Sometimes I just want people to believe.
I had a manic episode at 39 1/2, which I still don’t know if I believe it almost a year after. Maybe it’s normal for those who are bipolar 1 to believe what was real to them isn’t necessarily chemically healthy for their brain.
I know everyone wants to help me believe I’m not crazy, but just the label itself leads me to believe I’m not right. Like, “I’m not good enough”. That’s my shame speaking, I know, but it gets very strong, especially when I’m trying to find motivation to do things. Shame wants to keep me in the very place that I felt like the manic episode liberated me from.
I have certain people who believe and others who have a hard time with it. But I still equate this to a cessationist vs continuationist disagreement. One goes to judgment and I feel unwarranted shame for my actions, one presses in to listen and try to understand. They might even wade the waters of trying to help me with spiritual discernment through prayer and healing.
I’m to the point where believing is more consistent with continuationist than with cessationists. And I don’t really want those who are “open” but “skeptical”. I want those who love the word but who also actively speak the language of spiritual experience with God.
We are spiritual beings, is it not natural for us to be fighting spiritual battles? This is not a post against doctors or medication, it’s a post for God. I’m tired of Christian tones with underlying ego. Success is often a plague that stokes the fire of their misaligned emotional dysfunction.
I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want to feel the need to fight. I am reminded by my emotional coach constantly that I should instead focus on my response. I have my feelings but if I can’t have self control I can’t have love. It’s so hard to not be angry and feel justified for being angry, when you can’t keep a job and everyone expects you to. And you know your are wired a little differently, where you are gifted in breaking things and fixing them. Some people don’t appreciate that, they want you to follow the predefined systems that are inefficient and ineffective.
When you fight for what you deserve, you lose, especially when it’s ridden with toxic shame. You must learn to trust and believe with consistent followthrough. But it’s just so damn hard when people don’t believe and you’re constantly feeling the need to explain away why you’re doing it a certain way. And honestly, your trying hard yourself to believe that you’re not crazy, those thoughts in the manic episode weren’t crazy. And they just might be part of what God wants to do in your life, lessons you needed to learn for who you are meant to be.
To believe in the impossible by yourself is limited. To believe with others is freeing and life giving. With the amoral, there is a line drawn between judgment and encouragement. The goal should be to believe with others. Pursue that to no end.