned that the medication was helping me. I sort of smiled at her, and she knew something was up. I told her, “I haven’t been on my meds in weeks. I wanted to see how long I could go before you noticed.”

“I thought you would be running low…”

“Did you notice?”

“Actually, no.”

And off I’ve been for the last six years or so. The rest of the story is that I’ve taken great pains to create a world I can be safe in. The sleep hygiene thing is simply impossible with five small children, but I still watch what I eat. I think the dietary consideration that has saved me the most is that our processed food intake is near zero. Almost everything we eat is stuff we make ourselves from food that’s as untouched as we can manage. That’s made a huge difference. I also exercise when I can, but I tell myself that chasing the kids counts.

The biggest change I made is in my employment. I took a fairly low-pressure job where I make my own rules. I don’t have a commute to speak of. I get to work from home whenever I feel like. I play with the kids most of the time. I’ve created a delightfully low-stress cocoon for myself, and the only thing that will compel me to leave it is if my company went under for some reason. If I had to go back to a regular corporate job, with or without a commute, I would be back on the meds before you could say DSM-IV.

Please, please, please don’t construe this post as permission to take yourself off any kind of medication. If you’re on maintenance medication for any kind of disorder, you should stay on the medication until you have a chance to talk to your friendly neighborhood medical professional about taking yourself off. Me? I took a gamble with a little experiment, and it paid off.

Though I still cycle, I have enough habit training to notice it far enough off and take mental preparations for it. If I don’t notice the cycles coming for some reason, Heidi gives me a nudge in the right direction and I can get it taken care of. It’s a constant struggle, however. Strangely enough, the kids help ease that.

I don’t consider the days when I have to struggle to get out of bed because the depression is that bad. If I don’t drag my sorry butt out of bed, who’s going to be there to make breakfast when the kids get up? That’s my job! I can’t fail in this. On the days when I have so much energy flowing through my limbs, I feel like I’m leaping out of my skin, I grab a kid or two and throw down a good wrassle. I play freeze tag with all the vim and vigor of my little ones. I beat on my drums. I get on my bicycle and just ride. I can channel it now, and I pour it all into my family.

That’s not to say it’s easy. It takes a huge amount of energy to stay balanced in my life. When I’m home and playing with the kids, I don’t even think about cracking my laptop. The moment I divert my attention for even a moment, I can easily drop the good dad mask and become the grumpiest lout in the history of loutishness. I spend most of my time focusing on living in the moment. Just being the Dad, seeing to the needs of my family when they have them. Making minor preparations for the near future, but nothing too concrete. If I set my expectations too concretely, that can cause me to lose focus as well. So I try to not expect anything until I’m right on top of it. Flexibility and focus are my two power words these days.

I won’t lie to you. Sometimes it’s exhausting. But I’m still on top of it. And now that Joseph is here, and C and Mo are growing up, and I can see the glimmer of maturity behind Bennett’s mischievous twinkle, and Emy remains cute while she’s climbing on top of the counters — it’s getting easier. With a family who loves me so unconditionally as my family so clearly loves me, I don’t think I can fail.

I am constantly apprehensive that my children are going to pick this up. Statistically, because of a combination of Heidi’s depression, my Bipolar, and our combined family histories, our children have a 30-something percent chance of being bipolar themselves, and a 70% chance of some form of depression. It’s a constant prayer of mine that the love that keeps us all afloat will be their saving grace. That nurture will overcome nature for them. Though, if they do fall into the grip of these problems, they’ll have something I didn’t: alert parents to catch them and help lead them to safety.

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