“You are not even trying to feel better.”

“I have bipolar disorder. It is not about trying”

“Yeah, but you take medication for it now. Just explain to yourself. Tell yourself why your feelings are irrational and they’ll go away.”

Irrational. The word stings. I like to think I am rational. I even included the word “skeptic” in my Twitter bio. In my blog I have extolled the power of critical thinking. I read Isaac Asimov and Richard Dawkins. The name of my blog is “Passionate Reason.” I like reason. Reason is good; irrationality bad.

Being accused of not being reasonable makes me want to explain what it is really like to have bipolar disorder and why I cannot simply talk myself out of my moods as I am so often instructed to do.

A passage of one of my favorite books A Separate Peace is a good place to start. There is a phrase he used to describe a way that “feelings become deeper than thought.”

The entire passage goes like this: “In the deep, tacit way that feeling becomes deeper than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”

That idea that feelings can become deeper than thoughts has stayed with me. There seems to be a layer of me that eludes conscious control. Some call this the subconscious, yet I am aware of it as John Knowles was, so how “sub” can it actually be?

I am very often aware of how irrational some of my thoughts are as I am having them. They seem to erupt from me, and sometimes they surprise me. For example, right after I publish a blog I have a series of “what if” moments.

What if everyone hates it, what if it contains something embarrassing I did not intend to say, what if it ruins my life and everyone hates me and I am banished to the wilderness to survive on wild berries and ant dung?

Sometimes I write these thoughts down as a way to capture and study them. Sometimes it seems that I am not really thinking these thoughts at all, but that they are a strident background music to my conscious musings, the type of irritant where I should be able to yell, “Hey, turn that down or I will call the police!”

On a purely conscious level I know better than to worry about what anyone thinks about my writing. Writing is a risk. Even it was true that everyone hated my writing, I should be able to handle it. The philosophy that released me from creative block was that I would write for myself and not worry about what anyone thought. It transformed how I worked, cured me of block, and allowed me to make friends with my writing again, so that I never have to force myself to write anymore.

Unfortunately, my ease with writing has not increased my comfort with sharing my work. I have similar anxieties about sharing that I used to have about writing, including, sometimes, mood crashes. And no matter how eloquently I explain to myself how unwarranted they are, I simply cannot make them go away. They have to run their course.

The insidious thing about bipolar disorder for me is that when I am having my moods, I do not think about them as part of a disorder. I relate my moods to a trigger: “My blog had a glaring typo that changed the whole meaning of my sentence, but people have already seen it. Alas! I must retreat to my sulking corner at once with a snuggly blanket, a sock monkey, and a vat of Pepto Bismol.”

However, I am often aware that the triggering event often does not warrant the level of emotional discomfort that I feel. Having my cat get sick on the carpet should not ruin my day or cause me to question the meaning of life and the root of all suffering.

I know this, and the discrepancy between what I know and what I feel causes me agonies of cognitive dissonance.

But my discomfort does not just stay in my head. It affects the decisions I make during the day. It influences what I do.

When planning my afternoon activities I find myself scanning possibilities as cautiously as I would in a mine field, alert to anything that might trigger a mood crash. Fortunately, the act of writing causes me no pain unless I am getting ready to share it.

Writing is therapy for me. It focuses and relaxes me. Usually it improves my mood, although that was certainly not always the case.

But querying is a different matter. How it will affect my mood is unpredictable. By querying, I am giving someone the power to reject me. It is an exposed feeling and, in order to make this uncomfortable risk a reality, I am doing tedious work in order to conform to varying formatting and word count requirements.

There is no certainty that anything will come of any of them. The pull of wanting to write, to create something instead of trying to impress a stranger, is sometimes overwhelming. Querying can and often does make me remember what it feels like to be depressed. Because of that, I have to resist powerful impulses to avoid it.

But is avoiding mood-dimming activities strictly the domain of someone with bipolar disorder? Most everyone seeks to avoid unpleasant activities. This leads to another question that I frequently ask myself: How many of my bad moods are normal? Which of them are induced by illness? Where does my pathology leave off and where do I begin?

Are feelings being out of sync with a situation a result of bipolar disorder or is it a human problem?

There is no clear line between my “healthy” personality and my illness-induced moods. There is no single site that a physician can point to and say “There is your bipolar disorder, right there. Got a scalpel and some tongs? I can get that Bad Boy out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Whatever bipolar disorder is, I suspect it is wired into my brain in a way that is complex, burrowing into the folds and fissures where my personality is.

The medication I take is effective in preventing major episodes, but it is not infallible. But telling this to someone who has never suffered from mental illness can be difficult. The idea that I cannot talk myself out of a mood inappropriate to a situation strikes deep at what some people want to believe about free will.

But I wonder: If people could feel the way they chose, why would anyone ever take drugs, illegal or otherwise? There is something strange about trying to control my mind with my mind, and particularly with trying to assuage an afflicted mind with an afflicted mind.

However, I think that sometimes it can actually work, which is why it is so tempting to think I could make it work all the time. I thought my way out of being blocked creatively. I talked myself out of it to a degree that I do not struggle with it anymore. I even wrote a book about it.

I am intrigued with the idea that I could apply the same principles I used in getting over my block to also overcome my anxiety about sharing my ideas. Would it work? In writing the change came through a kind of rebellion about not having to please anyone anymore. I defanged my internal censor by creating a “therapy” file in which I heaped praise on myself to counter all the self-doubts that arose. And in doing so I changed the way I think about writing in a way that endures.

That is one reason I am so frustrated that I am still subject to the whims of my mood cycle. There are times my mood nosedives for no good reason, and when I am in that state, my ability to talk myself out of my depression is impaired by the depression itself. It is hard for a broken mind to repair itself and meanwhile pain gushes into the gaps where reason used to be.

I am not willing to say that my illness strips me of free will. But the place inside me where feeling become deeper than thought sometimes sinks beyond the reach of logic, pep talks and platitudes.

Can I control my moods to make them conform to the situation? Yes and no. There are times I have done it, when I went into myself and dug up treasure, insights that changed my perspective and that I could apply.

But when the rising tide of depression gets too far over my head, I go into auto-pilot. I react instead of act, and my higher cerebral functions go off-line. When this happens it is no help at all for someone to say, “Just be reasonable.”

I believe this is why a combination of drugs and psychotherapy are normally used to treat mental illness. People are able to adapt to a degree and have some control but there are limits.

Drugs address the biological facet of mental illness, but steering through a confusing hurricane of moods sometimes needs guidance.

I am not sure what I need. For me, writing is more effective as therapy than any psychiatrist I have ever been to, and, despite my complaints, I consider myself happy overall. Feeling truly depressed is a relatively rare occurrence now, but on days it appears, it is no less alarming than it ever has been.

I want to be in control of myself. I want my moods to be commensurate with the events that trigger them. But regardless of how much control over my moods I do or do not have, I wish people would stop saying, “You are not trying to feel better.”

I believe that when people say that, they are trying to confirm a model of human behavior that comforts them, one that says, “If someone is unhappy, it is their own fault; they have probably made poor decisions; they are too passive; they are not even trying to improve their life.”

Someone who cannot see the world through my eyes has no basis for saying whether I am trying or not. Why would I choose to be unhappy? It is a ridiculous accusation.

And it simply is not true.