A few weeks ago, my frustration with a writer’s block born of the down side of my Bipolar life led me to write about it. It was the first time in my life I had ever written about it overtly. Not knowing how it would be received, I purposely picked a post day when I thought no one would be on their computers. I worried about losing readers, but I was desperate to get past depression and back to writing, so I took a chance. The response to my gamble was overwhelming and, for me, completely unexpected.
Even then, however, freed from the fear of letting the world know that somethin’ ain’t exactly right, I was adamant that this would not become a bipolar blog. But a recent email exchange made me realize that, while I didn’t know exactly what this site was, in many ways it has always been a a bipolar blog -even if I couldn’t see it.
When it began last summer, I thought it was a mommy blog (for extremely disorganized mommies). I thought it might also be a rural mommy blog. For a while I thought it was an illustration blog. It was a cartoon platform and a poetry outlet. And, of course, it was a blog about family.
For months it was all of these things because I was. I was flying, and the blog and I were keeping each other aloft in the stratosphere. When my flight ended, however, the crash came, and the blog became part of my lifeline. It, like the other part of my lifeline – my family – needed me to get out of bed each day and nurture it. Like my kids, it needed care and feeding, even on the many days that I wonder if it and they would be better off with someone more competent or stable. And as my self-soothing visits to my fantasy work became more frequent, my blog became a depression blog, interweaving itself with the only other blog theme I could and needed to sustain – my family.
Now as I continue to cling to the “This Too Shall Pass” mantra that helps me manage my stay in Melancholia, I realize that this has always been a blog about mania and depression. It has always been about the simulataneously intoxicating but precarious highs and the sometimes crippling lows. But it is also a blog about how the journey between those places affect the family I chose to join and build – for good or ill – and how they have come to affect it by saving me every day of my life. Even on the days I don’t think I need it.