Top Ten Bipolar Blogs and Me

Posted on September 12, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Blogging

Congratulations to Crazy Tracy for ending up in Psych Central’s Top Ten Bipolar Blogs! She deserves it!

I am not so sure about Been Broken being there. I went to that blog for months and in the end I concluded that all his work sounded just one note. He has his fans, but frankly I never felt either catharsis or transcendence in his work. Just “I’m depressed” in many different wrappers over and over again. I wonder if blogging is good for him because of this groove. Trick Cycling for Beginners just didn’t hold my interest for very long. I haven’t read any of the others.

I’ve taken a different tack on this blog which is to throw out my whole thinking with the exception of a few confidential areas. So I write about politics, the news, nature, daily life, my reading, and my disease. You won’t see me numbered on bipolar blogs because I don’t conform to the type the board is seeking nor do I advertise myself as a bipolar blogger. I try to be a human being first, a sufferer of my disorder second. This is what my therapist insists upon — that I do not box myself in as “a bipolar”, that the disease doesn’t become the whole of my creativity.

I do continue to suffer over what appears to be the death of my creative impulses after stabilizing. I’ve never been much of a master of writing the long, self-expository confessional — I prefer to be like a camera taking snapshots. If my disease is there influencing the show, then it is there, but it isn’t always going to be the main attraction. I am a polyglot and that is what keeps me vibrant in this world where I count eighteen pills every day (the big swallow is at dinner) just to compel my body to a healthy neutrality. How many times can I write about the sharp corners of Lamictal’s blue shield or the blue-green horse pill that houses my dose of Cardizem?

If I go out in the world seeking the strange, I will find myself strange. Can I afford this?