I don’t know how it started or why.  I just know that today was not my best day.  I decided that none of my friends love me, that they are conspiring to not love me, that I am being left behind and left out, and I went on that.  I wrote emails, made phone calls, and basically made myself look like a nut-job.  Which at times I am.

How much does bipolar have to shame me?  Why, when I am sick with my bipolar, can’t the bipolar give me a break?  Do I have to humiliate myself in the process?  I feel sick and then I am sick and then I take it out on my friends.  Now, thank God for the medication because it was tempered.  I was able to say to my friends, “Hey, I think this is the bipolar that is messing with my heart, because in my mind I know I matter to you, but I am not feeling like I matter to you right now.  Am I even your friend?”

I am a 36 year old mother of three with a marvelous husband and an equally great co-parent to my older two kids, and yet today I basically went around with a  note that had check boxes on it – Do you love me?  Yes or no.

Thank God my friends love me, because I don’t know how they put up with my mood swings.  I admire them for trying.

And you know what I found out today?  They do love me.  And many of them consider me to be their closest or one of their closest friends.  I am actually one of the blessed ones that has multiple friends.  I have nine that I consider family (that does not include my parents).  I have seven that I consider to be my friends, and that doesn’t include all the people that I know and care about.

So maybe today, as erratic as it was, was good for me because it reminded me of what I have.  It is true that my friends are going through big life traumas, or at least some of them are.  I think that I need to do two things.  I need to pray for the friends that are struggling, and I need to lean a bit harder right now on the ones that aren’t because my bipolar is on the move.  I want to squash it down while I have the upper hand.

My husband suggested today that this might have been because of the light box.  It is funny but there is a thin – very thin – line between depression and mania.  So I am depressed and use the light box.  Then I become agitated and manic.  So maybe tomorrow the light box will be  for ten minutes instead of 15 or more.