M
mothcorrupteth
Guest
Hi all. I've been shying away from the BP forums for a while, but curiosity brings me to ask a question: How many of you had an experience similar to mine? (Obviously, I'll need to tell you what my experience has been.)
As best as I can reconstruct what has happened to me, my mood disturbances began close to when I was 15. They may have begun earlier, but the only evidence I have for that is that I was socially very awkward, which I can chalk up to how much my parents sheltered me from the kinds of influences most of my non-Christian peers were exposed to. The most compelling evidence I can find for age 15 is that that was the first time I can remember having a spell of obsessive anger. Namely, I had read R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and I was enraged that nobody else I knew seemed to comprehend what a brilliant idea it would be to introduce Heinlein's utopian form of government.
From there, the last 10 years become increasingly blurry. Something that I'm coming to appreciate now that I've removed a few stressors from my life and my mind has had the chance to adjust, is that when your mood becomes unresponsive to the environment, it can't make those continuous minor adjustments that most other people's brains are making in conversation, or during highly emotional events. In other words, just about every significant event of my life during the past 10 years, including my marriage and my wife divorcing me, has been no more or less significant to me that facts you would memorize from a textbook. And conversation was incredibly boring to me, because I couldn't detect the different shades of mood behind the other person's words.
I also assumed that everybody else's minds functioned like mine, so I was constantly angry because I was convinced that everybody was faking their emotional reactions. The emotions that everybody expressed over 9/11 during the entire month after it happened were lost on me. It was melodrama to me: a TV soap opera where the actors were so bad at their jobs that I couldn't understand why it was still on the air. Why was I supposed to care about what happened to 3000 people I'd never even met before? In my high school English class we were given the assignment of writing poems, with illustrations, about 9/11 that were to be displayed in the case at the school's entrance. I wrote a screed about how transparently hypocritical everyone was being about the tragedy. When I think about it today that that poem was on display up there for about a month, for everybody to see that I wrote it, it's a sad moment for me. You might begin to understand why my wife left me--and the odd thing about that, again, is that the only emotional impact that leaves on me today is that it undermines my general faith in people, because my wife figured out something was wrong with me and left me hanging out to dry anyway.
It's been 10 years since the show Firefly was canceled from FOX, and I had watched it when it first aired. I loved that show, but not for any of the reasons that made it great. For some reason, its costumes and set design put me a more tolerable mood. Years later, it started to lose its luster as my moods became worse and worse. A few months ago, I thought about getting rid of my DVDs, but never did. Then, on a whim, I started watching them Friday night. I realized pretty quick into the pilot episode that 90% of the show had gone over my head. The whole point of the show is to highlight the interactions between the characters, which I could never follow before for the same reason that conservations bored me.
You know what that's like? Waking up one morning and realizing that everything you've been striving for during the last 10 years has been based on a misunderstanding of human nature? It's like in Flowers for Algernon when Charlie finally reaches a level of intelligence where he can understand that he was the butt of every joke back when he was still mentally r3tarded. You know what it's like going for 10 years not wanting to be a elitist snob but never being able to escape the feeling that you are the only one on the planet who comprehends the sheer hypocrisy and emotional immaturity of everyone, and building elaborate theories about why that is, only to find out one day that it was all a misunderstanding? Imagine it. Living with the constant back-and-forth: yes, they really are all that hypocritical; no, no, I need to be more sensitive and try to having feelings like theirs; wait, I was right the first time, and they really are that hypocritical. It's kind of an anti-climax to discover that both answers were right.
Has that been anyone else's experience, who has bipolar? I know I can't be the only one.
As best as I can reconstruct what has happened to me, my mood disturbances began close to when I was 15. They may have begun earlier, but the only evidence I have for that is that I was socially very awkward, which I can chalk up to how much my parents sheltered me from the kinds of influences most of my non-Christian peers were exposed to. The most compelling evidence I can find for age 15 is that that was the first time I can remember having a spell of obsessive anger. Namely, I had read R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and I was enraged that nobody else I knew seemed to comprehend what a brilliant idea it would be to introduce Heinlein's utopian form of government.
From there, the last 10 years become increasingly blurry. Something that I'm coming to appreciate now that I've removed a few stressors from my life and my mind has had the chance to adjust, is that when your mood becomes unresponsive to the environment, it can't make those continuous minor adjustments that most other people's brains are making in conversation, or during highly emotional events. In other words, just about every significant event of my life during the past 10 years, including my marriage and my wife divorcing me, has been no more or less significant to me that facts you would memorize from a textbook. And conversation was incredibly boring to me, because I couldn't detect the different shades of mood behind the other person's words.
I also assumed that everybody else's minds functioned like mine, so I was constantly angry because I was convinced that everybody was faking their emotional reactions. The emotions that everybody expressed over 9/11 during the entire month after it happened were lost on me. It was melodrama to me: a TV soap opera where the actors were so bad at their jobs that I couldn't understand why it was still on the air. Why was I supposed to care about what happened to 3000 people I'd never even met before? In my high school English class we were given the assignment of writing poems, with illustrations, about 9/11 that were to be displayed in the case at the school's entrance. I wrote a screed about how transparently hypocritical everyone was being about the tragedy. When I think about it today that that poem was on display up there for about a month, for everybody to see that I wrote it, it's a sad moment for me. You might begin to understand why my wife left me--and the odd thing about that, again, is that the only emotional impact that leaves on me today is that it undermines my general faith in people, because my wife figured out something was wrong with me and left me hanging out to dry anyway.
It's been 10 years since the show Firefly was canceled from FOX, and I had watched it when it first aired. I loved that show, but not for any of the reasons that made it great. For some reason, its costumes and set design put me a more tolerable mood. Years later, it started to lose its luster as my moods became worse and worse. A few months ago, I thought about getting rid of my DVDs, but never did. Then, on a whim, I started watching them Friday night. I realized pretty quick into the pilot episode that 90% of the show had gone over my head. The whole point of the show is to highlight the interactions between the characters, which I could never follow before for the same reason that conservations bored me.
You know what that's like? Waking up one morning and realizing that everything you've been striving for during the last 10 years has been based on a misunderstanding of human nature? It's like in Flowers for Algernon when Charlie finally reaches a level of intelligence where he can understand that he was the butt of every joke back when he was still mentally r3tarded. You know what it's like going for 10 years not wanting to be a elitist snob but never being able to escape the feeling that you are the only one on the planet who comprehends the sheer hypocrisy and emotional immaturity of everyone, and building elaborate theories about why that is, only to find out one day that it was all a misunderstanding? Imagine it. Living with the constant back-and-forth: yes, they really are all that hypocritical; no, no, I need to be more sensitive and try to having feelings like theirs; wait, I was right the first time, and they really are that hypocritical. It's kind of an anti-climax to discover that both answers were right.
Has that been anyone else's experience, who has bipolar? I know I can't be the only one.
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