You ARE Your Brain!

I have a friend who researches brain drugs- yes I know, ironic! One day, we were at a cafe talking and I said something to the effect of "I don't.... my brain". He jokingly replied, "You ARE you brain!" That's one of those comments that you just think on. (In "What Dreams May Come", Robin William's character says something about his brain being separate from him; the whole movie is kind of like a lucid dream.)

So, I AM my brain. There is no me outside of my brain. In my last post, I talked about feeling disconnected from myself, but this is different. My brain runs EVERYTHING about me. I cannot distance myself from it. And yet, therapy is about trying to see around what your bipolar brain is doing. I tell you what: Sometimes, my brain seems so scrambled that I can't figure out left from right. Once, I found myself in a Wendy's and yet couldn't figure out how I'd gotten there, and was asking myself, "What do they DO here? Hmm..." I could read the signs and see the chairs and people, but I seriously had no idea what one did there, and my mind was blank as to the driving I (now obviously) had done.

I've heard other bipolar people say that they've been told to "just pick yourself up by your bootstraps" or "stop thinking and just do it" or "if you'd only..." These things certainly have their place, but say them to a bipolar person in the middle of an episode and you'll just get a blank stare since that's what his brain is processing at that moment.

It seems as if my brain runs the show and when it DOES, it takes over! I have had to learn how to back myself out of situations- how to catch the little clues that I'm heading into an episode, before they get out of control. Sometimes I can, and sometimes I end up in the middle of it and don't know how I got there. In my last post, I talked about realizing when I'm hallucinating and a friend commented on how good that was. It takes practice! I suppose that there could be SCARY hallucinations and then I might not be so quick on the updraw. (Spiders come to mind!! EEK!)

As I said before, sometimes it almost seems preferable to have an episode than to be turned into a jar of molasses and then told that you need to go exercise for heaven's sake!