Dec 12, 2009 23:15
It's not hard to remember that I DID have a life before The Big Damn Disorder (heretofore known as TBDD). What's hard to remember is the QUALITY of life I had before it.
This is hard to grasp so forgive any gaps in comprehension you may experience. This is me trying to talk out a feeling.
For as long as I can remember, life has been a wild swing from one side to the other of the circus tent that houses Kway's Giant Misfit Show. Angsty to angry, depressive to manic, suicidal to joyous-- the pendulum swing, the tidal pull, the hurricane in my chest was always there.
With the Trileptal, the tides have stopped. Now the pendulum swings in the middle. (And PLEASE, merciful heavens, let it stay that way!)
This is .. phenomenal for me.
But it's really weird, too.
I guess the best way to put it is in the context of a statement Sara made on CSI about her parents and their heavily abusive marriage. She said, "The fighting, the yelling, the trips to the hospital-- I thought it was how everyone lived. When my mother killed my father, I found out that it wasn't."
You don't ... I'm grasping here, sorry ... you don't really know how "normal" life is supposed to feel until you all of a sudden don't have that thing that's making your life so abnormal anymore. Sara didn't know what a normal family was like because she'd never had one.
And I feel like ... and boy, do I know how fucking melodramatic this sounds ... I never really had a concept of what it's like to live inside a consistently "normal" and "happy" existence because I really haven't, not till now, not till the swings went quiet.
So it's kind of like I'm waking up to my own life, learning what life SHOULD have felt like for the past 14 years (give or take ... I mean, we still don't REALLY have a firm timeline on when this thing began to manifest but Harry and I are thinking fourteen at least), assuming I'd either never developed TBDD in the first place or got the proper diagnosis and treatment for it.
But that also begs the largely existential question of whether I'd still be me if I hadn't had to live with TBDD. Would I still be as deeply bookish and introspective, as quick to flee into fantasy and theater, as drawn to anyone who seems to be a mental kindred spirit if I hadn't had to learn to live with it from the time I was 14 till now.
And now, now that I have this medicine that seems to be keeping me stable, what will my life be? Will it still be the same as it might have been had Heidi and Harry not come along and helped haul me out of the Pit? What opportunities might I explore now that I might not have if I kept battling it on my own?
I don't know, this is really all too deep to contemplate over right now, especially on a Saturday night with a warm bed and a deep pile of books calling to me. But it's been on my mind a lot, this sense of divergence, this feeling of the world tilting its way back into alignment. What happens when the world aligns? What happens when things stop going wrong and start going right?
bipolar