Residual Delusions

Posted on March 26, 2006 in Mania Uncertainty

Not all delusions come from our disease. I have several of them, mostly fears that have put claims down on decisions I must make every day. Before I was hospitalized last year, I took hikes that took me up to nine miles round trip almost every day. Even though exercise is by all accounts good for you, I became convinced that if I resumed my lifestyle, I would flash into an episode again. When I told this to my endocrinologist, she was confounded. I understood her predicament. I knew that the hiking was good for my heart, my blood sugar, my lungs, and my mood, yet I dreaded to do it because of the mania. A clear delusion or, maybe, just a phobia.

Until just a few days ago, I stopped keeping a journal. Next to my bed, I have a stack of notebooks filled with morning pages, evening pages, poetry, essays, and snatches of novels and short stories. In the months before the disease pressed my ductile consciousness into morbid absurdity, I wrote and wrote. I attended poetry readings. Met with friends. And after….I again began to fear that the writing had been the Disease. So I did not do any writing offline. It was all for the blog where you and others could see it; where you could check my sanity for me (as many other bipolar bloggers do).

I can list places that I fear to go, people I dread to meet, books I am afraid to read, and so forth. I have guarded against writing poems. All delusions or phobias or maybe real triggers that I should shun. Bipolar disorder: you never know if you are riding a jet or a butterfly. Or stuck on the ground taking a leak in the middle of the runway.