Tree

I feel the breeze in my hair

Shuddering as it tickles my shoulders

I feel the bark beneath my hand

Rough, tough, unyielding

The sticky sap leaves crumbs of it on my skin

The branch underneath me will hold

Never will I fear that I am not protected by its strength

I look down and see how far I have come

Each step requiring a laborious haul 

Never will I forget what it took me to get here

I look up and see all of the branches still above me...

And I freeze.

What is this reality
That we shalt liveth?
What is reality
Without you in it?
Who dost claim to know
Reality as I see it,
As we have lived through it?

Thou life has ne'er endured
The mishaps that we have known
For generation upon unfortunate generation.
The mistakes of our past wilt not end by our own life,
For our children's children will forever know our strife
While you and yours liveth day by day in castles and gowns
Claiming fame and fortune won for you
Generation upon luckful generation past
While me and mine cast our'n eyes down in shame
For we will ne'er bear those blameless names.

Might I ask for this one request?
Let me rest with whoe'er I claim as best for me
For I'd rather not waste my days in misery
Burning by the light which you cast upon all
Making us all feel worthlessly appalled
At what we will ne'er do
And ne'er have for ourselves.

I am delicate like a flower
Tough like a thorn.
I am pretty to observe
Friendly to the eye but rough to the skin.

I recognize the heat.
I feel that it is hot.
Yet I do not remove this sweater.
Underneath it all I am cold, so cold.
I am chilled from the inside out, chilled by my frozen heart.
Frozen solid, never to be thawed.

What Is Love?

Just another typical blog about love from another girl not even in her twenties yet. Whoop de do. But hey, don't judge. I just finished watching The Notebook for the first time ever (and I cried...a lot).

I guess The Notebook got me think hardcore about this whole love thing. What is love? Well, as a linguistic, I like to think of it as a verb and as a noun. In the sense of a noun, it is intangible. No one can see it or always correctly identify it but for the most part we all know that it is there. We feel it in some sense from our parents, our families, our friends and our partners. Just like we can feel happy, sad, depressed, excited, emotional...we can feel love.

Now the tricky part comes in where we define love as a verb. Love is something that we actually do. We can love our parents, our families, our friends and our partners. Hell, we can even "love" objects such as sports, jewelry, clothes, shoes, etc. Although we don't always see it in action and can't always pinpoint that the thing we are witnessing is an act of love, we know that people do it and feel the effects of it. That all makes sense so far, right? So if we can feel sad and happy and depressed and loved...why can we only love and not sad, happy and depressed? For instance, we can say "I love this game" or "I feel love". However, it would be ungrammatical to say "I sad this game" or "I happy this person", even though we can say "I feel sad" or "I am happy". By creating this obvious difference in how we can use this one word in sentence compared to how we can grammatically use all the other words in that same category (the category of feeling or emotion), aren't we creating an obvious distinction that love is more than a feeling? Yes, we feel it inside of ourselves and each person has the capability of feeling it. Yes, it is an emotion. But even down to how we use it in a sentence, we are identifying that it is so much more complicated than all of that.

Why, then, is it thrown around so easily by so many people? Why are so many people convinced that the thing they are experiencing is love? And that their love is so unique compared to everyone else's? Maybe I'm crazy for saying this but I don't think any one human on this planet can explain what love is and have a correct and ultimate definition for it. And I honestly don't think that any of us are capable of truly wrapping our minds around what love really is. It is too big and complicated a topic to use carelessly. To me, love is a word I may never understand until I meet the big man. But I know that my opinions are far-fetched and small and many people will not agree.

So, why make a blog about this? Well, I guess I just wish that people would realize that love is a complicated topic for some of us to deal with. And although I like seeing people happy and with someone they truly care about, it really bothers me when they claim that they're in love when they've only been dating a couple months or when, from the outside looking in, I can clearly see that what you are experiencing is far from love. If I ever do understand what love is while I'm here, I hope that someday I can use the word and have it mean so much more than what it usually does to everyone else. I hope that when I say "I love you" it is not taken as a passive phrase that one can overlook so easily. And I hope it isn't too late to save the purity of this word for those of us who want to understand it and get frustrated by people who think they've got it all figured out.

