#because diagnoses are umbrellas over symptoms and not discrete boxes

[mylittleredgirl]

the thing is: i’m really attached to my bipolar diagnosis. 

a medical diagnosis probably shouldn’t feel like a war medal, but i dragged myself through the trenches of every alternative therapy my loving parents or my young adult self heard might help, and then so many incomplete diagnoses and wrong medications to get here and it feels like i barely made it alive. 

there’s a safety in it. it’s one of the “real” ones, the ones that bystanders can’t easily argue out of existence -- bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are the two mental illnesses that basically everyone has heard of and basically everyone agrees require intervention. i like that it scares people a little: “oh, so you’re really crazy,” and they’re thinking about serial killers on tv, but it also means they’re not saying “i used to have a little bipolar disorder in the winter but i got a full-spectrum light and started doing yoga.” that it’s something more than me just not trying hard enough.

(i’m a certified yoga teacher. everyone i know is a yoga teacher. my parents raised me in a yoga cult. “have you tried yoga” is terrible for everyone, i know, but at least once every five years i’ll have someone in my orbit die from a treatable cancer because western medicine is a boogeyman and they really believe they can cure it with crystals and vitamin c. one of my fellow cult babies has CF and while on the transplant list for a double-lung transplant (now successful!), people were constantly telling her she could manage it with diet. so there are degrees of pressure toward alternative therapies to the exclusion of pharmaceuticals, and i spent my childhood feeling besieged by people lovingly trying to get me off my asthma medication by any means necessary.)

(i mean, this therapist isn’t wrong that there’s probably some potential for unusual childhood trauma here. but i firmly believe that there are two things at work here and one of them is chemical.)

i tried to manage this for years through “doing the work.” yoga and meditation and talking through my “trauma,” digging around to try and figure out what terrible things might have happened in repressed memories that would explain me, all the while engaging in para- or suicidal behaviors every october and february and june.

so it triggers a perhaps unwarranted knee-jerk fear and anger in me when a medical professional doubts the possibility of a chemical imbalance that feels justified by the extent of my psychiatric history and the effectiveness of finally for-fucking-finally getting on a mood stabilizer. and it feels much safer to rant about that on the internet than it does to talk about it to a professional who’s using my every word to build a picture of me that can impact my ability to survive my life.