I am amazed at how treatable bipolar really is. I’m not on much medication, but the effects are huge. My car is totaled, and I feel okay. I feel very calm. Of course when they gave me the news I did start laughing and crying at the same time (a little minor hysteria) and I didn’t get much sleep last night, but there was no throwing things (okay, some swearing). Is it all because of two pills a day?

I remember a time not long ago, before I was diagnosed, where I really thought that throwing things helped. It didn’t. I’ve lost a lot of nice things as a result and have some holes in the walls that I still have to patch. Of course, those serve as a reminder.

There was this one particular time, when I think I realized that there was something really wrong with my mind. I was being pushed, verbally, by my boyfriend at the time. He really liked to do that. It was nothing nasty, but fucking relentless! On and On and On he went about me and my problems and how they created all of our problems. I kept telling him to just stop, but of course he didn’t, so I got up and went into the bathroom, shut the door and started screaming “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone!!!” I had passed the meltdown stage.

He kept talking to me through the door, so I opened it and yanked something off the wall and threw it. It wasn’t enough. I then grabbed a framed photograph that I took of a flower that was hanging on the wall of the bathroom. It was a close up of a thistle. By now things were moving in slow motion for me and it was quite surreal. I smashed the photograph on the floor as hard as I could. I watched the glass shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces and ripple across the hardwood floor. It was so… beautiful. Like skiing on corn snow and watching it rush down the mountain in front of you, or dropping a small pebble into a still pond. I looked up at my now very alarmed boyfriend and pointed to the glass and said, “That is what my mind is like”.

Last night I was reading to my son and he says, “Well it sucks the car is dead”. I normally wouldn’t like that kind of talk coming from him, but I tolerated it in this situation. “At least I didn’t throw anything”, I said back.  He remembered a time when I foolishly got mad at my iPhone and broke it because I couldn’t get a signal or something. I had to buy a new one. Stupid. So he says to me “Yeah, you don’t do that anymore”. I told him there was a reason for that and I would explain it to him sometime. It was a good affirmation that he could see the difference in me. I have been waiting for that.