Creative Writing
31 March 2023

Can I live a real life if I have a Bipolar Disorder?

By Lee

For what it’s worth, the answer is a resounding ‘YES’.

Elsewhere in this post you will see proof that having a bipolar disorder is not a sentence to soul-destroying poverty, no friends, a life with no meaning, an inability to hold down a job or build a career, or any of the other myths other well-meaning friends and family tell you. What you will find are tips and tricks to help you manage your bipolar mind, tips that are hard-earned by others. And me. I am bipolar, and this is my story.

I knew things weren’t working well for me at a young age. When I was seven, in an unconscious bid to let my parents know I was unhappy, I put some tomato sauce on a kitchen knife and lay on the floor, as if I was dead. I was up before either of my parents on this particular Sunday morning, so I held my pose and my nerve and waited for a parent to come into the living room and ‘discover’ me, dead by suicide. At seven years of age.

My father just picked up the knife and carried on to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He said not a word. I’m guessing that finding your only child lying on the carpet covered with tomato sauce and holding a knife is something 1960s Dads were not told how to deal with. And at seven years of age I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary to express or explain my feelings. Nor did I have the experience to differentiate between ‘stable’ and ‘sad’.

Fast forward to age thirteen. I had long been moody and my parents struggled to cope with me. Despite their penniless state, they somehow found the dollars to have me visit a child psychologist. I went to the psychologist twice, and on that second session he asked me to invite my parents in for the third session. When I told Mum what he asked for, she immediately replied, “I don’t know why he wants to see us, you’re the one with the problem, not us. Your father and I won’t be going.”

I didn’t go to the third session and just gave up. Dad, as Dads did in 70s Australia, went to work and just left everything to do with children to the little woman.

Mum tried to be supportive, but was hampered by the training she received as a child. Born of very middle-class English parents, one of whom had been a Captain in the British Army in World War Two, had been stranded at Dunkirk, and who as an Intelligence Officer interrogated German officers, she was taught not to show emotions. Emotions were untrustworthy and only led to disclosure and weakness. My mother, her sisters and her parents were firmly of the British ‘stiff upper lip’ school. If things start getting difficult, you just make a cup of tea.

Mum was about a cold a person as you would never want to be introduced to. Dad was the life of the party but didn’t know how to interact with his own son. He loved fixing cars, and twice asked me to fix engines with him. The world of valves and paste, distributors and alternators, was foreign to me and held about as much allure as family events with other families on a Sunday. Mum was very controlling of me, in the same way that the Pope is Catholic, and bricks don’t float in water, and it wasn’t until the last year of her life that she stopped being so controlling and I stopped truly, deeply, hating her. Up until then she was my absolute, total nemesis.

My twenties saw me in the RAAF, masking my feelings of despair. Of course, there were pockets of sunlight—learning how to be an innovative Armed Forces radio announcer in Penang, the friendships I built and delightfully still have, learning to type (the best skill I’ve ever learned).

My thirties were a drastic fall into the horror end of depression. I had moved to England to be a singer/songwriter. It didn’t work out, but I ended up studying and achieving an Honours degree in Psychology & Sociology. And I became engaged to one of my uni lecturers, so that couldn’t possibly go wrong, could it?

After living in England for twelve years, my fiancée the uni lecturer gently told me that I needed to go home, that she and her young son that I adored so much would miss me but they’d understand. I was missing the blue skies of South Australia terribly, as too I was missing my friends, the same friends I had at school and who are still dear friends. In 1998 my father died and I was 12,000 miles away. I flew home to comfort Mum and I spoke at his funeral. I spent a few months in Adelaide sorting out Dad’s affairs because Mum was in deep shock and grief, unable to do anything but somehow put the kettle on and make herself a coffee. AKA ‘survive’. I also continued my studies long-distance. I eventually returned to my fiancée and her wonderful son.

In 1999, with my studies completed and my time with News Corp in London over after the collapse of the internet start-up I worked for, I boarded a Qantas flight back to Adelaide.

My forties were more of the same misery I had lived with in my twelve years in England, without the song writing and recording, and without the wonderful friends I had made while pursuing a career in music and phenomenal wealth. Instead, I had relentless depression and a series of sales jobs that I was totally unsuited for but took anyway because I needed to eat.

My forties also saw me marry a woman and her three children in a quaint Catholic church in leafy Stirling in the glorious Adelaide Hills, followed by a memorable reception at Warrawong Sanctuary where two animals formed the ‘beast with two backs’ while we and the guests were eating. The next fourteen years were a whirlwind of an off-again, on-again marriage. I became a world-wide guru in my field and travelled Australia and far-flung quarters of the world presenting my ideas on stages and running workshops. I wrote books on my field which sold well. To balance that, I had a few stays in the Adelaide Clinic (a private mental health clinic) for Depression, my wife started taking large doses of antidepressants to cope with both our relationship and her stressful job. In late 2017 we both travelled to Europe to try and fix our marriage. In mid-2018 she told me she wanted a divorce.

