The Fears of a Bipolar Father

It’s with much trepidation that I write a post like this. I want to be brutally honest without people private messaging me or texting me afraid for my safety. You see with Bipolar Disorder there is a lot of ups and downs. Some of those states just make everything in life ten times harder and some of them put you in a place of such distraught trauma that your brain starts telling you the best way through is out. That nagging is constant like a fire alarm telling you to evacuate your body. Those times suck. Not only do they suck but they almost completely contrast to the life demands around you. Your kids still need breakfast and a shower. Your wife still needs you to listen to her vent about how hard her day at work was. Your 7 year old son still needs your undivided attention while he shows you 3 or 4 of the 15 ten minute movies he made that day. It’s hard to balance because what you  want to do is lock yourself in your room, throw five deadbolts on it, insulate yourself completely and just scream profanities at the fact that this cycle just keeps repeating itself. But the deeper truth is that those “demands” in contrast to what you feel are not what keep you up at night. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Those people who “need” you both physically and emotionally they really do need you. You are all interconnected. Every time my son wants my attention a part of me knows that I have value and purpose. Each time my wife emotionally leans on me I know she hasn’t shut me out or turned to somewhere else for connections and support. These are the beauties of a life and family with also having a mental illness. Though I have a college degree, i’ve Barely found the stability to use that degree to generate much of any income. In much of the world’s measure of success I have amounted to very little but to my family I still mean a lot. So in this there is this battle between what I feel inside and what I get from these connections around me. It’s a beautiful psychological back and forth of validating these very real and painful emotional states internally and also realizing even with that inner chaos I am surrounded by love and connection, so much so that it fills my mind with worth.

All of that said, there is another real battle that I don’t always feel as confident about. In some of these times of deep emotional strife and trauma there comes a place where the drive to act out on or release such pain becomes quite overwhelming to the point of fixation on relief and or highly delusional thinking such as perhaps I am living in borrowed time and that my purpose is to die, that the world will be restored to equilibrium if I just end my life. Through years of therapy and various meds I have come to have less and less frequently these very serious and dangerous states of mind. Like many things in life I find that when life has gotten to these places you are kind of already gone and by the very nature of the issue, you are so emotionally and mentally consumed in the pain that at that point it is often hard to access your more rational self. It is these periods I fear most in life. A place where emotion and impulsivity become quite consuming and thoughts to act on suicide or at least slit my wrist come flooding in with an incessant borage. Simply, these are the times where I am most susceptible  to suicide. And these are the states where my past attempts of suicide have been enacted. The real problem isn’t the fear of suicide, it is the affect of it. I am a man that believes deeply and purely in a Heavenly Father and my Savior, Jesus Christ. I believe there is a lot of mystery in the true consequences of suicide and I don’t think it’s a straight up cause for eternal damnation but I also believe that we are accountable for our actions and the sanctity of life is high in God’s eyes. But even that judgement day isn’t my true fear. My greatest fear and what keeps me hyper vigilant in how I cope with my issues is the consequence my suicide might have on my 7 and 1 1/2 year old sons who would remember more than the love I showed and the videos I watched, that when life got really hard, Dad chose to quit. Dad chose to die over being with us. Though that might be made understandable later in their life that decision would mold them and affect them forever and statistics show that it could very likely cause them to see suicide as a real solution to their life problems.

So everyday that is terrible and I want to quit because despite being given every possible resource to succeed, because it is just too painful in my brain. On those days I let out a few expletives in my head and then I diligently get to work on surviving because as much as I want to put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, my boys need me to live so that on their worst day they don’t have to be alone and deal with the thought of “well dad got out, maybe I will too.”