Will the world ever understand me?

By Wr. Njeri Macharia

…because one day you are fine and the next you are in a deep dark hole. “But you were okay yesterday”…they wonder. “What happened?” A question I find hard to answer. How do you explain that your brain is broken when they can’t see? Sometimes I try and the response I get is, “you look fine to me.” It’s like they expect you to grow an extra head just to prove that you are mentally ill. Come to think of it, I think it would somehow make it believable. The invincible illness. The hows, the whys and the whens I never seem to be able to answer. Even after years of exploring mentally illness and especially my own I still don’t have the answers.

You know a relapse is coming, you can feel the downward spiral but there is nothing much you can do. When darkness closes in, I do what I know best. I lock myself in the house and withdraw from society. They will never understand, I tell myself. Whenever someone tells me to snap out of it am tempted to break their legs and ask them to walk it off. If it wasn’t a struggle then it wouldn’t be an illness. I take a rainbow of pills just to keep my insides stable, a little bit of normalcy and  happiness. Most bipolar patients are non-compliant to medication.

Bipolars are highly associated with creativity. I hate taking medicine, I hate the medications. Am at my best performance when am not medicated especially when am not having an episode, yet untreated bipolar is a disaster waiting to happen. So should I allow myself to be medicated to mediocrity and risk an episode or should I religiously take my medicines and be average?

Either way it’s a vicious cycle. Sometimes even the medicines don’t work. There are external triggers too. I know mine but this is life and no matter how much I try to avoid them, in one way or another I end up bumping into one if am lucky and other times when it rains it pours.

Yes, some days I can conquer the world single handedly and others am drowning.

It hurts, it actually physically hurts. Just because it’s not bleeding it doesn’t mean that it’s not hurting.

For now, I fight.

My story is not over yet.

#mentalillnessawareness

#bipolar

#bipolardisorder

#relapse

Njeri Macharia has a Bipolar disorder and she wishes to speak to you on this through the article. Contact her through: mashanje1@yahoo.com