Finding Balance - Confessions of a Bipolar

Book excerpt: In a life filled with the elation, exhilaration and animated exultation located at a paradise called mania... to the dejection, despair, and desolation of the hopelessness of depression ... but in the end mostly spent in the aftermath of normality and having to deal with reality... I remain always steadily cautious, for with great unannounced swiftness, I may be called upon to answer the torment and anguish of every emotion you can conjure betwixt up and down. The unfortunate and shattered relationships now crippled in the wake of my experiences are too many to count. Regrets I have many! But I know I am not alone in my tribulations. In these purposeful, selected retellings of a journey to finding balance, it is my hope that you find similarities to compliment or maybe enhance your experiences, and help you make sense of your own journey. It will also, in stages, fittingly break to take you inside the complex mind of a bipolar. But, an early cautionary heed, it can be playfully whimsical at stages, bold and brightly humoured at others, to profoundly philosophical, then savagely scary and even scaringly depressive in episodic peaks. No matter how this is externally viewed, in those interludes, the feelings and experiences are very real to me. I humbly prostrate my story before you in the desire that it may provide some guidance in making sense of the eccentricities of a bipolar life, or perhaps as we are all woven from the same ancient cloth, simply, life!