Sarah R. Ellis is a writer, disability advocate, and former teen librarian who grew up in Brattleboro and now calls Burlington home. To learn more about bipolar disorder, visit the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance or the International Bipolar Foundation.
BURLINGTON-I just went to a thoughtful, progressive show that happened to include a joke about bipolar disorder, an offhand comment that played the diagnosis for laughs and used "bipolar" as a shorthand for irrational and unstable.
This is what it made me think about.
Bipolar 1 disorder is a diagnosis that I have lived with since I was 19, when I experienced my first manic episode and was hospitalized for a week. It is a diagnosis that derailed my life.
Over the course of less than a week, I lost my community of friends who I thought I would know forever, I lost my ability to trust my own perception of reality, and I lost the way forward and the ability to travel with my peers along the trajectory we all expect.
I have since had to process that loss and grief in a world that is not built for me to succeed, surviving with no financial resources in a society not built for my mental wellness that tells me in both loud and quiet ways that I should be ashamed.
But here is what you need to know: Having bipolar disorder is not a shorthand for anything else. It does not connote personality or a certain relational style or antisocial behavior.
It means that you live with the uncertainty of an ever-shifting mood, a brain that has to be regulated and managed so as to engage with the world in meaningful ways.
It means that things that are easy for you are not easy for me; it means that my mood is fragile and that I am resilient and that I have walked through madness that changed me and now have to live in a world that calls me crazy.
It means that I dwell in darkness and have to reach for light from inside a mountain, that a choice to be happy is a matter of blood and bone and grit, not happenstance.
It means that I have to rally the strength to move away from the void a million times a day in a million different ways, that I am exhausted by the invisible effort that goes into existing.
It means that I have had to create a life outside of the ordinary and make that life beautiful.
Does that sound irrational to you? Does that sound selfish or worthy of dismissal or anything but courageous?
Less than a hundred years ago, I would have been locked in an asylum and sprayed with freezing cold water. That history lives with me today.
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I urge you to consider what it means to dismiss the realities of people with mental illnesses, to think about what it would be like to live with a brain that you have to actively and painstakingly regulate day to day while having to pretend that you are like everyone else or else be discriminated against in devastating ways.
I urge you to consider what it means to play "bipolar" for jokes, how it feels to have someone take a piece of your history and denigrate it in such a way.
I urge you to imagine how much determination it takes to survive with this identity and how understandable it is that some people who were not given adequate resources would be unable to manage.
I urge you to believe in the beauty of our experiences, the importance of our voices, the things we could tell you if we were given space and time to do so.
Listen to us. Respect us. Empower us. We wrestle with our realities every day, transform despair to hope and grief to joy, and if given the opportunity, we can change the world.
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