Trigger Warning: This is a raw, real take on bipolar disorder. It’ll have moments of hope, but it also contains elements that could trigger suicidal people.

Mr. Bipolar, my hands shake from nerves and the drugs you make me take as I write you. It’s been a while since I haven’t seen your face through the cracks of my life, always smiling and juggling the two doors through which you know I’ll have to walk. You’re just too damn seductive.

Mr. Bipolar, you made me want to kill myself this week because of your mania, the drug you inject my brain with on a consistent basis. The meds said they’d make you smile less, but I realized this week that you were hiding a fucking knife behind your teeth. At once you deemed me a god, but in the next you whispered that you have to take me. That they’d be better off if I weren’t here. That I fuck up their lives and a last march to midnight, us bound hand in hand, was all that I needed.

All the times my mother saw me manic and crazed, and worried that I would forever believe the fucked up things you told me. How god is us and I am god, whatever the fuck that means. How the neighbors are plotting a revolution. You lie yet tell the truth in ways chaotic lovers do, and Jesus Christ I love kissing you.

Do you remember that time, oh shit, it was this week. Do you remember that time, Mr. Bipolar, where you stole my fucking face and replaced it with a deranged one, a distorted smile draped onto it like fanciful holiday decorations? You gave me the mania, the high, and then you said the world wants to kill you. They’re watching you. Do you have any fucking idea what paranoid delusions feel like? How they convince you you’re not you, and no one else recognizes you. Not your girlfriend, not your mom, and most of all, I can’t even recognize myself. How the fuck are you supposed to find yourself again when you simply see an imitation holding a sign that points down.

Of course you would, and you probably do, but now I have to up the dose on my meds and hope I don’t lose me in the process. All the shit and chaos simply for a half week of fun, and you told me it’d get better. And it isn’t, Mr. Bipolar. You’re a fucking liar.

Thank you for taking my depression, the paranoia screams that it’s a better trade, but the mania’s razor grin hovers all the more lethally. It’s intensity a raging inferno that ignites and illuminates, only to dishevel and spit ash in my eyes. I miss the days when I wasn’t a rapid cycling variety, and I definitely preferred the flavors of darkness rather than these continually increasing manic flings through the night.

Mr. Bipolar, I don’t think you realize that I hate to love you and live to hide you. You can’t have my life despite all the times you make me want to end it. And each time we rush off to some paradise like lunatic lovers, ascending the bulbous clouds that dot the sky like cotton candy, I will miss you when it’s gone. When I come back. But see, that’s the problem. You always fucking leave me as soon as you take me, and my heart splinters and collapses. And that, I assure you, is what you can’t take anymore. Moi. Me.

Mr. Bipolar, I love a girl and you can’t take her from me. She won’t let you. Not my friends and not my family. None of it. You no longer control my life.

I do want to thank you, though. All the shit and noise you spew, I still see your beauty. I still see your lethality. Despite those, I see my reflection and realize I wouldn’t be here without you. As an artist/writer, I thank you for the emotive complexes you ushered me through. I can express the spectrum, baby. I thank you for showing me that good feelings can be simply that, fucking good. Thank you for allowing me to cascade into a crater lined with electric spikes, it made me appreciate the light.

And on behalf of all of my fellow Polar Bears, we thank you for bonding us together as a community. You can’t have us, but you will stay within us. We color our world now, and there’s not a single goddamned thing you can do about it.

Sincerely,

Poetic Asshole.