 CW: dangerous behavior and thoughts

It becomes more and more clear that I have some weird preoccupation with comparison and assuring myself of my diagnosis.

I know we’re all on a spectrum, but it feels like I got too lucky for my issues to be real.

I was getting 3 to 6 hours of sleep every night for 6 months straight. I couldn’t keep dreams separate from reality (and sometimes still can’t). I was falling asleep on tables in restaurants at 6 at night. I was almost crashing my car and feeling nothing. I was going back and forth from high to depressed four to eight times every single day, and people could tell. I had no friends, I looked terrible, I was so done and confused and hateful and frustrated and I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to speed and do drugs and drink myself blind.

But I never self-harmed. I never tried to hurt myself to any degree. I never went to parties or blew my savings on spending sprees. I never touched drugs or alcohol, no matter how bad things got. I never had sex with strangers or experienced psychosis or thought I was God. I got mean, narcissistic, hateful, volatile, and everything on the opposite end of the spectrum, but I never was really “dangerous.” I was probably close, but I never got there.

I was never hospitalized. I liked and still see the first therapist I ever went to. I am only on one prescription. It doesn’t work well enough for me to forget my issues, but I guarantee that I’m in a better place with one prescription than half or more of the people on this sub are on seven. 

It feels unfair. It feels unjustified. Mental illness isn’t a competition, but it doesn’t feel real. Who am I to need medication? Who am I to have gone and gotten help? Why couldn’t I live with these things anymore?

It’s like I don’t deserve help. I should have been able to get it for myself. These people hurting themselves and staying in hospitals and taking eight pills each night just to get through the day are the real sick ones. And not to diss on any of you, but my point is that I’ve never been there. It’s a spectrum, sure, but how am I even here? It’s like I’ve fallen off the edge. There shouldn’t even be a peg on this ruler for me.

So many people get by with cyclothymia undiagnosed and unmedicated. And they are just eccentric, they’re fun, they’re a little bit quirky. There are the “normal,” the “eccentric,” and the “mentally ill.” And I was edging just past eccentric. But who am I to claim that I am mentally ill when the people who really belong here are experiencing things so much more difficult to live with?

I can’t give myself permission to feel this way. I don’t feel like I deserve that luxury of admitting to myself, “yes, you have a problem.” It’s not me who has problems. It’s me who couldn’t fix these minor eccentricities for myself. I should have been able to fix it without help. It makes me feel so guilty and, honestly, weak. If this sub was an in-person support group, I couldn’t say “I’m bipolar” without feeling like a liar. 

It's why I want to skip my meds. I have to prove to myself that if I don’t take them, things will go wrong—because if they don’t, then it’s proof that there’s no reason to take them. It’s why I choose to stay up late and listen to music I know will send me down a rabbit hole. I need constant reinforcement that what I’m feeling is real. And even now, it doesn’t. Some voice in the back of my head knows that I needed help. If I could have done it by myself, it would never have been so bad. But what is bad, really? And the other voice, one that’s much louder, says, “you don’t need any of this. You are not ‘the sick.’ You are not ‘the medicated.’ You can do it yourself.” 

Obviously, I couldn’t.

Or could I?