Living with Bipolar 2 Disorder

Living with bipolar 2 disorder is a journey I never chose, but one that has shaped me in ways I’m learning to appreciate.

At its core, bipolar 2 is about navigating two very different worlds: hypomania, where energy and ideas flow faster than I can keep up with, and depression, where even getting out of bed can feel impossible. Neither lasts forever, and learning that was the first step toward building a life I actually want to live.

In the past, I thought stability was impossible. When hypomania hits, I’ll race ahead without sleep, full of excitement, and bold plans. When the depression takes over, I’ll crash so hard it feels like nothing will ever get better. It took some time (and a lot of help involving a wonderful psychiatrist and medication) to realize that these cycles don’t define me. They were just part of the landscape I needed to learn to navigate.

Today, things are different. They’re not perfect–never perfect–but better. With the right support, the right tools, and a lot of self-awareness, I’ve found ways to catch the early signs of a shift. I’ve learned how to slow myself down when I start to climb too fast, and how to reach out when I feel myself sinking.

Therapy, medication, and daily routines have been game changers. So having self-compassion, patience, and the courage to admit when I need help. Recovery isn’t about never struggling again, it’s about building a life that can survive the struggles.

There are gifts in this too. Bipolar 2 has made me more creative, more empathetic, more resilient. It’s taught me to appreciate stability when I have it, to savor the small moments of peace, to celebrate progress no matter how small. It’s taught me that healing isn’t a straight line, and that setbacks don’t erase the work I’ve done and continue to do.

Living with bipolar 2 isn’t easy, but it’s not hopeless although sometimes it feels that way and there are days I want to give up. Every day I’m learning more about who I am, and every day I’m choosing, again and again, to keep going.

If you’re struggling: it’s not your fault.

You’re not broken.

And there is a way through.

Maybe not a perfect cure, but a path: messy, winding, but real. And it’s worth walking.

What Radicalized Me

I didn’t pop out of the womb swinging a red flag. I wasn’t raised by union organizers or taught to quote Marx before I could walk. Like a lot of Americans, I coasted on autopilot for a while. I figured the president—whoever they were—probably knew what they were doing. The system seemed fine, or at least functional. Corrupt, maybe, but stable.

Then came Trump.

That was the first crack in the illusion. Suddenly the office of the presidency wasn’t just some boring institution, it was a circus, a cult, a threat. It wasn’t just bad policy. It was kids in cages. Racist dog whistles cranked up to bullhorns. And half the country cheered. That’s when I realized the system wasn’t broken. It was functioning exactly as designed.

That’s when I started reading. Rand again, first. I loved her in high school—thought she was deep. Then I picked up Atlas Shrugged as an adult and felt like I’d been duped. It wasn’t philosophy. It was selfishness with a thesaurus. The heroes were sociopaths. The poor deserved it. The rich were gods. It clicked: capitalism doesn’t just tolerate cruelty. It requires it.

From there, I fell down the rabbit hole. Camus hit me like a freight train. The Myth of Sisyphus gave shape to something I’d felt but couldn’t name. This low, constant hum of absurdity. The rock rolls back down the hill, and we push it again. Not because it’ll change anything, but because we refuse to give up.

That absurdism became fuel. So did my misanthropy. Not in the “I hate everyone” kind of way, but in the “I don’t trust people to do the right thing unless they’re forced to” kind of way. I watched people defend billionaires like they were sports teams, as if Apartheid Clyde was going to show up and hand them a Tesla for their loyalty.

I started arguing online. Then organizing. Then donating. I joined the Democratic Socialists. I started lurking at meetings, listening more than talking. I wanted to shake things up, but not just with signs and chants. I wanted disruption. Chaos. Direct action. Guerilla organizing.

I kept reading. Kept pushing. Anti-natalism hit me hard—David Benatar, Cioran, all of it. The idea that no one consents to be born, and that bringing someone into this world is an inherently selfish act. In a dying planet, under a dying system, having kids felt like feeding bodies into the machine.

All of that coalesced into anarcho-communism. Because socialism wasn’t enough. The state isn’t neutral, it’s a tool of capital. Voting helps, but it’s a bandage on a severed limb. I believe in mutual aid, in decentralized power, in horizontal structures. I believe in burning down what doesn’t serve us and building something new from the ashes. Something where people matter more than profit. Where community matters more than hierarchy.

And yeah, I still own guns. Gifts, mostly. I don’t shoot much. But they’re there—”just in case” feels more relevant by the day.

What radicalized me? The cruelty. The absurdity. The lies we’re told about success, about work, about life itself. And the quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, we can break the cycle. So I meme. I write. I organize. I fight. Because if this is a pyramid scheme called life, I at least want to go down pissing off the billionaires at the top.

What’s My Drug of Choice? Well, What Have You Got?

I remember reading a blog some time ago on another site by some old fuck that lives in her own little world and refuses to accept that the world changes, and she refuses to accept that sometimes people can’t help their situations. One particular blog of hers was about drug addiction, which was something she clearly knew nothing about. “People who use drugs have no one to blame but themselves. They had the choice to use drugs or not to use drugs and they chose to do it so they shouldn’t be helped.”

