Is being "normal" really better?!

Is being "normal" really better?

The medication is supposed to level me out, make me "normal", but I don't want to blend in. I like being different. Granted, I also like being functional, so medicated I am. I just want to know why the goal is to be like everyone else.

I don't take meds to be like everyone else. I take meds to function, to keep my mind going at a functional speed, to let my moods drift down so I don't have to send that outraged letter that I still had to write for some reason. Now my anger fades by the next day. It's amazing. One day I just can't stand some injustice and can express myself very well exactly why it's injustice, why I am seeing it in its proper context, and what the consequences are for whoever it is hurting. The next day all that is still true, but I can accept that it wouldn't help anything to stir up some normal person on this point. I've done that enough already.

For that one effect I would get down and kiss my lithium's feet if it had any.

I had an uncle who was diagnosed in the thirties as schizophrenic. I've read his letters, where sometimes every other word was "good", "better", or "best". The euphoria dripped off the pages. I am sure he was bipolar, not schizophrenic. They gave him one shot at life again after his first craziness as a teenager, but when he failed that he went back to the state hospital where he stayed from his teens into his forties. Then he lived the rest of his life in group homes.

Somehow my bipolar disorder started later than his did. As a teen I just had depressions with a little craziness only I knew about. Meds didn't intervene in the natural course of my illness until my thirties when my career and marriage were both in trouble. They saved my career for a while, not my marriage. Maybe more important my meds let me be a person instead of a disease like my uncle was. He was thoroughly dominated by his illness. It's all he had. I have more, because of my meds.

I volunteer to help people, an extension of my helping profession, from which I took early retirement. It's not my disease that dictates that. As much as I have seen wonderful things and felt great joy in my manias, that's not where the love in my life comes from. It comes from a life I had to examine thoroughly because my illness was such a sneaky little bastard, because it made me look at every stupid conflict in my psyche through one mood or another. I turned to God for that, something many people feel disaffected from, but God will listen when no one else will. I was as surprised as anyone when God answered me, especially in that first mania when He showed up in some sunlight. I've known Him ever since. I've needed to.

I'm satisfied that I have sorted out what's real about my experiences as someone with bipolar disorder from what's meaningless disease-generated words, images and emotions. There has been some benefit to me in learning to say whatever I feel like saying, do whatever I feel like doing and not get caught up in pettiness like so many people do. I never would have learned this as much as I did except by trying to cope with all the drama.

Yet would I be normal if I could? HELL YES I WOULD! If I could trade away all the knowledge of failure I have, the little bit of moodiness I'm stuck with no matter what I do, and the blank stare I would get if I tried to explain my life to almost anyone, I wouldn't mind losing all the wisdom about life and very unusual experiences I've had in my life. I would choose to be normal because normal feels better than I ever feel, though I have no side effects from meds, no financial or other insecurities, and my mood is terrifically balanced. The world hates me. Each time someone asks a question here about his or her awful bipolar spouse I'm reminded how the world hates me, scapegoat that I can be. My wife didn't love me enough to put up with my never again being the man she married. She had flaws that explained that. So does the world. I know how they've hated me for being bipolar, as if I am merely a nuisance to them. I know how the world hates my clients for being poor, also a nuisance . The normal people ask why all these nuisances don't just fix themselves, and perhaps look forward to the day when some fix will be imposed on us.

And I would be normal? Yes I would. And I would dismiss the problems of others as simplistically as normal people do. And I wouldn't feel the burden of half a lifetime spent being bipolar, with a mind that's not exactly mine, with everyday having this degree of struggle like life and death, just to keep breathing, while normal people have no idea what that's like. I would just as soon never have learned what my life is like. And I'm not the least bit depressed in saying that. It's just realism.

Only I'm not normal, and I don't have meds to make me normal. I could resume Seroquel and my moodiness would be even less. I'd rather have my current moodiness than that feeling of being encased in glass, though, or anything in that direction. There's no normality in that.

I can't be normal. I can't be 20 again or any other age except my current age. This is the life I have. If I think I got a raw deal, I can think of my uncle, my clients - not one of whom would I switch places with, sane as most of them are, but poor, or people in the past, like slaves. I'll take my life over many others, my genetic heritage, my illegitimate conception, my growing up in an angry home, my learning about bipolar disorder the hard way, my learning how to live the hard way, not because I don't want better or normal, but because it's mine, and someone loves me for being me. Craziness is not mine. Craziness is asking to be mugged, literally or figuratively. I take my meds so I won't be crazy.

I can't possibly be like anyone else, much less everyone else. Even if I rambled on twice this long I can't tell anyone reading this who I am. Start with bipolar or any other characteristic and you can't know that I am unlike any other person you associate with such labels. I must admit I wouldn't trade my uniqueness to be normal. I would trade in the pain I've accumulated being abnormal, and lose much of who I am in the bargain, but not who I am to the one who truly loves me. I never would have understood that without living my crazy life, how important real love is, not what anyone has in their twenties, but something beyond selfishness, something that can withstand change.

No one would have felt that about my uncle. He was just crazy. But someone feels that way about me. Whether I like it or not, I am different. Meds can't make me less different, but they keep me from being crazy, and no one likes me when I'm crazy. Not many people like me when I'm just different, and that's painful, a pain I would trade for being normal if I could, but I can't. I live the life I have with the love I give and the love I receive. That's what's real.