Bipolar Disorder Support Group
Bipolar disorder is not just a single disorder, but a category of mood disorders marked by periods of abnormally high energy and euphoria, often accompanied by bouts of clinical depression. This is the place to talk about your experience with bipolar disorder, learn from others' experiences, and find support.
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
psychosis is fun....until it isn't
If you want to go to the "glass is half full" way...then no BiPolar Disorder (madness as you say) does not have to change your reality. If it's treated like a life long condition and managed as such, i.e. working the treatments and problems from it into your daily life and realizing that this is the life you have, then things can be very different. Stability is a possibility, managing symptoms, stopping mania before it takes over, etc.
If you do all that you should to manage your disease, meds, therapy, coping skills, eating right, sleeping, etc. then you can get to a point of stability and life can be pretty normal.