Life & Death
This sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it, and yet Bi-Polar Landers live pretty much on the edge of life and death.
We live on the edge of life because there are times when we can barely function. Depressive episodes are on the edge of survival when our body can just about cope with breathing and keeping our heart beating. Many of us can’t even keep our body temperature steady. This ‘concrete body’ experience does NOT feel like we are fully alive and, as all we seem able to do is sleep for hours on end, we really do feel like we are just a few steps away from being in a coma.
When we experience this depressive ‘paralysis’ being told that all we need is positive thinking to feel better is frankly ridiculous and I would go as far as calling it insulting.
ALL we can do in those times is accept the way our body and our brain are functioning because any attempt at fighting it makes us feel even worse. In fact, if we fight our illness during a severe depressive episode, it will come back at us with the force of a tsunami.
We also live on the edge of the life we used to live before our chronic illness ‘ruled’ our everyday routine. It’s hard for us to feel fully alive when we can no longer do the work we used to love and when we are often totally broke as a result. It’s easy to feel like one of life’s ‘rejects’.
And we live on the edge of death when we end up feeling suicidal and the recurring question that keeps hitting our brain is ‘what is the point?’...It is really hard to stay alive when all seems totally hopeless because the only thing we can see stretching ahead of us is more of the same recurring cycle of medication, side-effects, depressive episodes, medical appointments, failure to thrive, life on the edge of life…
People who commit suicide are sometimes called ‘selfish’ and I undersand why - it is because they leave behind them a legacy of grief poisoned with guilt1 and it is a nasty concoction to inherit for people who love them. Having said that, there is only so much pain, physical or mental, that anyone can take and I do not know of any Bi-Polar Lander who has never, at any one time or another, skated on the edge of death.
The only way for us to deal with our Life & Death situation is to define for ourselves what LIFE IS ALL ABOUT. If we believe that life is all about suffering then we are well positioned to cope with living life in Bi-Polar Land but we pay a high price for our attitude because we feed our depression - in other words we make things even worse for ourselves.
If we believe that life is about love in its deepest sense, then it encourages us to:
- Love ourselves by treating ourselves with compassion rather than adding to our burden by judging ourselves and seeing ourselves as failures
- Squeeze any wisdom we can from our experience and learn lessons that have the power to enrich our daily lives
- Love our family, our friends, and our fellow Bi-Polar Landers in a way that builds and sustains a virtuous cycle of support and understanding
- Find our way back to laughter within our illness, and sharing laughter, because one of the most important components of love is joy.
- Decide what path we wish to leave behind for others to find and follow when we are no longer on this earth.
Surprisingly, by living on the edge of Life and on the edge of Death, we learn to know and appreciate the core of what is most important and valuable in Bi-Polar Land - OURSELVES.