It’s been a very long time.
When I started writing this blog, I did it because I wanted to share day-to-day things, by a person who happened to have bipolar disorder. Now, bipolar is everywhere: characters in movies, tv shows, even commercials. (Okay, the commercials are largely PSAs, but, hey, it’s helpful.)
My partner-in-crime and I have a special thing that we do whenever there’s a bipolar character – We shout “Bipolar!!” and his right and my left fists approach each other, then pull back like they’ve exploded. There are sounds, too. It’s pretty great.
We’ve been doing it a lot over the past year. Authors, screenwriters, playwrights are writing about their bipolar parents, siblings, friends, or selves. Sometimes it’s happy, a lot of the time there’s pain that just can’t be entirely fictional. I think it speaks to how far the conversation has come, and about the new generation of artists who grew up with the illness and can express it without the censure that surrounded mental illness. Mental illness affects about *one in every ten people (*did not look this up just now, but it’s close), so everyone knows someone affected. We all must. And now we can talk about it.
So – What do you want to hear about? A new question about life with bipolar? A list of tv and movie characters with bipolar disorder whenever I catch the reference? How to balance life and work, if you’ve just been diagnosed? Let me know, and I’ll start writing again.
superfabulousgettingby 