I was talking to my brother-in-law about this. We used the example of a party one time. No one goes to a party and just blurts out, “So who’s got heroin in this motherfucker?” A lot of the time heroin stems from an addiction to opiates, which are prescribed by doctors to manage pain. We as humans will find any way possible to eliminate the pain in our lives, whether it’s physical or emotional.

I started drinking and using pills when I was 19 or so. I’ve used coke, still smoke weed, drink occasionally (but have recently discovered that I can’t drink alone anymore. I won’t drink alone anymore.) Also, as I mentioned in my previous blog, I tripped on acid for the first time this past weekend. We’re all looking for ways to avoid, ignore, or eliminate pain. I don’t know too many people who become addicts because they’re happy. No one drinks alone because they’re entertaining happy thoughts. Those of us who use are trying to mask, hide, and again, eliminate pain. We’ll go to any lengths to do it.

I know what depression is like. I’ve struggled with it since my teens. It’s not something that’s easy to live with and it’s not something I’d wish on another person. Then again, maybe I would just so someone else could walk a day in my shoes to know what the pain is like. I commented on a friend of mine’s blog about depression, saying:

Sadness and depression are two very different things. I have felt sat before and I struggle with depression. Sadness is the loss of a job, the feeling you have after a fight with your partner, failing that test you studied so hard for.

Depression is wanting out. There is nothing to life and you go along every day and wonder why you still bother in the first place. It’s feeling that nothing is ever going to get better and dreading the days ahead. It’s sleeping the day away because you can’t bring yourself to face it. It’s just not wanting to play anymore as David Foster Wallace said in Infinite Jest. Nothing brings you joy but the nothingness of being unconscious somehow whether it’s from sleeping or being passed out from the night before.

It’s why we choose things that are bad for us to handle the pain. We drink, we do drugs, we try to numb the pain anyway we can because it’s physical and mental. You don’t feel anything when you’re on drugs. That’s the feeling we want … the feeling of not feeling at all.

It’s why so many who suffer from depression commit suicide. They want an out. They’re done with playing and have realized this life has nothing to give them.

I struggle every day with the feeling of not wanting to feel. I lie in bed and sleep for hours on end because I just don’t want to know what the day holds for me and I don’t care. I just want to be out of it. I want to be put into a coma so I won’t have to be dead, but I won’t have to deal with what’s going on in my mind anymore, either.

Knowing this, how could you say you don’t understand why people turn to drugs? It’s easier, faster, and sometimes cheaper than therapy.

You can’t understand a user’s mind
But try, with your books and degrees
If you let yourself go and opened your mind
I’ll bet you’d be doing like me and it isn’t so bad

You know that you tried to hide it Shouldn’t you have said what you meant? Oh…

I found out a dear friend of mine – one of my best friends since high school – tried to kill himself not too long ago. It was because of his wife. He discovered she was cheating on him. They hadn’t even been married a year (eight months.) Her reasoning? She told him that his depression and anxiety caused her to cheat. He gave me the whole story. I don’t know his wife. I’ve never met her in my life. I didn’t go to the wedding or anything for reasons I won’t get into. Eric (not his real name) has always been honest with me as far as I know. I know Eric has his issues. I have mine as well. I know Eric has always struggled with depression and anxiety just as I have. I’ve got something he has never really had though: a support system. I wish he had one so that he didn’t think he had to end his own life.

I’m thankful that he failed at killing himself, but I also feel like shit because I’m not exactly sure how to help, either. We’ve always both just joked about our mental illness. I remember one of the best jokes I ever heard — this is just his and my fucked up sense of humor — being when I hadn’t seen Eric in a while, me asking him how he’d been doing, and I asked what he’d been up to. He replied, “I go to work every day, come home and make myself some dinner; sometimes I’ll play a video game for a few hours; and occasionally I’ll stare at the noose I have hanging in my closet and say to myself, “Maybe tomorrow.” I laughed to the point where I could barely breathe.

This recent turn of events in Eric’s life got me thinking about honesty as well. People always claim they want honesty in their relationship, but do they really? Does a woman or man who has put on a few pounds really want their significant other to tell them? If someone in a relationship isn’t looking their best one day then do they want their significant other to tell them they look like shit (in a nicer way than that, of course)? If your spouse is cheating, do you really want to know?

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people extol honesty until you’re honest with them. You can tell them all day long how you were honest with someone and they will tell you how you did the right thing, but as soon as they ask a question about themselves and demand an honest answer and you give it to them then you can consider that particular relationship or friendship finished. A husband or wife doesn’t want to know that their partner is being unfaithful. If they ask and their partner says, “No. I’m not cheating on you,” it’s better for both parties because no one gets hurt. However, if you’re caught then you might as well fess up because you know there’s no getting out of it.

I’ve never agreed with someone in a relationship cheating on their partner and just coming outright and telling their partner when their partner didn’t ask. I don’t agree with cheating, either; I want to make that perfectly clear. If your partner doesn’t ask then keep your mouth shut. If your partner asks then should you lie? I guess it depends on whether or not you’re a good liar.

Dr. Brad Blanton’s “radical honesty” isn’t going to win you any friends. Being honest with friends is going to make you lose them one day. My advice? Just stick to lying in order to save face. Read up on it if you have to in order to learn how to do it better.

Or you can just not be a piece of shit who feels the need to do shitty things to people.