I have so much to say yet I'm speechless - this is genuinely so helpful. Thank you!
Glad to help!
These are painful lessons that I had to learn the hard way and if sharing what I've learned helps others to avoid such horrific emotional pain, then there's at least some benefit to having gone through such pain.
may i ask what the differences are? im not really educated on bipolar disorder and bpd :,)
The somewhat confusing commonality is unjustifiable emotional swings.
There are two big differences that I'll refer to as the emotional and the scale.
For someone with bipolar, the scale tends to global. If you're depressed, it's about everything (e.g. Leiot's anology of wearing shit-tinted glasses), if you're hypomanic or manic it's about everything (e.g. Leiot's analogy of rose-colored glasses).
For someone with bipolar, the emotional variance tends to center around mood and interpretations of self, events, and the world.
The low end is depression, in both mood and energy.
The high end is manic episodes, again, in mood and energy, and these are often debilitating or damaging (for example people will spend an inordinate amount of money in manic phases for no justifiable reason).
There are also less extreme high ends known as hypomanic episodes, which I can best describe as having genuinely amazing productivity and energy. Fwiw, if I could live in a permanent state of hypomania, I absolutely would!
(Note that if you're ever accused of being on speed when you aren't, you're probably experiencing a hypomanic or manic episode.)
Some people bounce between the extremes within short periods of time (e.g. will experience extremes within a single day), this can be referred to as "rapid cycling". While others may experience almost exclusively depression, and only have a single manic episode in their entire lifetime.
Of particular relevance to the broader conversation, people who suffer from bipolar also tend to have less typical, atypical, or outright paradoxical reactions to medications.
In my case, I've had mostly depression, with hypomanic episodes after all but my first and last surgeries, and somewhat randomly, often times every few months from when I was a pre-teen until I started testosterone (I'm transmasculine), but there was a roughly six month period when I had them almost weekly.
My single manic attack was after a really basic knee surgery. For three days I didn't sleep and my mind was bouncing around so much that I couldn't complete multi-word sentences for that entire period. It was so bad, I literally couldn't go to the bathroom without my mother basically making me follow absurdly simple steps ("unbutton your pants" which I did and immediately got distracted again, "unzip your pants" again, I did it and again, I immediately got distracted). Thankfully, after subsequent surgeries I only experienced hypomania. I came to suspect that it was because of the types and amount of pain meds. During my next to last surgery (on the same knee), this was basically confirmed as I refused pain meds in favor of just keeping my knee packed in ice; unfortunately, it was summertime and there was a power outage, so when the ice ran out and I couldn't stand the pain anymore, I broke down and took some morphine, about 30-45 minutes later, I literally had so much energy that I physically couldn't stay in the bed; I was about to run (and I do mean
RUN around the hospital -on crutches, no less), thankfully the nurses caught me and convinced me to race myself through the halls in a wheelchair; they made a point of telling me that they'd
never seen any patient -
not even remotely- so energetic. During my last surgery (for GI issues), the doctors did nerve blocks so that I simply wouldn't need pain meds and, low and behold, I didn't have any mania or hypomania episodes.
For someone with borderline personality disorder (BPD), the scale only tends to center around individual people, while the emotional variance is seeing that individual as almost god-like (e.g. wearing rose-colored glasses,
but only when looking at specific people) or demon-like (e.g. shit-colored glasses, but again, only for specific people).
I'm not sure what the rate of change is like for the typical person suffering from BPD, but with my ex, she mostly saw me as god-like, but every month or two, there would be several consecutive days where she only saw me as demon-like. In her case, she simply appeared to me to be extremely moody during these phases, and a week or two afterwards, she'd give me some unexpected, but very personal gift (e.g. a hand quilted blanket in my favorite color; a hand made dog jacket for one of my pups that had an emblem on it which is really important to me). I only learned after we broke up that, during the "demon-like" phases, she had told all of her friends and many of our acquaintances some truly horrific lies about me. (I only learned about those horrific lies when the next person she dated reached out to me and we started comparing notes. My ex had also stalked me after our breakup, but she had outright been caught in the act of breaking into the subsequent partner's house. So the subsequent partner had been advised to reach out the me in case there was a lawsuit to see if I would testify.)
