Bipolarity: mania or joy? – 05/21/2023 – The Worst of the Week

Carolina writes to tell me that she comes from a long lineage of people with severe bipolar disorders. For this reason, since childhood, whenever she becomes very excited or happy, she asks herself whether it is mania or joy: “I check myself with regard to my symptoms so as not to overlook cyclothymia, or hypomania at all…”

I felt an enormous affection for that phrase “whatever hypomania”. Apparently, the fear of loneliness and the need to belong are so great in humans that, unconsciously, we regret when we are born luckier and, therefore, free from some disease or disorder that would intimately connect us to the ills of our family and ancestry. It looks like a desperate attempt not to look like a lonely sweet orange that fell from a huge, overgrown lemon tree.

I found it interesting that this email arrived just in the week in which I finally consulted with a great specialist in bipolar disorder, after thinking about the subject for fifteen years and waiting about six months for a vacancy in a very busy schedule.

I talked non-stop for over an hour. I mentioned that I spend my money compulsively; that I am obsessive about more and more jobs and projects; that after days overexcited with the crazy wonder of being alive, I usually collapse with body aches or absolute exhaustion; that my existential goal is to be the joy of parties and, at the same time, never go to any party; that I try with daily effort (and loss of work contracts) to control my irritability and impulsiveness without medication (which is extremely complicated: in the astral map I have four houses in aries and, speaking of home, I was raised by barraqueira ladies from the East Zone) and, finally, that I suffer from heavy anxiety attacks because I feel I have no ideological-aesthetic place in the world, since I no longer belong to the lack of culture with terrible taste in clothes from where I came from and, nevertheless, I can’t even stand the voice of the elite to which I pretend to belong today.

In short: my friends from the past are Bolsonaristas who wear a shirt with a coat of arms and never read a book, but the intellectual elite that I “frequent” complain too much about the nanny using that nasal sound full of pride (which sounds like the most shameless class struggle).

I love everyone and I can’t stand anyone. I spend the day seeing fault in everything and, above all, in myself. I help everyone, I am generous, patient, loving. And I’m a demon. I love the people I work with, I spend months calling everyone a “genius”, I spill instagrammable statements, I call for 67 projects, suddenly I think everyone is stupid or I get very persecuted thinking they are fake, I fight, I break up, then I regret it, I feel bad, then I think I did it right again.

In the end, the doctor said that a very low dose of lamotrigine, perhaps a tiny bit of lithium, would not harm me. I mean, they would, they’re medicine, but maybe they’d improve the intensity of my thoughts and feelings, and she wouldn’t refuse to give me a prescription. But that my diagnosis was: an anxious irritable who thinks too much. “You’re not bipolar, you don’t need treatment for bipolar.”

I left the consultation feeling happy, sad, empty, full, normal and strange. It’s usually how I feel when I’m fine. The fact is that I’ve always been sure that I’m not bipolar and the full conviction that I am. And this is just another example of what I might be. Or a nice way of concluding that I’m just like everyone else.

Carolina, I’m not a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist, but you tell me in your letter that after happy days, you don’t feel mood swings or depressive symptoms. Never felt. And you tell me that these are happy days, not that you decided to run naked along Avenida Paulista, such excitement in perceiving yourself as human. A doctor once told me that crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. And that I, as much as I “wanted” to be crazy, would be forever frustrated—because nobody goes crazy just because they want to be.

“You’ll have to live it in the texts,” she told me. She was wrong and right. I’m terrified of freaking out and I’m always surrounded by a certain frenzy of madness.

I think I’m chasing a name, a diagnosis, something that explains so much stuff inside and that, because it’s cataloged and studied, brings together a magical drug formula that transforms me into what I believe a real person is, I think that when I observe any apparently normal woman walking down the street: look there, a real person!

Carolina, I think we’re fine, it happens that it doesn’t stop hurting a lot just because it doesn’t hurt beyond worrying.

---

Tati Bernardi answers the most unusual questions and strangest comments from her readers. Do you want to participate in the O Pior da Semana column? Send your message to [email protected]

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.