between the broken places

Archive for June 19th, 2009

Out of Context – Life of a Bipolar Chick

Per Dictionary.com the word Context means the following:

con⋅text (noun)

1. the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect: You have misinterpreted my remark because you took it out of context.
2. the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

Bipolar Disorder is an Out of Context mental illness. It takes normal, everyday events or comments and knocks them out of context, sending them back to my brain jumbled, with a trigger attached no longer allowing me to make sense of the situation, much less react in an appropriate manner. This has the ability to leave me paranoid, irrational, confused and suicidal, among other things.

The worst part about thinking out of context, is when those around you realize that’s how your brain works and they use it to their advantage. My ex-husband once told me during an argument that he could love me more if I were prettier. Yes, his exact words; “I could love you more if you were prettier.” There were no surrounding sentences to place this comment into some wacked out context; it was a random thought thrown towards my head with the speed of a flying dinner plate. He tried to play it off, told me I had misunderstood…again. That I was always picking individual comments and holding people accountable for my “out of context” interpretation.

To this I say: HEY! Speak in context…say what you mean and mean what you say. I’ve got enough trouble trying to sort out all your crap on a daily basis. I don’t want to have to decipher your comments as if they were Di Vinci’s Code. Yes, my brain twists the truth and tells me lies…I don’t need any help from idiots who think it’s funny to watch me react badly to something and then try to wrestle myself out of the cage I’ve locked myself into.

When I am living “Out of Context”, I am forever apologizing for not understanding what someone was trying to say, for taking something to heart that wasn’t meant to go there or for reacting to someone else’s action as if it were meant only to hurt me. This is why I have had to learn about my “triggers”.

Triggers are unhappy, sad or even joyful events that can make depression or mania more likely to occur. The baseline trigger is generally something that happened in the past which caused an extreme reaction and now some new event twists the Bipolar brain into a visceral response because of some familiarity to the initial situation. With the exception of the originating moment, the new reaction is an “out of context” moment caused by Bipolar Disorder. This is why we have to learn our triggers, understand how they played out in the first place and put the whole situation back into context to help avoid new and exacerbated reactions.