If anyone wants to know what it is like to have bipolar and panic attacks here’s what it’s like:
You’re just going about your day, doing your normal routine. You’re happy and doing all right. Nothing major is happening. When out of the blue, you are hit with a sudden wave of extreme sadness and panic. Everything starts to swim in your eyesight. You can’t breathe. Your heart is thumping ten times more than it should. You don’t know what happened and you can’t stop it. It’s like someone close to you has died, and you can’t do anything about it. You feel like curling into a ball and crying.
Then, quite as suddenly, you realize that everything is happy again. Everything is going ok. Your heart is not racing. You don’t feel sad. Everything is as it should be. You even get insanely excited about stuff you love. You go about normal routine, excited for the rest of the day.
Then you take another step and suddenly, you can’t breathe. A depressing weight is making you physically bow down. You feel an intense sadness that you can’t place. And because you can’t place it, your heart starts to race again. You start panicking. What on earth is happening? Why do I feel this way right now? What happened? You start to psychoanalyze, to figure it out. But nothing comes to mind. That makes it worse. You have no appetite, you feel tired. And you can’t tell if you want to be with people to make you feel better or run and hide yourself from all human interaction.
And then you’re “fine.” At least that’s what they tell you. “Everything will be all right.” “You can do this.” “You beat this before.” But it’s hard. It’s hard to figure out what is right and what is wrong. It’s hard to figure out which emotions are real or not. And if what you’re feeling is who you are. It’s hard not to sink into the mire and stay there when your heart tells you one thing and your head tells another. And you just want to hide from it all, not sure who to trust and who to believe…even if those voices are just in your head.
When things are up and down and one minute you’re fine and the next you’re definitely not. How do you deal with that? How do you know what to do? And does anyone understand….
Yes, I am talking about my day. Yes, I know I will be fine. But right now…I’m dealing. I’m working through it. And no, I have no idea what caused it. I just know it’s panic. It’s depression. And it’s a manic episode. I’m caught between two worlds that I can’t escape. No matter how hard I try, I just have to deal. And live.