Support Rant

This is the first of what I will call stream-of-consciousness blogging. Basically I am expressing my mood exactly as the thoughts flow out of my head. Sometimes I will refer to specific people in my life during one of these posts but will not name names and will try and keep pronouns neutral. Certain sections may contain specific information about that person or a situation but I will try and keep things as vague as possible.

Today my rant is on support. The support that we do and don't get. It is crucial to our survival and the thing that people grasp hardest. Trying to support someone with our illness is damn near impossible. When we don't even know what will calm us down or break us out of it, how can anyone else? It is frustrating for all parties involved. There are some nice middle ground places people can stay however.

If you know someone is having a hard time, the first step is contact. It doesn't matter how you contact them but most people that I know with this disease hate the phone. So start with a text or email. Start and don't stop. Text over and over until we respond. If we don't respond, send more messages! Something that might make them smile a little. Smiles are great and every one makes things a little better. Smile take us back to when we were little kids and the first thing we looked for in someone we can trust is a smile.

There are many moments in the life of someone with bipolar where we will feel like children again. Some people, like myself, never really stop feeling like a child. This is directly tied to the type of support system you have. If you have people around you who feel like they have to constantly take care of you, then it is almost a given that you will feel like a child. This is also where the feeling of being a burden comes into play. Let me give you an example.

After my suicide attempt in 2008, I was hospitalized from a Friday afternoon to the next Wednesday morning. There will be another post about my hospitalization earlier but this is SOC (stream of consciousness) so I'm just going to let it flow. While I was in the hospital, the doctors began dosing me with new meds to see how things would balance me out. It's an insane story that I will  place a link to at a later time. But it was a degrading and confusing place that I couldn't wait to get out of and lied to say whatever I needed to for them to let me go.
Since I had told the doctor I was ready to go home and begin my recovery in a place that didn't scare the absolute shit out of me, he signed my discharge papers and gave my husband about a million things to sign and brochures and print outs to take home. There were papers about self harm, papers about my medications, papers to excuse me from work, papers for reduced duty at work, and most of all, papers about what to expect after a bipolar diagnosis. We poured over all of it. This was a whole new world we were venturing into and it was scary as hell.
I had been admitted under suicide watch, I was required to sign a treatment plan to be released. My treatment plan included my family and how they would help keep me safe. Now we get to the part where I felt like an absolute child for the first time in my adult life, although sadly it wouldn't be the last. The most important part of the treatment plan was that I was not to be left alone. I had a 5 month old daughter that I was still nursing, and wanted to continue nursing, and an 8 year old son. On top of everything else, my husband worked nights so that was even harder to deal with. We began spending a lot of time at my parents' house. Pretty much every night that my husband worked, which would have been 4 out of 7.
My parents were more than accommodating. They took wonderful care of my daughter while still supporting my decision to nurse, which I was assured my medication was not interfering with. My dad walked to her sleep around the house every night and sang to her, which spoiled her rotten but she was worth it. They made sure my son had a lunch and got to school and back every day. It really was working well. Everything except my recovery. The first psychiatrist they sent me to was a complete asshole and could not have made me feel worse about my diagnosis. We hadn't even finalized my diagnosis yet! Just that it was bipolar and this lovely doctor informed me that I was basically being called an asshole. What an awesome thing to tell someone who has just been given the news that they will now have a mental illness to carry around for the rest of their life. That deepened my depression.
All these things combined with some serious medication side effects that I had, I wasn't allowed to be alone until about mid-September of that year. From the beginning of June until the beginning of September. My family members came together and had a plan for who would stay with me and when. It was one of the most humiliating things I have ever experienced. My in-laws witnessed a severe panic attack where I thought I was being swarmed by bugs and left huge scratches in my skin. I've cried and cried and cried in front of them all. What did it leave me with? Their pity and an undeniable distance between me and them.

Over the years, I have had to had minor rescues by friends again. A friend I got very close to and who helped me through my July 2016 attempt was the most reliable. She was there for me whenever I needed her. Until she moved halfway across the country and became inaccessible for the emergency situations. I have another friend that I've had since before the hospitalization that I can sort of rely on but she has a lot of her own issues and I don't want to burden her with more.

And there is the one point I want anyone who reads this to understand: the weight of the word burden. It's stamped on our souls. It's embedded in our brains. It becomes a large part of the person we become as this disease changes us. In my experience, it is unavoidable.

It digs in a little deeper every time someone rolls their eyes at a statement we just got the courage to be able to say. Every time we let someone down because we just couldn't bring ourselves to attend an event or even just be able to answer the phone. It cuts like a knife when your family is forced to watch over you all day and maintain a schedule of who's turn it is to watch you. We wilt, we droop, we bleed. A little bit of me wears away each time I have to be a burden to someone I know or love. It's what has affected me the most ever since my diagnosis. I know longer require supervision but sometimes I think I should. I've always managed to keep myself safe. Even the July 2016 attempt apparently wasn't enough to get the job done. Had I been alone, however, things could have been much different.

Support is everything. We have to know that someone accepts us the way we are. Even though we aren't perfect, we just want to be understood and accepted. We can't help the way we are and most of us are trying to do the best we can to get through life. People who can accept and understand can make all the difference in the world.