“Doctor Blume,” I whispered, “I’m tripolar.”
Doctor Blume pursed her lips, leaned back in her brown leather desk chair, removed her horn-rimmed spectacles, and began polishing them with the end of her cornflower blue cashmere cardigan. Then, slowly, deliberately, softly, said, “Well, Irina, what makes you say that?”
I was reclining on a supple, soft, saddle-brown leather couch in Doctor Blume’s office on Beacon Street in Boston. It was a cozy, capacious couch. Doctor Blume had diagnosed me two years earlier with “bipolar 2,” the type with mild mania, called “hypomania.” I knew nothing about bipolar until her diagnosis—which I initially scoffed at (“who, me?”). How dare she call me bipolar, I’d thought. Quack! It’s not possible I have a mental illness. I’m just a regular gal. I was angry, bitter. Everyone gets down at times. Everyone has periods of frenetic happiness. Ups, downs, highs, lows. That’s normal. That’s called normal disorder. What does she expect, my moods to be as flat as a sat-upon pancake? Don’t label me as abnormal, as—mentally ill!
But since her diagnosis, I’d read a lot about bipolar disorder. I became a bit of an expert. And I came to understand—and eventually, grudgingly, to agree with—Doctor Blume’s diagnosis. It only took two years. For two years after Doctor Blume’s initial diagnosis, I continued therapy sessions, but I refused to allow her to insult me with even the mention of bipolar again.
Bipolar people were bad, I thought. They were, well, like, crazy. My first thought, that day Doctor Blume told me in her office I have bipolar disorder, was simply, no fucking way. But over the next two years, I had multiple episodes of deep depression. Although I’d agreed with Dr. Blume to try a bit of medication early on, I kept going off the medication when I felt fine. But eventually I started to sense something was wrong. My highs were moderate, when I happy-go-luckily waltzed through life, as light as Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, the free spirit from Tulip, Texas, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But at the end of each high stood the tallest cliff on earth. And on the other side of that cliff was the deepest, blackest hole. Some days, simply trying to get out of bed, get dressed, and propel my limp, deadweight body to Doctor Blume’s office felt like Sisyphus trying to push his boulder up, up, up a hill from the deepest depths of Hades. The hole was too black, too deep. On other days, I was trippingly zipping through life, lighter than Holly Golightly. Ups, downs, highs, lows. Still, I kept going on the meds, off the meds, on, off, up, down. High today, then pushing that fucking boulder up the hill again tomorrow. Fucking Greek myths, man.
“Why do this to yourself,” Doctor Blume asked one day, once again pursing her lips, leaning back in her chair, and cleaning her spectacles with the end of her sweater, just as she had on so many days before, as I reclined in her office, bedraggled, limp. After two years, desperate to shove off this crushing boulder from under which I couldn’t breathe, I agreed with Doctor Blume’s urging to stay on medication. My life changed.
There are four kinds of bipolar. I suppose most people