Rewarded for patience

I am well pleased with myself. Following my low energy episode (which I could call a depressive mood), I am happy because I feel I handled it well.

There are always two sides of the bipolar coin: how you feel and how you react to how you feel.

The underside of the coin is the bit that we don't often see for ourselves because it requires two things:

1. Considerable experience of living in Bi-Polar Land
2. Sufficient self-awareness and self-responsibility in order to make the most of the above experience.

Number 1 above is paramount because it is our experience that gives us perspective. It isn't until we have been around the bipolar cycles many times that we get to recognise what we are feeling. This may sound surprising but the way our illness grabs us by the brain and shakes us around all over the place makes it very difficult to know EXACTLY what we are feeling at any one time. It's a bit like being caught in a violent storm when our instinctive reaction is to close our eyes, not look around to see exactly what is going on. 

Number 2 above is crucial because it gives us two things:

• The knowledge we need to recognise who we are at our core and how we behave by comparison when in crisis
• The desire to take whatever action we can to move forward in a way that avoids repeating behavioural mistakes

Coming back to my violent storm example, it is when we have been in a storm a few times that we know what we can do to keep ourselves as safe as possiblle, using all our self-knowledge to avoid taking unnecessary risks - we might like riding our bike but this does not mean that this would be a good time to cycle around... The choice is ours.

Where I am concerned, the choice was mine too.  I could either get really upset about being unable to do very much OR I could accept the situation I was in patiently and graciously.  I chose the second option and I feel I am rewarded by feeling better today.

I KNOW from previous experience that fighting my illness only makes things worse for me - like Don Quixote fighting windmills I exhaust myself further by fighting the stormy winds of exhaustion (or another day the stormy winds of agitation). 

By being patient and gracious rather than frustrated and resentful, I feel I treated my illness as a 'friend' rather than as an ennemy and I kept my depressive episode as short as possible.

I might well be wrong but twenty years of living in Bi-Polar Land tell me I am on to something ... :0)