Interesting. I wonder how many of us who launch ourselves in weird and wonderful directions finally realise what we are when we hit a wall that can no longer be climbed?
If we're lucky, we find a profession and a way of life that fits our atypicality, the peculiar ways that we're wired. But, as is the way, we pick up complications along the way, things that our 'specialness' can't resolve because they result from that specialness
Doing something different from everyone else because somehow you're different from everyone else you have a kind of grace period where everything meshes and your quirks make the running for you. Then the period of grace ends and the quirks want their due
With something like bipolar II you're like a programme that can do something pretty amazing but which collects unresolved routines that eventually mount up and crash the computer
I think it's really interesting the amount of people who are diagnosed with things later in life who have effectively used the bleeding edge of the way they are to get where they are and then realised that atypicality isn't all gifts, there's deficits too
With my own condition I've always been a bit terrified of fully embracing it, of letting it take me where it might (bipolar II as well). There's a vertigo to embracing it that I still wrestle with. Bipolar is seductive like that. Anyone will tell you
I've always been terrified by the potential for making a massive mess. Although I have made massive messes. I've always been terrified of the capacity to mess things up for other people. So I have kept the shining eyed quick creature hidden through shame, I think
There's something horribly humbling about having to accept you have something like bipolar II in later life which means you have to go back through your life and reclassify yourself and your experiences, a kind of existential crisis asking 'who was I? Is it the me I am now?'
So many of the amazing, talented people I know are so good at what they do because they found the way to harness their inherent freaky difference. Many of them run into a wall when it comes to how you live with that when the gifts and debts become unbalanced
The common factor in harnessing the freakiness is finding a career that can accommodate the lateral exploration you need to do to make best of how you are different. But eventually non negotiables of life catch up with you and you find the gift and the curse are the same thing
The thing is, what Maria knows, and the rest of us who have been there know too, is that if we hadn't used the thing that could be defined as a condition, we would never have catapulted ourselves into the thing that could make it possible to gain value from it
If you'd got the 'right' help early on, you kind of know, you'd probably never have been able to take the path you have. This may be an illusion. Maybe their might have been a healthy way to get things done, but whether you would have found it you'll never know
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