Chapter 2:

The Effects of the Lockdowns

I AM DETERMINED TO BEAT THE STIGMA OF BIPOLARITY. More and more, we get to know people who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and panic attacks. Without being a doctor, I can say all these conditions are the result of an imbalance in our brain. Medication has been for me, my saving board. I understand how common the rejection of being medicated is. I understand how much we want our bodies to just respond and have this condition under control. I was there once. I asked my psychiatrist to reduce my dose to the minimum possible, I went through cognitive therapy sessions, and I had monthly sessions with my psychiatrist. My family doctor and I check constantly how I am and how I feel, especially since I have turned perimenopausal. Why? Because in the case of women, our moods are also connected to our hormonal changes.

I am not familiar with men diagnosed with bipolar disorder. All I know is that we struggle in the same way with being medicated and being kept under observation, while we find what our bodies need to get settled and tame our minds. We suffer from an invisible sickness that is not completely understood yet by the world. In the early years of my diagnosis, in 2012, while I was visiting Colombia, my mom came across a newspaper article about a book written by the Argentinian clinical psychologist, Eduardo H. Grecco, who is bipolar himself. This article and reading his books brought insights into my life that helped me come to terms with my diagnosis and caused me to be determined to try to keep myself well and stable. 

Here is the link to the article: https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-12379364 — This is the title of the article in Spanish: “La bipolaridad puede esconder un don. Según el psicólogo Eduardo Grecco el bipolar puede tener un talento que no ha logrado desarrollar.” This would be my English translation of the title: “Bipolarity can be a hidden gift. According to Psychologist, Eduardo H. Grecco, a person who is bipolar can have a talent that has not yet been developed.”

Yes, he nailed it. Dr. Grecco is bipolar himself, and in his two books La bipolaridad como don (Bipolarity as a gift) and Despertar el don bipolar (Discovering or Awakening the Bipolar gift) he taught me how my sickness was not a burden, but a gift to be unraveled. I promise you, that if you stay with me for the next 10 pages, you will not need to read anything else to understand the point I am trying to make. I give total credit to whoever summarized, in that article, the findings of this insightful psychologist called Eduardo H. Grecco. I hope one day I can meet with him in person. I would shake his hand and thank him for the brave and courageous stand he has taken to explain, untangle and bring back to grace what being bipolar is. Thank you!

I have not read that article in a long time. Its essence, I can assure you, has stayed with me forever. I decided that the best way to pass on the message to you is to break down line by line the truths that are stated in that newspaper article. Beyond that, it is up to you, to link it to your own reality and to your own life experiences. I am well aware that the way its content has resonated with me might not be the same way it will resonate with you, and that is okay. We are all at different stages in our journey. I hope these findings set you on the path of a peaceful and rewarding self-discovery and self-restoring journey.

CALLING OURSELVES BIPOLAR IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT. It is

a limiting belief and does not honour the fantastic human beings that we are. We are more than the two moods between which our emotions fluctuate. Ninety percent of the time, if not more, we are functional, regular, “NORMAL” people. There is that percentage of the time, mostly while we are asleep, that our brain keeps functioning, rolling, getting our body exhausted, robbing our energy and leaving us depleted. During this time, we are unable to cope with the world.

It was in that consciousness of the unconscious where I found my peace. Being conscious and aware of what happens in the back of my mind, of the changes we all go through as we raise a family and as we age. In other words, as human beings we are subjected to physical changes that we don’t even notice. The biggest changes in my moods were related to my fertile cycle. I never used contraception. I used natural family planning and still dealt with problems of infertility and not being able to maintain pregnancies. The ups and downs of my estrogen and progesterone levels altered my moods and made me susceptible to so many swings, that I could not label my emotions properly. 

OUR MOOD SWINGS ARE JUST THAT, SWINGS OF NORMAL EMOTIONS. One of the hardest things to understand about bipolar disorder is that we are not aliens. We are not out of this world or weirdos. Why? Our only issue is that we cannot stop the swinging between emotions. But who can? It is as negative for people to feel excessively than to not be able to feel at all. Many books, articles and medical reviews point to our experience in the womb or to an emotional wound of the past as the cause of the oscillation. For me, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really care why. Now that I have made peace with my own emotionality, the cause is irrelevant.

