Output 1–What if I'm the bullshit?

It seems I am bipolar. Bipolar II, surely, as my mania is more of the hypo- variety. I cashed out my 401K in January and as of now I have spent about 90% of it. But I didn’t spend it on gambling, hookers and cocaine like a crazy Bipolar I. I spent it on normal things, like building a tiki bar in my home office even though I spent 20 years in AA, or on hat-making supplies from Etsy, or on $300 hand-built brogue shoes for my DoorDash driver boyfriend. Normal!

I don’t have an official diagnosis yet. Just one telehealth conversation with a prescribing psych doctor (more on her later) and a bunch of questionnaires. But this is the direction in which we seem to be heading. 

I came to her with “crippling anxiety.” I say crippling because it has, in fact, gotten so severe as to prevent me from working. That wasn’t such a shameful narrative when the places I was working had other features that might cause extreme stress. I left my job as an adult ESL teacher because I was hyperventilating in the back of my van between classes but teaching is stressful, and teaching while in Menopause is REALLY stressful, and the adult ed system in my State is, objectively, a mismanaged hellhole. But now I have my dream job.

My fucking dream job. I quit teaching to be a 57-year-old tattoo apprentice. I thought I was going to somehow make tattooing out of my house work (even though that’s illegal) but I was offered an actual apprenticeship. My mentor is the husband of one of my oldest friends (though we are periodically estranged–more on that later) and it’s a private studio. Just him and me. No walk-ins. Completely flexible schedule. He just needs to be there to observe when I tattoo. Oh, and the studio is a 2-minute drive from my house. Dream job. DREAM JOB.

Except it’s not. Because I’m having anxiety attacks when I tattoo. I’ve been asked by my boss and his wife to stay home for at least 2 weeks to get my mental shit together, get therapy, get meds. I think we were all hoping these anxiety attacks were some kind of simple, isolated phenomenon that could be sidelined with a fast-acting Xanax infusion. But nope. No such luck. My questionnaire answers revealed that I probably have childhood trauma (duh), possibly PTSD (hadn’t considered that), and while I had been diagnosed with Clinical Depression in the past, that was a swing and a miss and no wonder the meds didn’t work. I’m probably Bipolar. And always have been. And have developed many, many coping mechanisms that are not healthy or productive (the opposite of productive, since most of my coping mechanisms involve sitting on my ass and absorbing stimuli so as to keep the dopamine flowing and the overwhelm suppressed. Can’t create if you just sit around sucking screens, or weed, or rum, all day and night). And Menopause kicked my Bipolar into super overdrive.

I didn’t know that irritability is a symptom of hypomania, did you? At first, my doc was confused about my answers because I answered “no” to the one about periods of having markedly more energy than usual. To me, energy is a good thing. A thing I usually don’t have a lot of. It’s positive, it’s fun. But I guess in this context, energy is just… A LOT. And I am definitely A LOT. I get wound up. I freak out. I dissipate. I build up. I crash. Sometimes I throw things.

My main coping mechanism is just… quitting. I quit the things that overwhelm me, or that I become overwhelmed in, I think is more accurate, all the time but usually I spend a while “building a case” against that thing before I exit and the exit always comes as a great relief and sometimes feels like a triumph, like “walking away from the bullshit.”

But what if I’M THE BULLSHIT? WHAT IF I'M THE BULLSHIT?