Recently, I had a number of stressors pile up in a very short period of time.  Among them were a trip to Emergency for my daughter’s severe abdominal pain, an awkward situation that could at best be interpreted as an inappropriate request from a woman to my husband and at worst be interpreted as a pass at him, and assorted other bits of garbage that life chose to throw along my path.

Bizarrely, I seemed to do something that looked, upon closer inspection, like handling it all.  Understand that is nothing short of revolutionary, something like world peace breaking out, or the Pope deciding he is no longer Catholic.  I am the queen of self-pity, feeling like a victim, and epic tirades that would put Shakespearean thespians to shame.  Plainly put, I can do furious like a BOSS.

So what happened?  On page 44 of Bipolar Disorder for Dummies, Fink & Kraynak write: “The brains of people with bipolar disorder tend to be less effective at managing stress – even between mood episodes.  Developing strategies for handling strong emotions and stress is vital to reducing the likelihood of episodes and diminishing their severity and duration.”

I never handled strong emotions and stress before.  They handled me.  And because I was such a mess for so long, everything was stressful, and everything created strong emotions.  I remember in university getting a notice from my bank that, because it had amalgamated with another bank, my credit card had been changed to a line of credit.  I would therefore be required to make a $50 minimum monthly payment, instead of the $10 I had been used to.  I called the bank in a seething rage and yelled at the unsuspecting twenty-something customer service representative on the other end of the phone with such unrelenting hostility that she eventually hung up on me.  All this over $40 a month.  Nice.

On page 38, Fink & Kraynak write that in the bipolar brain, “complex systems of communication between and within brain cells break down when signalling pathways within these circuits become dysregulated.  In addition, some neurons appears to be less adaptive to their environments and less resilient than usual in the brains of people with bipolar disorder.”

The key words in this sentence are like reading about what my life was like before.  Dysregulated.  Less adaptive.  Less resilient.  I jolted from problem to problem, crisis to crisis, drama to drama.  It was like when I was in labour, hardly able to catch my breath between contractions.  There just wasn’t time to recover from one giant issue before another giant issue came along.

I have no idea what physical and chemical changes have happened in my brain as a result of the medication I am taking or the CBT sessions I regularly attend.  It sounds like even doctors don’t fully know, for Fink and Kraynak write on page 42 that “medications that work for bipolar disorder continue to puzzle researchers, who don’t yet fully understand how they do their thing.”

My personal theory is that part of it is maturity.  I am pushing 38 after all, and long overdue for my “grown up” badge. I think part of it comes from the fact that I am calmer over all, so when stressors do happen, I have gas left in the tank to handle them, rather than being in a state of constant depletion, always on alert, overtired from depression or from using energy I don’t have because I am hypomanic.  Maybe some emotional part of my brain has settled down, so not everything feels so threatening and huge or immediate, or maybe the critical thinking part of my brain has amped up, so I can put problems into some perspective and understand their degree of important in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter.  It is weird to be calm at the best of times.  It is even weirder to be calm at the worst of times.  I’d rather focus my returning energy on adjusting to this monumental change, which is a bigger effort than it sounds like, because I am so used to storming through life and thrashing around it and protesting against it that it’s rather a shock to my system to simply carry on, with nary a broken dish or string of expletives spewed at my appalled parents.

I look back on my younger, flailing self and realize how much I was truly suffering.  How much we all suffer, until the planets align and the gods smile down on us and we find a treatment that works.   It’s sad, really, that these basic feelings of calm of equilibrium elude us all, that they feel like miracles when they finally happen.  I deserved serenity all along in my life and so do you, friend, so do you.