Age & Memory

I found out that I have bipolar at age 33. This is true for a lot of people: They aren't diagnosed until later in life. Three weeks ago, I had a manic episode. About a year before that, I had another manic episode. Each presented itself differently, but still they were classified as manic episodes. How long did it feel between episodes? Not long! I am now 41. It seems I was just diagnosed with bipolar 1. But its been 8 years. How can that be? As we age, a year becomes a smaller proportion of our total life lived, and so it seems to go by more quickly. When I was 10, the years seemed to go by slowly, so that every Christmas was new and fun. This year, Christmas is coming up again in two months and I distinctly remember my friend coming to visit and our sitting together by the fire and talking the day away this past Christmas. The phrase, "I remember it like it was yesterday" is often used because of the splicing phenomenon where as we age one year becomes a smaller and small portion of your life. We also become better at remembering things and we have more memories in general to recall on, so this makes it seem like the event was closer to us.

At the same time, one of the reasons I keep this blog is so that I don't forget the events that I go through relating to bipolar. The further one gets from an event, the easier it is to distort that event in one's memory. It gets thinned out and changed as time goes by. If you were to ask me, for example, about my manic episode this past month, I could tell you that I wanted to play in traffic and that I thought angels were talking to me and that the sun was giving me messages, but the details of that would be gone. This happens to everybody, more or less, but this blog is a good way for me to remember how I was feeling at the time; not only that but its a good way to remember how I was thinking. In the long run, it can tell me how I was feeling from month to month and year to year, from manic episode to manic episode and everything in between. When I go back and read older entries, I think, "Aha! I remember that!" My hope is that others can learn from my candid entries, as I keep a record of my moods and thoughts. Maybe, in time, I can also learn from my past and avert an episode when similar symptoms arise.

Also, some of the medications can affect memory, like Topomax, but that gets better over time. I had a period of time where I had a terrible time with my short term memory; I would go to do something and immediately forget what it was. What's more, I would go to write down what I was going to do and forget what it was before I could write it down! It got really bad for a while and was quite annoying. I had a hard time functioning because the second I thought of something to do, it was gone.

So some of it is getting older, some of it is normal sense of time and some of it is side effects of medications.