What If I Am Wrong? (Part 1 of 3)

(Splitting this long post into 3, because I hate ridiculously long blog posts…)

Those five words echo hauntingly in my mind.  There is a part of me that wonders what I would be able to accomplish if I did not second guess myself constantly.  I read not that long ago that people born under a full moon struggle with polarization; they hold two opposing forces and attempt to find the balance between the two.  Combine that with being a Libra, in which Libras seek to find harmony and balance in all things…Oh and I’m bipolar.  Ha!  It would seem my conflicted oxy-moronic nature was written in the stars.  I remember the last time I sat down and contemplated my life.  I was sitting in the mental hospital 5 months ago to the day.

I remember mentally waving a white flag and forcing myself to accept my greatest fear.  I Am Crazy.  I have no interest in exploring the technicalities of anything.  Call it whatever you want, but me taking medicine for mental illness, in my mind, makes me crazy.  That is not to suggest un-medicated I thought I was sane, because I have been terrified of my mind for as long as I can remember.  I have watched myself create hell for myself over and over and over again.  I have watched myself set my mind to something and do it with no effort.  I have watched myself control and manipulate people with ease.

If you were to ask me if I feel I am a good or bad person, I would be unable to answer.  I don’t necessarily believe in good or evil.  Call it moral relativism, call it being a sociopath or borderline, I don’t know.  I do know that I spent the majority of my adolescence absolutely convinced I was evil, and I got tired of beating that dead horse.  I do know that every step I have taken on this earth has been with a left foot of confidence and a right foot of trepidation.  “What if I am wrong?”

I do not know what limits are; I never have.  I suppose I always believed that limits are truly only self- imposed.  That belief leads to the self-confidence, but my backlog of fuck up’s supports the self-doubt.  One day, I woke up tired of all of this, and I just decided it was time to change.  I weeded through my own history book and cherry picked the things that made me happiest in different periods of time.  Coincidence, fate, whatever you wish to call it led to a conflagration of events where I could not tell you if I lost or found my mind.  I insisted I be taken to the hospital immediately, because I could no longer discern reality.  I don’t know if anyone has experienced what I have; frankly, I am scared to talk about it more often than not.

I believe I am crazy now.  That old war I waged upon myself, this me vs. me battle that caused me so much anxiety, pain, and suffering, has largely come to a surrender, where I just accept I am “not sick, but I’m not well…” (Little Flagpole Sitta reference…) sometimes.  I comfort myself with the belief that everyone is fucking nuts; awareness  and prevalence are what differs.  I even still wonder if all of the rise in mental illness, etc. is not that we’re getting better at diagnosing, but we are getting better at making ourselves ill and distracting ourselves from what we need to be well.  I am not interested in my soapbox, either though.  Five months ago, though, there were a lot of people in the hospital saying similar things.  “I don’t know what happened, I was fine, and then I wasn’t.”  I have been obsessed with contemplating that since.  I re-directed my “What if I am wrong?” to asking if maybe I am wrong about being crazy, maybe there is more going on than I am aware of.  Why did so many people tell me, “I have been sober for __ years and suddenly, I was using again, it was only a few days and here I am” or “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop having panic attacks.  I was fine and here I am.” I have never seen the hospital so crowded….

To be continued…