Looking Toward The Future After Depression

I promised that I would get this done a few days ago, but a few things got in the way. Still, I’m doing it, and that’s a good enough milestone for me at this point. So today, I’m talking about how I’ve dealt with the future of my life in the wake of another severe depression.

One of the major realities that dawned on me while being in the psychiatric ward was just how much my life hinged on the medications that I’m taking. It’s not the kind of dependency where I choose between high functioning and low functioning depending on my medication, it’s choosing whether I want to put my life in jeopardy by not taking my medications. A new sense of urgency and revelation revolved around this fact. The medications that I take every day at specific times are there to save my life.

But there is a flip side of the realization, it was that I was carrying around something that could kill me and would have it for the rest of my life. I had a rather benign view of bipolar disorder up until that point. I had pretty much only fun and creative manias with just one psychotic mania thrown in there. I thought I could handle it if that was all there was to it. But I didn’t know that lurking under the surface was something deadly.

Finding that out threw my future into a dystopian version of it once was. My life seemed fragile and ready to bend and break with just little slip ups in my medication. What was I going to do when I went to grad school and another one of these episodes happened? What if my insurance is not nearly as good as it is now and I cannot afford my medication? These are just some of the questions that floated through my mind and it terrified me that my life could turn out for the worst.

This bleak future that I created for myself as well as the disturbing threat of the darker nature of bipolar disorder threw me into what I can only really describe as an existential funk. I became acutely aware of just how lucky I was to have the right people around me at the right times. That during my psychotic episode I was incredibly lucky to see it as wrong and seek help. I was also lucky that my teachers were understanding. Sooner or later, luck just runs out and I didn’t know what to do if it did.

Also lurking in the back of all this was a question as to who I really was at the end of all of this. I was coming out of the psychiatric ward and felt crazier than I ever have. Much of my past experiences had remained unresolved as I kept pushing through them and taking on new tasks. Now they formed a picture of someone who was not necessarily able to cope with life in all its complexities. I had also lost my high functioning view of myself and it was now replaced by a low functioning picture. This produced a deep identity crisis about who I was and where I was going; something I am still going through now.

In addition to this was the brutal realization that my stability is a luxury right now. Being beaten with mood cycles and what feels like episode after episode of bad events, I’ve just given up. That constant threat that whatever I do today may be interrupted tomorrow by something out of my control, hangs over my head. It makes me want to attempt very little because I fear that yet another bad event or mood swing will interrupt my life again. It’s a year’s worth of bad things that are doing this to me, and I consciously know that it is not the right way of thinking about things, but knowing something is different from fully believing it.

The final impact of this future has ground me down to a slowly functioning individual. I am one who now fantasizes a lot because I don’t see much on my horizon that I can work for without seeing my illness get in the way. But I am coming out of it. There’s two things that I’ve really latched on to as a way out of this. First is that I’ve begun a new philosophy project and am trying to read more. The idea of throwing myself into a project and working on it feels right and is helping. Plus, it’s a work of existentialism. I’m reading through analytic philosophy, like Robert Nozick and David Hume, and also continental philosophy like Nietzsche and Camus. It’s a combination of the two disciplines and ideas to produce a way of life. And that brings me to my second item, skepticism. I realized a while back that one of the things that analytic philosophy engrained in me was a fundamental distrust of myself and my mind. I never took it as the end all and be all of my knowledge. I didn’t doubt everything, but I was doubtful. And looking back to my psychotic episode, that was one of the tools that I used to detect that something was wrong. I was prepared by my discipline to not take everything as it was, but instead saw shimmers of something wrong. So I sought help.

In looking to the future now, I still haven’t erased the bleakness of it entirely, time will be necessary for that. But the project and realizations about skepticism have made me view the future as being determinable by me and not just by luck. Granted, luck is still a part of it, but I’m growing to accept that reality. And hopefully, out of all of this, I’ll reach my goal of writing a short book in my time off. That’s all a few months out, I’m trying not to look further than that. I’ve learned that looking too far ahead means that there are too many possibilities that I cannot control. Instead, it’s only the near future that I can look forward to as being reasonably stable. And with that, I’m slowly getting better at just focusing on the task at hand, because the only way I’ve gotten better from all of these other things is by taking the days as the come. With practice, I’ll hopefully get better at that and maybe forget about the future a little more.