Are You Afraid You’ll Miss Your Manic Side?
Controlled creativity is a miracle for a once-upon-a-time bipolar person like me. I often hear from would-be Truehope program participants or EMPowerplus users who worry that they won’t be able to do their creative work any more if they “lose the mania.” Many functional bipolar people depend heavily on mania as a big money maker to launch careers or keep them on the cutting edge of their field.
When I was bipolar, my frequent manias started with an art project and inevitably ended with miserable hallucinations. It didn’t matter what the art project was, but most included paint and a belt sander! My moods changed so often that most projects went unfinished. On psych meds intended to control my mania, I was depersonalized, slow, and I felt emotionally and mentally shut down. When the meds periodically ‘stopped working’ I was tossed into swings, forced by mania, compelled to go and go and never stop until I crashed into deep depression. Sometimes the depression didn’t come soon enough and I would wind up into paranoid hallucinations and have to end the cycle with heavy sedation or hospitalization.
I started using the EMPowerplus micronutrient formulation 15 years ago. My cycling moods flattened out. It took me 2 months to transition completely from a five-drug cocktail and then the healing began.
For the first year in transition, (the First Stage of healing,) I felt amazing in so many ways, but I wondered if I’d ever be creative again. It was like I had a bad case of an artist’s ‘writer’s block’. The block didn’t last though, and as I started to learn how to be creative in spite of feeling self-controlled, I found myself capable of taking on and finishing bigger and better projects than ever before. Where once, in mania, I wrote feverishly and without direction, now I was able to write an auto-biography, finish it, work with editors and get it published by HarperCollins!
With controlled creativity I am at my very best. I think things through, plan my projects (sometimes for weeks), and I finish them. I live in a home that I treat as a living art project. I’ve designed draperies and painted in oils and acrylics, mounted wood sculpture on feature walls and refinished and reupholstered large pieces of furniture, all within reasonable boundaries and never as an all-night project.
I did not lose my creativity when I resolved the bipolar with the micronutrient formulation. I harnessed it.
In the first few months of transition it can be tough for many of us to find creative balance. Coming down from medications or no longer experiencing creative mania can be painful for a little while. Trust the process, give yourself time. You can do this. Fifteen years from now, you can write and tell me all about your journey and how you harnessed bipolar and lived side-effect free and built a great life for yourself using your own version of controlled creativity!
Go find your balance.
Image: winnond / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
