Back with a Venn, Gents.

Immediate reassurance: I have no intention of turning this into one of those egregious lifecoachy #feltbads and #itsokaytofeelbad #feltabitbadafterthegym #hayfeverlife posts – or to – seriously now - make light of anyone’s struggles with mental health, whatever the shade.

This is gonna be brief. It is merely to say that after 10-months of misery and many months of truly stunning supportiveness from my employer, colleagues and colleague-mates, I suddenly felt normal again - surprised one evening three weeks ago by my life partner, who opened the kitchen door to find me doing the twist to the Chordettes ‘Lollipop’ (immortalised by the boys in ‘Stand By Me’…possibly the most beautiful evocation of childhood joy - and fear - in the Western canon).?

My diagnosis: bipolar disorder. Am a Polaroid, mum. Yeeeeeees, it’s one of the ones that is relatively unlikely to appear on workplaces’ neuro-lists and it’s not one that’s exactly celebrated. Quite rightly: as it’s horrible.?

It used to be called ‘Manic Depression’, but was relabelled as that suggested you were always maniacally very depressed. Churchill is supposed to have had it (we shall fight them in the foetal position). Stephen Fry says he has it (bijou little word for you, panellists). Carrie Fisher (the most beautiful woman in the world when-I-was-seven) had it. But all this tells us is that, happily, people are more at ease than ever talking about mental illness…and I would love it if one day that talk included BP. ???

I’m determined to be fully bipolar ‘out’, you see, as this diagnosis explains one awful lot. Namely: 1) frankly over-excitable past behaviour (a phase that is considered ‘safe and healthy’ and known, confusingly, as ‘hypomanic’ - feeling like you’ve had two cans of Red Bull and no breakfast) 2) feeling ‘normal’ in a phase called ‘normal’ (when you wish it was Friday and isn’t life all a bit bleedin' tiring) and 3) a morose / Ostend-sky-like three-tiered phase called ‘depressive’ (think: watching Gillingham v Stevenage on a rainy Tuesday evening). I’ve been properly manic too – but only a few intimates have witnessed that.

It explains how you may have seen me drawing when I should be visibly listening; may hear me listening to Rammstein at volume 11 in the office one afternoon; may hear me reel off 128 things that this brand seriously needs to do - offer to design their logo and write their marketing copy tonight; may have heard me singing in the direction of SWP leafleteers in public. There are, as I see it, four different tiers to BP mood. Each tier can run for a few weeks or months; July and August might be a safe ‘hypomanic’ freneticism and exuberance; September might be just plain ‘normal’; October, for me, is often mildly but functionally depressive (prompting well-meant suggestions to get a ‘SAD’ lamp). Sudden upheaval can make you manic (up) or manic depressed (down) - the more so this year as it will mark a year since the 7th of October events that absolutely ripped my life apart.

The main thing is that I’m now out of Bipolar Depression and Depression – the bottom two quartiles. Suddenly, it seemed, the sun rose; suddenly I had an overwhelming desire to write sh*t, draw satirical things, to collect cartoon ideas, tics and tensions while on the tube, nose in someone’s armpit. A sudden rekindled love for the absolute dump of an area that I live in in London. A love of music and noisy post-punk. A desire to learn, learn, learn (as Lenin said ‘Uchitsia, uchitsia, uchitsia’…advice he sadly never followed himself). I’m starting Hindi classes next week and am signed up for a four-day carpentry course in December (the future dream is to one day be a horny-handed cabinet maker in a mountain village in Corsica, squinting into the sun and going ‘Non - Porto Machissimo is turn left at Monte Morte’ to tourists).

The self-knowledge and hindsight that a correct diagnosis of bipolar gives to your ‘personal storytelling’ (for that is what we do) helps explain so very, very much of one’s past. It’s like discovering that you were adopted. Turns out, I’ve had three periods with an upside down bell curve like the one I’ve just come out of - and everything just fits together. This explains how I know the insides of three different psychiatric hospitals in England. How when I’m not normal or gently hypomanic, I’m reliably utterly miserable; how when I’ve been manic, I’m jumping up and down like a seven-year old watching her dad pull open a mini packet of Milky Way Magic Stars.

Yet unlike other areas of mental health (and this is no ‘Madder Than Thou’ screed), bipolar is, I think, still rather a taboo subject. Partly ‘cause it takes a lot of effort to manage and partly because it is – in the cop-out words of psychiatrists - ‘different for every individual’.

I’m currently in the low reaches of what’s called and considered a healthy, mild ‘hypomanic’ phase. That means I am taking photographs of ads I see on the tube and in magazines (with a view to being glib or full of praise about them on the blogroll) and writing notes in my phone of unfunny cartoon ideas that I plan to turn into unfunny cartoons.

And alongside that, I’m writing the titles of essays I rilly rilly rilly want to write this very minute. So far there is:

-?????? How did ‘Slimline’ survive as a term in the tonic water category, but nowhere else? Would love to hear the semioticians opine on this and here’s my guess

-?????? What can we learn from the newish but booming category of vape and snus brands – showing more variety and diversity than any other since, well, craft brewing

-?????? Why McCain’s multi-ethnic ‘family’ campaign is so darned good and to be admired

-?????? What everyday UX is still getting wrong and 10 Ways to Scare off a Customer

-?????? And…

-?????? 'Why I’m not worried about artificial intelligence now that we have before us a sturdy bulwark of artificial unintelligence - in the guise of a reunited Oasis'

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…and so much more (a line that I have seen bakery and service station use in its strap).

I’ll calm down. I have no intention of being very down. But be kind to your bipolar colleagues - and let’s get taboo-busting. There is no hierarchy of mental illness – but I for one would welcome what I’ve got being mentioned at all in any hierarchy.

Thanks to patient haverim, mishpocha, workmates, employer and everyone else.

?Her mit dem schoenen Leben / Let the Good Times Roll.

Oh - I’ll do the Venn tomorrow.?

#mentalillness #bipolar #wellbeing

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