How do you organize your life with bipolar 1?
Hi everyone--
I am a (mostly) self-supporting woman in my 30's with bipolar type 1. was misdiagnosed and mismedicaed for 10 years+ and did some serious damage to myself and my relationships during my teens and twenties. Now I"m sober, medicated, working as a teacher, and having a seriously hard time figuring out how to take the next step re-organizing my life in a way that supports both my health and my personal interests (art, mustic, family, and nature). There are times I feel I am not given credit for how hard I worked in my twenties to get to where I am now, and a lot of that has to do with bipolar disorder. I feel misunderstood often and because of that (and mood swings), I withdraw from others (or others withdraw from me). So, I guess my questions are--
How do you organize your life when manic depressive? How do you set up your systems that help you function the way you want to? How do you begin to recognize oncoming episodes and what are your methods for addressing them before you are fullblown manic/depressive/mixed? And how do you keep a firm understanding of your baseline/core identity when bipolar/
@KidRatHeaven
I'm more like bp2 or really just depressed, so bp1 is different. But I'm thinking for you, medication and prevention of mania is the key. Lay people understand depressed. They don't understand mania. Prevent at the all cost. Find out what triggers that for you. For me it's love. Tricky, no?
@KidRatHeaven
Good question.
I am so impressed you've been able to maintain, manage, and participate in your chosen career. It is inspiring. Thank you for sharing. How do you find managing the anxiety of presentations, etc? Or managerial reviews? I am working on walking over the paranoia of being new in my job - I was chasing experience for my resume and got tripped up when I chose the Emergency Department. I regret this decision. It was too high stress, against my morals, values, and ethics of new treatments available including reduced use of injection medications (well researched). My manager did not appreciate my sharing of my dilemma and did not counsel me through how to manage the long wait times for care, she'd have rather seen me lose my career.
I find a clean desk, appropriate old school style shelving units, bins with labels, a cork board, white board, stationary and systematic use and discarding of these items after tasks are done to be most therapeutic. I have walked away from electronic systems of organization and found a small coil ring scribbler (yes, how scholarly) in my purse or back pack, writing down day events daily (this was SO therapeutic) and including conversations I had and with whom on the telephone in these books have been monumental to get the anxiety out of my system of forgetting my tasks or requests of me and then having something to refer to that is not electronic on the tiny cell phone screen. I feel more present in real life and like old school women who used to run telephones etc had awesome techniques for staying grounded in real life tasks, not just day dreaming through it. Spend the time on yourself.
This has helped me manage my finances better, too.
I hope this helped.
