It may seem like a little thing to you, but my being able to add posts to this blog is a dream come true for me!! I struggled for hours and hours in the past few days, putting my domain, redtailyes.blog, into my phone and my tablet, not being able to access this “add post” site. But here I am!! Access acquired!! Somehow I figured it out!
This past 4 months have been a TRIP for me—being hospitalized 3-4 times for complications with my bipolar disorder. Honestly, my “system” swings into destructive mode and I have often found myself in the throws of suicidal ideation…SI…
SI is a mindset of just “Not wanting to wake up” for me…it goes way back to the year 1980 when I first became suicidal in January ‘80, the second half of my senior year in high school. I was like the boy with wings (in Greek mythology, I think) who flew too close to the sun and the warming rays melted the wax on his wings, and he came barreling down to his demise. I was a captain on the hockey team, leader on the football team, and in the yearbook for “best dressed” and “most likely to succeed”!! I thought I was pretty big stuff my senior year in high school!!
There is so much I could share about that time in my life, but I will just keep it simple…
In late January 1980, I had caught myself in a lie, or at least a half-truth that “I LOVE YOU” had come from my lips to my then-girlfriend, Allison, the prettiest gal in Buffalo (Minnesota) High School…I was in a confused state that January evening, (as I remember) on a Tuesday night when I came home from a Buffalo High basketball game to find myself in DEEP DOUBT…I sat in our La-Z-boy and my thoughts came spinning down: “I had told Allison that I loved her and I don’t think that I do—I don’t really like her much of the time…But if I don’t LOVE her, how can I love my parents? And my 8 brothers and sisters? And my many other friends?” My thoughts spun me around, and just like flushing a toilet, I fell headlong into depression! I watched the buttercup moon walk across the sky that first night of my depression, as I languished in bed pondering my “un-love” status.
I don’t know how much my bipolar disorder played in that very first depression, but I kind of gauge it that THIS was the entry point for my bipolar to take hold. For the next 5 months, I suffered the ups & downs and the ins and outs of this depressive state until I graduated from high school and went to work my summer job at my dad’s construction company. There, I was given the lowly duty of trimming pipe with an acetylene torch contraption.
I eased out of the SI depression in mid-June, then by July 1980 I had been in a flimsy balance for a few weeks when my system kicked ‘er into overdrive and, unknowingly, I become manic and excited about life again! In August, I went out West to Montana and Colorado in a large van with 7 of my high school buddies and made a fool of myself! I was so excited to be alive that I wanted to experience EVERYTHING, from the bison along the road to Crazy Horse mountain where they had started blasting rock and creating the figure of CrazY Horse pointing forward from his horse, in Montana. The elation I felt was the opposite of the drastic SI depression I had been in that spring. It felt amazingly good—but actually TOO GOOD in my manic, unbridled, impulsive state that got me in so much trouble—not with the law or anything, but in my interpersonal relationships.
I ended up in September of 1980 heading to college at Mankato State University, 80 miles south of Minneapolis. And I began taking Lithium, prescribed by a psychiatrist I saw just before entering college. The little pink pill adjusted and balanced my mood and I spent a good 6 years in pretty good balance!!
I want to give a SHOUT OUT to all of these wonderful people—doctors and nurses and support staff AND ALSO fellow patients— I have crossed paths with, especially these past 3-4 months of life-improving hospitalizations! “U R Wondeful!!” Thanks for all your time and attention! My moods are currently stable and I am in a good head space.
Rich