Well, Now I've Done It

Well, I've done something that'll probably make me the biggest bitch in history, but I had no choice.

Trying to continue on the way I was going was making me sick. The much-too-short vacation in Destin helped, but let's tell the truth: I am much too broke to go barreling down to the ocean every time I get overwhelmed. I will be lucky to go back next year, so I had to come up with an alternative way of dealing with it, and it was past time for me to do so.

Studies have shown that people with bipolar live, on average, a lot shorter lives than normal people, and that's even when the numbers are adjusted for suicide rates. Different studies come up with different numbers, but the most optimistic ones say that being bipolar knocks about 8 years off your life span. The more pessimistic ones say it's more like 25.

They cite a number of factors, including the shitty lifestyle choices. Most of us are overweight. Many of us are heavy cigarette smokers (not me, thank God). Others are alcoholics and/or drug addicts. Many of us live isolated lives (definitely me) and don't make enough money to provide ourselves a decent standard of living (also me). And then there's the fact that it's rare that bipolar is the *only* thing wrong with the people who suffer from it. We're a lot more likely to suffer from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and so forth.

In my opinion, there's another factor involved that I suppose there's no real way of measuring. When you spend your whole life fighting the crazy, it wears you out. Your body just craps out on you. Between the crazy and the various things wrong with me which I will not even attempt to catalog here, I cannot remember a time in my life when I was ever NOT tired. Any mental stress I'm under only compounds the problem.

I've been under a goddamn lot of mental stress lately. My body is starting to crack under the pressure. I'm back to having migraines regularly, which is something that hasn't happened since I got off Depo in 2007. My asthma has started flaring up again, which usually doesn't happen until it starts getting colder. My body is reacting to all the stress by making me fucking miserable.

I cannot keep living this way.

I could smell the tang of fall on the wind today, which gave me a brief moment of panic. Usually, it doesn't happen this early. But I know that I always go mixed, at least to some degree, in the fall, and I'm going to do everything I can to fight it off. I can't have another Fall of 2010 happen again.

But I also know that all this shit going on around me will drive me down that hole if I don't do something. It did it last time. There's no reason to think it won't do the same again this time. But I can't have that happen.

So I had to step up and do something I should've done a long goddamn time ago but didn't because I was so conflicted about it. But the truth is, I've spent my whole life bending over backwards to accommodate other people while hardly ever getting anything in return for that. I've lived my whole life in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" quandary. For the most part, I went with "damned if you don't" because it meant I could avoid confrontation.

But, clearly, "damned if you don't" is getting me nowhere and making me sick in the process. I'm going to die early as it is; I doubt I'll make it into my 50s. No use in driving myself into an even earlier grave.

So let's try "damned if you do" for awhile and see if that works out any better, shall we?