What is really relevant is how much you are swinging between the emotions of being sad and being happy. How sad are you? How happy are you? How often are those swings happening? Is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it monthly? Is it seasonal? You can map your emotions very easily if you compare them with a child on a swing set. Are you the kid that swings up and down like crazy? The one adults would yell at because we worried they could get hurt? Let’s use the law of physics which states that for every action, there is a reaction. If you pull yourself very high, the lows will be very low, and you can lose control of the swing. If you are cautious and find a rhythm that works for you, you will have a pleasant time. Do you see where the dilemma is? It is in how high YOU WANT to swing. For me, being bipolar without the meds is like swinging without any limits.

The use of medication can be a personal decision. It is not as easy as deciding to take a Tylenol for a headache, but as important as using insulin if you are a diabetic or deciding to do chemo if you have cancer. It is at that same level for me. I don’t mean to be a pusher, but I believe only time and the methodic, obedient and appropriate use of a prescribed medication brings stability. Once you have gained the confidence in your own self and your body, you can evaluate, talk with your doctor and decide if it works for you. Why am I such an advocate for getting the right medication? Because in one day, my psychiatrist, who I consider a good friend, changed my mood so that I could cope with a difficult situation without hurting myself. I say he is a genius, because he did not switch my medication, which I had been taking for twelve years, but adjusted the dose and opted for the XR version, which is an all-day release. That was it. He also added an antidepressant, and I was hesitant. I did not want to take both medications at the same time. What if they damaged my kidney or liver function? Did I really need them? I struggled for weeks, maybe even months, with these thoughts and it was hard. I was not able to manage two medications. He turned to me and said: “Maria, take them together at night.” That worked! My first name is Maria. Only my doctors, my lawyers and any law officers call me by my first name. My friends and coworkers call me Alexa or Alexandra or Alle, so even in the number of names I have, I am TRIPOLAR.

If we know how often the swings are happening and how high the highs are and how low the lows are, we can act upon them. If it is the swinging that disturbs our functionality, then finding a pattern will definitely help us to be proactive and anticipate the moods. Most of us are not used to examining ourselves, so we can’t really map the state of our mind. We stay on the surface, making people uncomfortable because we are not okay, and they don’t know what to do. We end up losing hope in ourselves. We feel people don’t care, but the truth is they care so much that it hurts. They might even get to the point of shutting you down, or ghosting you, as the new generation would say. When we feel uncomfortable with what we don’t understand, we either reject it or attack it. Our highs and lows become a power struggle between opinions and points of view.

These swings of emotion have been accurately portrayed in the Disney movie called ‘Inside Out.’ Here we see how they are a part of everyone’s life since adolescence, or I would say since birth. Who has not seen a baby that smiles only to start crying like crazy because of something scary or it was feeding time? This is the description on Wikipedia.org for the movie: “Within the mind of a girl named Riley are the basic emotions that control her actions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Her experiences become memories, stored as colored orbs, which are sent into long-term memory each night. Her five most important “core memories” power aspects of her personality take the form of floating islands. Joy acts as the leader, and she and the rest of the emotions try to limit Sadness’s influence.” That is the plot of the movie and is something that we all experience in real life. We all want to be happy. Only the geniuses at Pixar could explain emotions in such an easy, animated way. Someone in that team might be TRIPOLAR.

Wikipedia continues: “A major aspect of ‘Inside Out’ is the way emotions and memories are portrayed in the film. The core memories in the film allow Riley to recall previous experiences which control her emotions and can allow ‘mental time travel’. In the film, memories are shown as translucent globes that encapsulate its events, with a different hue depending on the mood of each memory.” Wow. This is a great explanation of how we travel back and forth between happy and sad memories. Our moods are what lead us to act in fear and anger or to stay put, erring on the side of caution.

