My Gift Is My Illness

I read a book once, Charles Dickens.  I never got past the first sentence.  It boggled my mind completely in English class, while everyone seemed to confront this book with grace and ease.  That was not my experience with Tale Of Two Cities.  Even the name baffled me, "Two cities in this tale, how does that work?"  "It was the best of time, it was the worse of times.  "Huh, best and worse, simultaneously?- How can that be?" Although open to understanding, I pondered this thought for some time.  Then I truly lived it.  This one sentence said it all.  I was a young girl, that was not though the best of times.  The best of times for me was when I was ruled by an illness I knew nothing about.  Bipolar What?  Bipolar was just as foreign as that first sentence in the Charles Dickens classic.  The book was heavy, the pages were packed full of words, the smell was old and musty, but tasteful.  It was overwhelming, and I was lost.  "Oh great"  I thought, "all I did was open a book and now I am going to fail English"  Which I didn't, I paid great attention to our class lessons and got the jyst of what garbles we were discussing. 

Bipolar, and mental health in general is much the same as an old and heavy, dusty book.  At first, puzzled, lost, in a daze of horror of the impending feeling of failing, the look on my Teachers-oops; I mean Mothers face was enough to know that I was headed down a dark and scary road.  My Mother knew it, I knew it.  This would be the worse of times.  I've talked about the battles, I won't bore you with the battles,  it was the worse. 

It was also the best.  With saying that, though not reading a morsel past this clever introduction to a huge undertaking of a novel, I can honestly say that what I learned through the course of the best days of my life, was honestly found in the enriches of my worse.  It was not just the lessons learned through triumph I love to discuss.  You know, how one road leads to greater understanding and fulfillment.  That with pain comes joy, and every parallel of duality of up and down, forward and backward, black and white.  It was the simple part of life only found through experiences of the worse.  If you lived the worse, the best sprouts up in every turn of the page.

I am able to live fully, in the moment.  Fully aware of the beauty around us, fully mindful of the fact that, tomorrow I could have a bipolar filled episode, and I better enjoy the days that I do have, when well.  Though, learning about gratitude and living it,  learning about a thankful life, and living it, learning about being becoming comfortable in my own skin and living it.  It was a breath of first-fresh air.  I filled my lungs, with the blessing of my gift; the best and worse of life.  Accepting that part of me, allowing it and living it. 

It became the source of fight or fright.  Nothing could ever be worse, nothing could ever be better.  Time did heal as the saying goes.  My greatest downfall and battle, became my mutant super power called gratitude.  Bipolar was the worse, I would not wish it on anyone, not even myself, bipolar though....is the best.