Another “Untitled” Post

I hate it when I pull stupid stunts like forgetting to title a post. Yesterday’s wound up being called ‘953’ because I wrote the thing without coming up with one of my typically catchy headlines first. (OK, you can stop snickering now.) So because I’m not feeling terribly creative, tonight’s post will have a title that’s not a title…..or it won’t have a title that IS a title. Or something like that.

It was good to have a day off, even though I can hardly wait to get started on next week’s learning. I know the time will arrive when I’ll feel a desperate need to take in great gulps of free air on the weekends before I have to go back to work, but for now it’s great to be on a normal schedule like most of the rest of the civilized world.

I could’ve done without some of the stuff I’ve seen on TV this afternoon, though. Will and I watch a lot of true-crime shows on the ID channel, and for some reason there were two different shows that featured murderers with a history of—yep, you guessed it—bipolar disorder. I’m just glad things are going so well for me, because I’ve been triggered by less than this in the past, and gotten quite upset.

Now, we all know that some mentally ill people commit murder, but obviously not every killer is mentally ill, and not all mentally ill people are killers. In one show, the female detective repeatedly referred to the suspect as a kook: “The guy’s bipolar, he gets a free pass (on the crime) because he’s a kook, his neighbors know he’s a kook, we know he’s a kook”, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Well, isn’t that special. Just makes me even more resolute in my decision not to disclose my own illness at work. I can’t have people looking at me as if I were a hand grenade with the firing pin pulled, or calling me a “kook” behind my back. It sucks that I practically have to live a double life in order to have a normal one, but if that’s what I have to do, it’s what I’m going to do. I want things too badly and have worked too damned hard to lose yet another part of me to this infernal illness.

Which gets me to thinking: really, who determines what constitutes ‘illness’? I am most certainly not in a state of distress right now, although I’m well aware that the absence of symptoms doesn’t mean I don’t have the condition in the first place. (I got fooled that way once……it won’t happen a second time.) So should I still be considered ‘mentally ill’? I don’t think so. After all, I am currently able to live as a fully functioning adult human being; compare that with where I was even a couple of months ago, and I’m doing extremely well by comparison.

I’m sure there are those who would disagree with me on this point, and still others who might find something ominous in the assertion that I’m as healthy as someone with bipolar disorder can ever be. But I am, and what’s more, I’m doing everything possible to stay that way.

Even if I do forget to name my posts every now and again. 😉