Love and hugs xx

Sometimes I wish I could take them myself, as the lows feel so shit, but my “sensible mind” knows I’m on the right meds given my highs are pretty damn high (diagnosed Bipolar I after being hospitalised with acute manic psychosis). In your case, though, I’d be asking your doctors about those options. Hypomania may be more noticeable and therefore people are always keen to treat it, but with the depression by its very nature you tend to suffer tremendously, often alone and in silence.

And for what its worth, I’ve found it helpful and liberating to think of Bipolar as being an essential part of who I am. I gladly seek treatments to try and manage the symptoms that make my life hard, but I wouldn’t take a “magic cure” if one was available, because that doesn’t even make sense – if I was not like this, I would be such a different person as to not really be “me” anymore.

Our personalities, our “true selves”, are all just brain chemistry and neural physiology, for everyone on this planet., whether mentally ill or not. We just have to make do as best we can with what we’ve been given, the good and the bad – of course sometimes we need medications or the like to cope with the worst of the bad.

I’ll admit, this is more of a hypomanic view than a depressed one. Ask me in 6 months, probably get a different answer. But when I think like this when I am depressed, I do tend to feel a bit better about how much of a fuck up I am.