I see a fuzzy, fluorescent pink blanket sitting on a white, uncovered mattress, crumbled up like someone had carelessly tossed it on the bed after they had been using it to wrap themselves up on a chilly evening while they watched Netflix or read a book. 

I see a flattened black pillow with drool marks running along the sides laying beside the pink blanket. I see bits of my life thrown together on this sheetless mattress. 

My warm and bright and beautifully disastrous life. 

My equally as flat and dark and stained life. 

I AM...BIPOLAR

Now this one's a fun one for me. The newest of all of my identity traits and a big inspiration for this blog series.

I am bipolar...big time.

My diagnosis started July 4th of 2015, so a little over a month before this blog post was published.
For over almost a week, I couldn't sleep. My thoughts were racing so fast that I just couldn't let myself relax enough to pass out. My body was also running on almost half of the food intake I was used to, partly because my body was probably stressed but also mostly because I couldn't slow myself down long enough to eat. I just had to keep moving...I went from not working out at all for over 3 months to going on a 4 hour bike ride and spending over 2 hours at the gym in one day during this week. I spent two days straight creating maps on the floor of my home with objects and was sharing very sensitive and deep information with anyone I could talk to. Thankfully, I was around people that had experience with psychological disorders, especially bipolar disorder, and so I was sent to spend over a week in the coping center.

Now that's just the part where I was diagnosed. Prior to this week long experience, I spent over a year in a deep depression. I started skipping classes. I started sleeping all day and cutting myself. This cycle eventually led to my withdrawal from school because I literally thought I couldn't do it anymore. This depressive year (2014-2015), my sophomore year of college, happened right after my manic year of college, my freshman year (2013-2014). I was involved in over roughly 15 programs at my school, was taking as many credit hours as I could and working a ton, on top of being social, going out every night, getting good grades, etc. I never had to sleep and was always working, life was great. But eventually my body shut down...and led me to the coping center. That's mostly the life of a bipolar disorderly person.

See, bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder, is a (in my case, hereditary) brain disorder than effects your mood but impacts almost every other function in your body and in your lifestyle. It can ruin marriages, financial statuses, employments, schooling, relationships, friendships, and even one's own life.  Bipolar people are impulsive people...on an impulse, we could lose all of our money because we wanted to donate it to charity. Or we could lose a friend because we were in a depressive state and blew up on somebody. The sad part is, most people go their whole lives never getting diagnosed and some even go their entire lives never knowing that they have bipolar disorder. I was lucky enough to have been diagnosed at an early age, but it still cost me my schooling, a lot of close relationships with some awesome people, and put me in financial stress.

Now there's some other things that you should know about bipolar disorder. There are three types: bipolar 1, 2 and NOS (not otherwise specified). Basically, the severity of bipolar increases as the number decreases (shout out to math people, what's that called again? haha). In other words, bipolar 1 is the most severe, followed by bipolar 2, which is followed by bipolar NOS. People with bipolar NOS are typically never diagnosed. They can usually go their whole lives untreated and live relatively normally. People with bipolar 2 are usually a little easier to diagnose or can be just as easily missed on the radar. They can usually live pretty normally with the help of therapy or medication or neither one. Bipolar 1 diagnosed patients are typically hospitalized by their condition at some point in their lives. They typically CANNOT get by without medication AND therapy. Statics show that bipolar 1 people have a 25% attempted suicide or death rate...they tended to be the most impulsive and reckless of the bunch, I guess.

Anyway, bipolar 1 is the diagnosis that I've ended up with and what I'll identify myself as for the rest of my life, not to scare anyone. I am currently getting the help and support that I need. However, my life hasn't become much easier since the diagnosis. In fact, I feel as though life is harder with this whole new identity to my name. I keep trying to analyze the WHY of this situation to find some value towards my experience for the sake of the world around me and for myself. To be honest, I don't know the WHY of my condition. Maybe I'll never know. Or maybe it was simply to write this blog and let everyone know that I struggle with this one big thing that takes everything out of me everyday. But I know I'm not alone in this world. To all of you other bipolar people out there, I honor thee for being so strong with this disorder.