As it turns out, the demon is bipolar disorder. And the demon is a widely raging tornado that is determined to obliterate everything in its path, including both my own past and my own future. How can two simple words make me question my whole entire life to this point? How can two simple words make the here and now seem so intolerable? And how can those two little words make me so afraid of the future?
Two words. Words don’t have power, but the symptoms that make up those words absolutely do. The diagnosis makes sense, but with that diagnosis comes more pain than I ever thought was possible. Acceptance is usually met with a profound sense of relief, but I am not there yet. There is way too much to sort through yet. For me, all I feel is pain. It feels like my body is going to explode from all the hurt and bitterness and anger and sadness and grief and loss, and that all of these emotions are going to swallow me up whole so that I’m left with just a shell of a person that might as well not even exist anymore. Either I’m flat, emotionally cut-off from myself and everyone else, or I am crying so hard I think my chest is going to explode or my stomach is going to rip apart. What do you do with this? What? Pop me full of pills and send me on my way. I understand the pills. It’s not the medications that I’m fighting. I’m fighting the pain and the loss that I cannot seem to tolerate. I look back at my life and if feels like 25 years of wreckage and sewage. I have made so many bad choices, I have been so impulsive at times, I’ve lost relationships and I’ve lost time. I know this is the start of a way to move forward, but right now, all I can see is pain. I know this is meant to be a hiking blog, but I can’t, for the life of me, come up with an analogy. Nothing related to my experiences with hiking and backpacking can compete with this. Trying to compare hiking to this deep-seated pain seems sacrilegious. Hiking brings out the parts of me that I am proud of, and the deep sense of grief has no business here.