Monday, January 30, 2012

Can a person be a Christian and be Bi-polar?

I spoke with my aunt on the phone this evening after talking to my mom and saying some things that scared her. She thinks I should be evaluated for a Bipolar disorder because it runs in the family and my mood swings have been both sudden and extreme. 

I told my aunt that yesterday was a really good day. The sun was shining, I was in a good mood, I felt poetic, I felt good, I started doing stuff, and I started cleaning, and I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned.  There was probably nothing that could have brought me down yesterday. And then this morning I woke up, didn't feel either good or bad, but my back hurt (probably from sleeping in a weird position), so I stayed in bed for another two hours and finally got up, dressed and went to church. 

At church I started feeling extremely irritated. There was a person sitting behind me who was doing the anxiety thing where they fidget, and he was shaking his leg really fast. I could feel it making everything around me shake and I got so irritated that I got up and left the room and went and sat in a different room all by myself.  Then the day went on, I still didn't feel either good or bad, just normal. And I was talking with my cousin Brandy and I was thinking about the tax predictor thing and how it predicted I would owe $1200 and I started feeling incredibly anxious.

I started feeling so anxious that I literally could not see hope for the future. My future felt so bleak and miserable and I felt so trapped in this hoplessness that I told my mom I didnt want to live and that if I ended up owing the government $1200 (like the tax estimator thing predicted) that I might as well jump off a bridge because I would never get it paid off.

My mom started to tell me that she didn't want to hear me talk like that and I hung up on her and then cried because I felt so alone and because I just wanted someone to tell me things will get better. And then I went and checked the mail and I got my insurance statement in the mail and I cried because my monthly payments went up about $5 a month. (Now that I look back on it, it feels pretty rediculous, but just a few hours ago all of these things felt like the end of the world, and tried to feel better, I tried to pray).

So when I did calm down, I called my mom back and let her know I was feeling better (she had called back to check on me, but I didn't hear my phone), we talked about it, and I realized that this has happened to me several times over the past few months... maybe even over the past year. I used to be so happy-go-lucky and simply go with the flow of things, now I have bouts of utter hopelessness so bad that I don't want to live during those moments.  What happened?

And now... I don't feel horribly depressed. I feel mellow and tired.

So after we spoke, my mom suggested I talk to my aunt (who is bipolar), so I called her told her all about it and she laughed at me and suggested I get checked because I sound just like she did before she was diagnosed.

I don't know what I'm going to do.  I think jumping to believing I have a bipolar disorder is a little extreme. It could be a hormone imbalance. Elevated estrogen levels can mess a person up.

 But I also don't want be looking for excuses either.  Maybe there is another explanation that doesn't involve drugging myself to get better. Try harder to give my worries to God?  I don't know.

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