Member’s Profile… Repressed Expression

Following on in our Member’s Profile series the following profile comes from our newest member the author of Repressed Expressions and is published here with her permission.

“Life on the (Bi) Polar Express”

I really don’t think that anyone can understand what it is to feel bipolar unless, well, you are bipolar. So I have attempted to descriptively show what each day is like using my favorite book as a child, I Think I Can. To be bipolar you have one side, the engine, who is sad and slow like Eeyore the donkey, and the other side is fast and frenzied like the crazy trains in the “Thomas the Train” Series. It will inevitably tear you apart. I struggled with it for 25 years before I began to rapidly cycle from one to the other all day long. In that lies madness. So I went to a psychiatrist, a group I loathed from prior experience. And I am happy to say that I found a more middle ground. I am still sensitive to mood changes, and for a while the medication made me a walking zombie, stripping me of my creativity. But I stuck to it and now my creativity is back even more than before because now I can stick to it without the bleakness of fantasized death hanging over me. I have read that bipolar disorder and artistic talents — especially writers — are linked (Lord Byron), and if true, at least there is a rainbow in the sea of disorder that plagues our lives.

 

I belong to an elite club, the Bipolar Express

Engine, sad like Eeyore, caboose fast and loose

I puff forward and backward, East or West

Barreling barely on track, crashing and failed

Life, an uphill battle, or downward slant

My mood travels on the fast track or derailed

My constant chant, “I think I can, I think I cant”

 

Quiet depression or manic rave and rant?

Am I the hangman or the noose?

I try to juggle the teeter-totter stress

Life is dull and dark or rapid delight

Internally my emotions often a mess

A shade in a world of black and white

Or a shining orb floating in sparkling light

 

Unbalanced, I feel MORE or LESS

Each day, a mystery I must confess

Black cloud, rainbow delight, anyone’s guess

My emotional temperature, rapid cycling unrest

Does not make me feel God-blessed

 

But there is a rainbow in my cloud of duress

Bipolar disorder is an artistic caress

Humor, poetry and music, brightly dressed

Creative expressions allow emotion some rest
Many thanks are given for permission to publish the above 🙂 I hope members of the guild will make her feel welcome and pop over and visit her blog.