My fifties were deeply coloured by depression, until my treating psychiatrist noted I was Bipolar II. Which means I suffered depressions that went on for months and years, interspersed by mini-mania (aka hypermania) which sees you with more need for sex than you’ve ever experienced (and usually giving in to your impulses), gambling, impulse purchases (drunken 3am purchases of Tony Robbins cds and exercise equipment), arguments, feeling like you are on speed, frustration that no-one can keep up with your thinking, walking at a faster pace… the list is long and multi-coloured.

This all sounds disastrous, doesn’t it?

Well, in 2020 I commenced a creative writing degree and found the key that explained all the unhappiness I had experienced in my life—I was a ‘creative’ and not at all suited to the corporate jobs I had always taken in order to feed myself. Being a ‘creative’ meant that my moods were understandable when considering the stress of being a square peg in a round hole. With this is mind, and knowing that there’s a strong link between creativity and bipolar disorder (Cirino), I bought books on being bipolar and how to manage it.

Which led me to discovering, from all the suggestions the learned doctor authors expressed, there were a few tips and tricks that worked for me. So, here’s what I recommend based on my own lived experiences:

Firstly, see a psychiatrist to get a qualified insight into you, and see if you are indeed bipolar and what ‘flavour’ (Type I or Type II); the psychiatrist I see is wonderful, she found the right medications for me and helped me be a functioning member of society again, without taking away those qualities that made me ‘me’—a man who firmly dances to his own beat.

Then take the medicines the psychiatrist offers, knowing that it will likely take many months to find which medications work for you and which don’t, and at what doses. Nothing works overnight with psychotropic medicines, and they all interact with each other. But thanks to the new medication I started taking a year ago, I am finally, joyfully, wonderfully stable. I’m even in a loving relationship at last!

Tell those friends and family members closest to you that you are bipolar, and ask them to support you when you need it and offer you an early-warning signal if you start to go manic or depressed. Because then you can take corrective action. Never underestimate the healing power of close friends—without the friends I’ve had since high school I’m convinced I would be living in my car a lot more than I did during my marriage’s ‘momentary lapses of reason’.

Exercise as much as you can manage; getting them ol’ bones moving is really therapeutic. Eat nutritious foods, anything you like (steer clear of heavily processed food like Maccas, and go easy on the alcohol please, because alcohol reacts badly with some of the drugs you might be on, and it’s also strongly linked with cancer, particularly breast cancer) and make sure you include greens and fruit somewhere in your meals and snacks.

Read up on the condition. Find out as much as you can about you, the medications, and the help available.

Oh, and if you think that being bipolar means you can’t be one of life’s achievers, the following names have all admitted or been diagnosed as bipolar: Ben Stiller, Brian Wilson, Carrie Fisher, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Charlie Sheen, Demi Lovato, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Ford Coppola, Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, Kanye West (aka Ye), Kay Redfield Jamison, Kurt Cobain, Mariah Carey, Mel Gibson, Robert Downey Jr., Russell Brand, Selena Gomez, Sinead O’Connor, Steven Fry, Sting, Vivien Leigh, and Winston Churchill (Cirino; Olympia House; Wikipedia).

You can manage your own bipolar brain, or the brain of a friend or that of a family member who has a bipolar disorder. I reckon the best way is to visit the Black Dog Institute, Australia’s top research and resource body for bipolar disorder. They have a ton of information with which to skill up on the disorder, and what you can do to effectively manage it.

After decades of feeling stupid, dumb, and achingly sad, I now:

  • Am very happy
  • Am very stable
  • Am loving life again
  • Am half-way through my second Masters degree. Not bad for someone who dropped out of high school, and whose teachers said I’d never amount to anything
  • Have won a prestigious award for my landscape photography
  • Have a wonderful partner who ‘gets me’ (and I her), and we spend hours laughing until we cannot breathe
  • Own my own home
  • Am about to exhibit some of my best photographs at a wonderful winery
  • Am about to publish five albums of ambient music across all of the world’s major platforms, such as iTunes, Google Play, Amazon…
  • Have a publishing deal to publish one of the several books I’ve written that I kept in my top desk drawer, too scared to submit them to publishers. The publisher also wants me to update three business books I wrote between 2008 and 2012, then publish them as ‘Second Editions’
  • Realise that I’m a ‘creative’ not a ‘corporate’, which explains why I always felt like a square peg in a round hole with work and relationships. I should never have been in a J.O.B. in the first place, because I was destined to fail and once more berate myself for failing
  • Proudly wear my heart on my sleeve, instead of trying to hide my true colours in order to fit in with everyone else and not stand out or embarrass anyone.

Good luck and above all have fun. Dance with your bipolar and you surely will have fun.

Trust me, I’m a psychologist.

Cirino, Erica. “Bipolar Disorder and Creativity.” Healthline https://www.healthline.com/health/bipolar-disorder/famous-creative-people. Accessed 23rd March 2023.

Olympia House. “18 Celebrities with Bipolar Disorder.” Olympia House https://olympiahouserehab.com/celebrities-with-bipolar/. 2015.

Wikipedia. “Bipolar Disorder.” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder. 2015.