blobfish-a-go-go

(This entry blows my  usual 200 word limit out of the water, but because it's a listicle, I think it works best as one post.) If you spend much time at all in bipolar groups, you’ll eventually hear someone say “Bipolar is a fulltime job,” and then a bunch of people will nod their heads.  This might not be true for everyone. I guess some people can get their meds sorted and be on their way. But for the rest of us, we have to deeply invest in self-care. And it can absolutely take up 8 hours a day or more. What do I mean by self-care for bipolar? Well, there’s self-care between episodes, to help minimize their occurrence, and there’s self-care during episodes, to help minimize the damage they create. I'm gonna start with preventative self-care. Here are 10 self-care suggestions that I’ve found helpful.   #1 Establish a routine and stick to it .  Include -            sleep -         ...

Why is it so hard to be kind to ourselves—gentle, caring, compassionate—when inside and recovering from an episode? Because we are not who we grew up wanting to be, thinking we’d become. In that sense, we are failures. Because we are reminded every morning with that first pill that something is wrong with us, will always be wrong with us. Because we were taught to be strong women and men. We were taught that if we worked hard enough, were smart enough, we could do anything . Solve the problem! Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! “Pure Horatio Alger,” says Hunter Thompson, which should be our first clue if not our forty-seventh. It’s hard to be kind, gentle, compassionate, when our brains are incessantly tearing us down, trying to get us to give up, give all the way up. It’s hard not to believe your own brain. But we have to believe we deserve kindness and compassion from ourselves. It takes work. I’m certainly still working on it. It takes mindfulness and self-remembering...