“Being on the right medication and [a] change in my living situation changed everything about the way I dated: Because I knew my time in each place was so limited, dating one person at a time didn’t feel like the right choice”
Photo: J.V. Aranda When most people think of bipolar disorder, they’re thinking of bipolar 1. I know I used to, anyway. I thought of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, sweet and soft-spoken one moment, harsh and abusive the next. I thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; I thought of Jim Carrey in The Mask. I thought bipolar 1 looked like the intense highs and lows depicted in these films, and that bipolar 1 and 2 were pretty much the same.
It’s an illness associated with milder manifestations of mania, clinically known as hypomania: for me, it was my racing thoughts, rapid speech, never feeling tired, and intense anxiety. Bipolar 2 can make you feel like you’re being swept down a river, desperately trying to cling onto something steady. For me, that something was always a person.
And then, the diagnosis. The psychiatrist who told me I had bipolar 2 gave me a common prescription for the disorder, Lamictal. I took it, and for the first time in 30 years — my entire life — I stopped experiencing anxiety. I had fewer low days; I slept better; I stopped working myself to the bone. When I saw the psychiatrist, I was in the midst of a bad breakup, one that left me with nowhere to live. I decided to drive across the country on my own for a year, with a vague plan to live in a half-dozen cities for one or two months at a time. Being on the right medication and this change in my living situation changed everything about the way I dated: Because I knew my time in each place was so limited, dating one person at a time didn’t feel like the right choice.
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