Being Bi Polar Sucks

Apparently, 20% of people diagnosed as being depressed are actually Bi Polar.  I am no exception to this rule, having been misdiagnosed for many years.  I have been on many different medications over the years for depression, and although many of these drugs were helpful at the beginning, they all ceased to be effective, at which point I usually gave up treatment and medications altogether...until eventually I became so focused on suicide that I had no other option than to seek help. 

The last time this happened to me was about 2.5 years ago.  I saw a very good doctor in an emergency room who immediately picked up on it and sent me to see a psychiatrist who finally diagnosed me as being a sufferer of Bi Polar Depression.  I was stunned.  I spent so many years in deep depressions that were attributed to, well, plain old depression.  He put me on a medication I had never been on before and it worked very very well.

Sadly, due to the complications of our health care system, I have no doctor.  no family doctor, no psychiatrist, no medication.  Now I am forced to self medicate (when I can afford to do so), which seems to help, but it is not as good as the legally prescribed medication was.  Not to mention how difficult it can be to get when you are in a city where you don't know anybody.  Ideally, I would self medicate during more difficult phases and be on the prescribed meds all the time.

Most of the time I hold up well.  The problem is that I appear to be functional, so no one ever cuts me any slack when I am having a hard time.  Sometimes I wish I was a more typical Bi Polar sufferer!  My moods range only from mildly depressed to suicidal.  After paying attention to these things for so long, I can identify when I am in a "manic" phase, but it is really mild:  I tend to talk too much and I start having hopes for the future.  Then it goes away, leaving me depressed again.  I wish I could have a real manic phase!  I get all the low moods: depression, despair, self loathing, hopelessness, fatigue, lethargy, guilt, and memory problems, yet none of the benefits like being energetic and temporarily euphoric.  Sometimes I feel ripped off.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to let it show how dysfunctional I really am.  For example: I would show up to my terrible job to be abused by customers for 12 hours and be taken advantage of by my boss way beyond the limits of acceptability day after day after day, working in a mental fog and doing it all by rote even when anyone else in my shoes would be next door to institutionalized. When I tried to talk to the boss about it, she told me that people who are mentally ill are weak, and I wasn't like that - I was a diligent worker and her "right hand man" - I was just exaggerating.  End of conversation.  Just because I am intelligent, hard working and very good at my job did not mean that I wasn't having significant issues, but she was unable to see that.  I was able to hang on to my multitudes of job duties by my fingernails, and when I reached the point that I had zero internal resources left to cope and had to quit, I was (and still am) treated like I made some kind of irrational decision.  Like I decided on a whim to send us spiralling into financial ruin.

So here I am:  a very capable Administrative Assistant/Receptionist with stellar references, a strong work history and a desire to better myself all set to go on fucking welfare next week.  And I can't even tell anyone.  Thanks to this recession I can't find a job I'm qualified for, and I am over qualified for everything else and no one will hire me.  I'll have to come up with some lie to tell people when they ask about where the hell the money is coming from because they don't understand anything about my type of disease and will just say it is because I am lazy or unmotivated.  "Why did you quit a perfectly good job?  You should go and beg them for you job back" is what my mother said.

I really don't know what to do about any of this.

If I was totally healthy, none of this would be an issue.  If I was sicker, I could get help.  But I'm me, and that isn't enough.  I have lofty aspirations that I am committed to achieving, but I wonder if its unrealistic to expect anything from myself.  Or maybe I'm just being crazy.