This other comment in Wikipedia just opened a new rainbow of possibilities where we accept that we are conditioned by our experiences and that we feel in certain ways, with regard to certain things, because we all have gone through either positive or traumatic experiences. Here it goes: “Another theme was forgetfulness, representing a ‘common but unsupported theory leading to a ‘permanent loss of information’.” My understanding of this last quote is influenced by a book on exercising the power of your memory. We forget things, because they are considered by our unconscious mind as useless OR because they are too painful. Our minds block them in order to protect us.

I love that movie and the fact that it portrays emotions as individual characters. The characters are represented as being pretty alive, as human beings are. Each emotion is A CHARACTER and it is the wrestling between these emotions which determine our moods. Wikipedia explains: “In Joy and Sadness’s absence, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are left in control, with disastrous results, distancing Riley from her parents, friends, and hobbies. Because of this, her personality islands gradually crumble and fall into the ‘Memory Dump’, where memories are forgotten. Finally, Anger inserts an idea into the console, prompting Riley to run away to Minnesota, believing it will restore her happiness.”

This movie deserves a whole workshop to analyze the depth of the concepts that describe the human mind and the range of emotions that influence our trains of thought which lead the “headquarters” of our minds in a set direction. I actually did that analysis for a group of parents, and for some of the attendees, my explanations sounded a bit childish. Do you know why? Adult minds lose flexibility or rather, malleability. Googling its meaning, malleability is a noun. “The definition of malleability, relates to the quality or state of being malleable such as: a: capability of being shaped or extended by hammering, forging, etc. The malleability of tin b: capability of being influenced or altered by external forces. The malleability of memory . . . is the first reason why autobiographies should be taken with a grain of salt.—Judith Rich Harris”.

The minds of children are in permanent development. We say they are like sponges because they can absorb everything. They are absolutely creative, attentive and malleable. We just have to get used to understanding that a child is not an adult in miniature. They are not a reduction of us, and they do not understand why we as parents act in a certain way or react to things that for them are not that important. This is because our knowledge is formed by our experiences. We know things because we have lived through them, experienced them, and reflected on them and that leads us to take action in different ways. That is why something that is pretty easy for me, can be challenging for someone else. That is why, when I mention something to another person, they might feel pressured. All this is because every human being is a world. So, our planet is made up of billions of “walking worlds” interacting with one another.

The collapse of these “worlds” is the result of under-understood emotions and of the mix and probably incompatibility of different trains of thought. Relationships are complicated. Not per se, because a relationship can be explained as the interaction between two people. What makes it complicated is that every person is a whole world. In conversations, a common saying is not to mix pears with apples, right? Well, our relationships are more like a fruit salad. We are a mix of many fruits, some of which, put together with others, do not mesh. For this reason, couple relationships are like a matching game. You either get the right match, or you lose.

It is clear in the Inside Out movie that happiness is not an emotion. It is a place we all want to go. It is the wrestling between joy and sadness that triggers the other emotions. “When Joy finally understands Sadness’s purpose: alerting others when Riley is emotionally overwhelmed and needs help” all falls back into place. This is a skeletal summary of the movie and an even more skeletal picture of human emotions. Emotions also depend on the time of year because they are affected by weather. The way we work and we rest also play a part in our emotional stability. I am not a morning person; most of the time I am a night owl, but I function all day long quite effectively. My days are long. I feel I live in a triple-shift: morning, day and night.

All this analysis, trying to write each sentence together and come up with a simple explanation of my understanding of emotions, has made me exhausted. I truly believe that if adults stopped seeing the world only with their grown-up minds, the world would certainly be better. Kids and this new generation of adolescents and young adults, made up of our children, have got a lot of things right. We have to stop feeling offended by their remarks, by their courage to stand up for their ideals—without resorting to violence of course—and start working together on the world they will be inheriting from us in the near future. With this pandemic, it is more and more obvious that the atrocities and problems of the past need to be solved with audacity while trying to maintain a just equilibrium. This is the work of my lifetime: I am determined to beat the stigma of bipolarity. Together we can create awareness and help people to grow their understanding of the mental challenges we all experience at some point in our lives.

We have the opportunity to keep growing as a society and turn the turmoil of the reality we have to live into an opportunity. We have the opportunity to turn despair into hope for a better and more understanding society.

Or, Contact us at: iamtripolarbyalle@outlook.com