Being Bipolar

I am finally stable enough to confess the dirty little details I so carefully hid during my last meltdown. These are just a few of the things I hid in an attempt to keep from being hospitalized.

The day of my cousin’s funeral, I was really psychotic. I spent most of the funeral service staring at the flowers atop the casket. They were dancing – intertwining and gyrating in an amusing fashion. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. When they played various songs during the service, they danced perfectly in time to the beat. It was mesmerizing.

When I finally reached the peak of my psychosis, I started hearing my father’s voice telling me, “Come home.” In the last few weeks that my father was alive, he constantly told us that he was ready to go home. By this, he meant that he was ready to die. I knew what the voice was saying to me and it kept repeating in my head all day until I could not stand it any more. I took a box blade from my husband’s tool bag and tried to cut my wrist. Fortunately, it was dull and wouldn’t cut very well when I tested it on my arm so I abandoned the idea and started seeking other ways to commit suicide. Finding nothing suitable, I abandoned the idea for the time being.

At this point, I told my husband to be home when the kids got here because I needed to leave. I could not be by myself anymore. He sensed how bad things were and called my sister. Her and my mother came and got the kids and me and made me go to my sister’s home so I wouldn’t be alone the next day. I was so upset by having to leave my home, which is my safe place, that the idea began to form in my head again and planning went into place.

I told my sister how much my limits were on my credit cards and told her I wanted to go to St. Louis one more time. I told her we could pack up the kids and go for the weekend and I would take care of everything if she would just go. (I can’t go anywhere alone because of severe agoraphobia.) It was then that it was decided that I would be taken for assessment. The doctor was insistent that I go right then to the hospital but I refused to go until after my son’s birthday party the next day.

The next afternoon, I was taken to the hospital. I went back alone at first. I was honest and told the woman that I had been suicidal but I did not tell her that I had cut myself and I kept my jacket on to hide it. After a little while, they decided that I was okay to go home. If they had known these little details that I hid from them, they would have admitted me. I was afraid to be away from home for any amount of time so I kept certain details to myself.

Now that I have come clean, I feel like I can move forward from this episode and put it all behind me. I feel much better now.

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