Bipolar Type 2

These are two excerpts from a logbook of mine that I arranged as a travel journal. I selected an example of a writing spree during an episode when I didn’t know I had Bipolar disorder. Then, I selected the end of said journal, it was the day I found out I was in fact Bipolar.

This is a part of my personal journey of living with type 2 Bipolar disorder that I wanted to share. People might relate, people might feel more seen, heard, understood. And others will perhaps have a better understanding of what this condition is like (at least from my pov).

Depressive episode:

I’m beginning to understand how fragile this whole enterprise is.

The darkness is always there, tucked away in a corner, waiting for the slightest opening to return.

Getting up each morning, setting goals. Above all, not letting myself waste away. Acting against the current, resisting what comes easiest. Thickening the shell, hardening the skin. Letting things slide off, as if I had scales. And yet I absorb everything. I listen, I take it in, I turn the problem over and over in my head. I reach a conclusion, it leads nowhere, so I begin again. The process repeats until sleep comes. Sleep as impact, I knock myself out. Sleep as escape, a place outside time. I don’t want to sink, I want to live, really live, laugh often. I am a weight, I weigh myself down. To be aware of oneself and still feel this way is revolting. It is powerlessness turned inward. Knowing where the problem lies, having some idea how to fix it, and still being overtaken by something shapeless, often black, intangible, cunning. It catches up with me. It’s astonishing how the smallest thing can hit like a blow. A look, a word, a grimace, silence from someone else, and I am thrown into an abyss, questioning everything again. I cannot calm down. One pill, two pills. Stop. Don’t make the same mistake again, you know it solves nothing. You know. You know.

Breathe. Stop crying, it’s humiliating. Crying over things that small. Look at the state you’re in. Think about the consequences. Break the cycle. I want to scream. Whatever I do, it feels like I’m always caught again by you. No rest, no relief. I have the best intentions, listen, stop. No. Why is it always you, waiting in the shadows. Please, let me taste happiness. Stop slipping into every crack, every weakness. You feed on my surges.

My surges of feeling, my bursts of emotion. I should be strong but I want to fall. Why am I like this. God, if you made me, show me why. I was born split in two. Two spaces inside me, for two presences: myself, and the other.

Drowning in an ocean of black bile. Sinking.

No. Resist. I carry resilience too. Have pity on me. Everything feels so fragile. It’s raining.

It is a thick, black substance, like oil. When you rise, it spreads like a spill.

Everything is submerged, swallowed, altered. My companion on the road, inside me, always inside me. A companion that never shows itself. No. It must not be shown, quite the opposite. You are my burden to carry alone. An isolating, mocking companion. At best you can be subdued, like a volcano asleep, but never gone. A creature of solitude, feeding on it, settling into it. The senses shut down, replaced by numbness. Then you disappear again. An hour, then two, then three. I knock myself out to silence you, I strike you at the base of the skull as if with a shovel handle. It hurts. Even violence leaves you untouched. I am the one who feels it. A brief heaviness settles in, but it never lasts. It never lasts long enough.

September 2024, first term at the Sorbonne, studying History. The towers of Tolbiac loom ahead, oppressive, I sigh and walk in. The interior is worn down, slogans scrawled across the walls, students moving in dense, restless flows. I cross toward the courtyard, the Pit, tiered concrete, brutalist, student groups shouting over one another.

I tell myself History will have to captivate me if I am to spend every day here, in this former USSR atmosphere. Then November comes, then winter, and like so many students in Paris, I make an appointment with a psychiatrist.

She listens, takes notes, nods. Her silence isn’t hostile. She leaves space, too much space. At the end she doesn’t decide anything. She doesn’t assert. She speaks of rhythm instead, of cycles, of internal imbalances. She mentions a way of functioning based on intensity, a heightened sensitivity to shifts in the environment, to emotion, to rupture. She never names anything definitively. Only detours. Blurred images, as if what I am could only be approached indirectly. I leave with a strange feeling. I feel heard, and at the same time suspended. Nothing resolved, just a possibility lingering. She follows me out, into the corridors, into the street. The weeks pass. The same oscillations. Surges, then that heavy, sticky exhaustion. I keep going. I manage. I rationalize. Until I am offered a change of doctor. This time it will be remote.

psychiatrist appointment on video:

The screen lights up. His face is clearer, his words more direct. There is nothing to observe, no room, no smell, no uncomfortable chair. Just my tired reflection and his voice. I speak. Again. But differently. Slower. He does not circle around things. He does not use metaphors. He names. The word lands quietly, but with weight. It doesn’t echo at once. It settles. Bipolarity. I stay there, staring at the screen, unable to tell whether this is an explanation or a reduction. Does it illuminate, or does it confine. I feel neither relief nor collapse. Just suspension. I start to wonder what, in everything I’ve lived through, still truly belongs to me. Where the boundary lies between what I am and what happens to me. The word is there now. Fixed. I am not. The session ends. The screen goes dark. I remain seated, still. My body is intact, functional, but slightly misaligned. It responds without conviction. My neck is tight. A dense, almost greasy fatigue settles in. I stand up. Nothing in the room has changed, nothing moved, nothing disturbed. And yet the space feels different. Narrower. Barer. I drink a glass of water. The gesture is automatic, reassuring. The water is cold, real, but it explains nothing. I check the time. Still early. Too early for the day to end, too late to pretend nothing happened. I should go out, walk, take the metro, a bus, even just a pavement. Anchor myself again. But I stay there, caught in that strange aftermath where nothing hurts yet.

And then I start thinking again. About the metro. Those endless rides where I thought I was thinking. Where I believed I was observing the world with amused detachment. Shoes, faces, the irritation of others. I wonder now if that clarity wasn’t already a kind of excess. A way of being too present, too alert, too permeable. The carriage as an echo chamber. Others as stimuli. Myself as a surface without filter. I think of the sea. The Channel striking my face, that sense of grounding so intense it became almost mystical. That feeling of absolute belonging, of rare alignment. Was it calm, or was it ascent. An exaltation mistaken for peace. I no longer know. What once felt obvious now seems suspect. I think of those surges. That strange, almost joyful energy where everything feels possible, fluid, bright. Ideas piling up, thoughts accelerating, a sense of finally being equal to what I might be. And then the fall. Always. Slow or sudden. That familiar, nameless pain. I had described all this as a series of places, of seasons, of movements. Now I am given another narrative. And that is where the rupture appears. Because this word, placed so calmly, almost cleanly, acts as a reagent.

It rereads my past for me. It rearranges my memories. What I lived becomes symptom. What I thought was character becomes manifestation. I feel split.

Two selves. The one who lives, and the one who watches, asking whether she is living properly. Today I feel that, just by looking at myself.

I have become my own checkpoint.

I return to Transports, but differently. It is not a text that moves forward. It oscillates. Places follow one another, but nothing holds. Paris, the sea, cities in passing, they are less destinations than attempts. Each time something almost settles, then slips away. Movement does not lead anywhere else, it starts again. I thought I was writing about movement, but really I was checking whether anything changed. The diagnosis arrives without drama. It does not correct the text. It does not explain it. It simply makes it readable from another angle. Like a footnote.

I understand now that Transports did not announce anything. It observed. An alternation without center. Moments of clarity, followed by a return to blur.

An ability to be intensely present, then to withdraw just as quickly. It was not romantic wandering. It was adjustment. Again and again. The diagnosis does not resolve the movement. It only outlines it. Barely. It simply suggests that this back and forth was never accidental.

Nothing closes. The places remain. The sentences remain. Only now I know that this text was never searching for an exit, only for a temporary point of balance.