Who are we?

So…. Is BP contagious?I know this may sound a bit flippant to many out there but BP has a diagnosis through symptoms.

Would living with a BP I sufferer and dealing with their mood swings and their altered sleeping patterns not produce similar symptoms. Does the strain of having to be the “competent” one in a relationship leave you so wiped out that, when you are not operating on overdrive to pick up the slack during a down, you find yourself staring at oncoming trucks and wishing the steering would go?

I’m 33 and my wife is 32 and suffering from Bipolar II. I have seen a mental health professional in the past. I think I may have been a ‘little’ bit BP I in the past, which I suppose would make me lucky now. I no longer have periods of thinking I am a secret agent. I no longer think that at any moment the aliens are going to scream out of the sky as I walk down Victoria Lane past the hospital and my powers will properly develop. I still do abuse alcohol but can just have a single drink although this is a bloody hard job. I have managed to regulate my drug intake. I’m having a spliff as I write this. I still find it difficult not to roll one in the morning if there is weed there. But I haven’t gone on a 3 month long drug binge on class A, B and C’s since I got out of catering. I am still a bisexual hypersexual although I have been monogamous since last year after a ‘fuck’ binge lasting about three months.

At the moment I have had few recognisable periods of happiness over the last few months. This has been interspersed with depression and the alcohol abuse. This has been since my wife’s diagnosis as Bipolar. My cousin has BP I and we never got on. Two Hyper BP I’s in the same vicinity is a little volatile. Two people thinking that they are the most important beings in the world? I didn’t identify with her then and I still find it difficult to now. Although having friends who were undergoing treatments for other mental health problems I stigmatised Bipolar. I did not find anything out about it as I would have done with anything else I came across.

It took me over two weeks to actually start looking at BP after MrsP was diagnosed. I was scared at what I’d find out. Suddenly this wasn’t my wife, this was Mrs Bipolar. Once I’d seen Stephen Fry’s programme on the BBC I had a very small picture of what I was looking at. It was just enough to make me watch my wife hour by hour thinking “Is she looking happy because she is on an up? Am I going to have to deal with all those things on that bloody programme that lead to penury and my life being put on the back burner? Or is she unhappy because she is about to go into a depression? Am I going to be coming home every night dreading to see the pain and emptiness in my wife’s eyes? I know depression. I had thought it was depression. When MrsP wasn’t depressed, she lit up a room, she absolutely shone and everything was exciting and larger than life. I thought “this is the person I fell in love with…?”

Who is this in between person? Who would she be if she wasn’t ill? I suddenly felt then that I didn’t know her anymore. I knew I loved her. I just didn’t know who it was I loved.

I realise now that the woman I fell in love with was this same woman. I may be a little calmer now but
I’m still the same person she fell in love with. Why should it be different for her. I made the mistake of just seeing the disease. I don’t excuse myself for it but I know now it was knee-jerk.

I’ve now been learning along my wife. I follow her blog. I read some of the other blogs about BP. I know now my extreme behaviour from an early age may also be somewhere along the BP scale. I may just have been a hypersexual, alcohol and drug abusing demagogue alternating with a very self destructive depressive. J

I’ve learned to tame the highs, to put myself out of harms way, but it leaves me unfulfilled. The lows I have got a face for. Either it is a switched on “happy face” for on-stage or I go a bit robot. I had a bit of a breakdown in November but I don’t know if this was depression or was it just a natural reaction to a hard time at home. That’s why I asked the question at the top of the page. I’ve never been diagnosed. I don’t know if I just react naturally to things or if I too have a problem. Am I just alternating between sad and happy? Or is Bipolar contagious?

This journey so far has shaken my faith in what I know. What I do know is that whoever I am, and no matter where Mrs P is on her part of the journey, I know I love her.