'Between the Poles', by Paul Illidge

Ever since the term bipolar was first applied to me when I was a mere boy, a beardless youth of 15, I’ve always been baffled by it. Definitions, explanations and clarifications offered by medical professionals and schooled amateurs alike, never really helped me to understand what bipolar disorder, a.k.a. manic depression, was all about. There was even disagreement as to whether it was a disorder, an illness, a disease (like alcoholism), or all of the above. This left me nowhere.  
Any time I tried reading up on bipolar to learn more, the jargon alone (hypomania, acute mania, delusional mania) threw me down Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes to the point I had to resort to looking up the various terms describing the condition from which I’d been led to believe I was suffering, in medical dictionaries, only to find I needed to look up important related terms which of course left me more confused than ever. 
I felt guilty enough about my extreme mood swings and radical behavioural shifts and the  intense aggravation they were causing, but now as a result of my research I was left feeling dumb and ashamed as well: How come I didn’t get it? What was I missing? What was wrong with me? How could I get rid of whatever it was that was having me act like a crackling creative nerve-ending one moment, and a distressed limp noodle the next? 
Add to this the fact that in everything I heard or read, there were so many assumptions, generalizations and catch-all descriptions used to explain bipolar symptoms, that it seemed to me they might as well have been talking about what it was like to have the flu, or a cold. People seemed to be saying it was an illness that hit everyone the same way, for which you took prescription pills, sought psycho-therapy and eventually got better.
Yet with bipolar this apparently wasn’t quite so. With bipolar disorder the catch was you had to continue taking the pills and going to therapy regularly because bipolar, unlike many other illnesses, never really went away. Yet the good news, a certain kind of healing consolation I guess, came with the assurance that I was not to worry: bipolar disorder wasn’t fatal. In fact, and this was a source of comfort for bipolar sufferers: along with the supposedly comforting fact that bipolar had no pathology, no cause or effect, no diagnosis that could be effectively arrived at. On this basis, studies had established the fact that bipolar in some cases could be a sane response to an increasingly electronically obsessed world. 
More perplexed than ever, my question came to be: if there’s no cause or effect, no diagnosis, no cure per se, how can anyone tell whether or not it even exists? Was what I’d been feeling for so many years all in my imagination? Was my continuing confusion about the nature of my illness proof that I had it — was the illness itself making me ask these questions in the first place? 
A psychologist I was seeing for a time in my 30s, in an effort to clear up the distressed confusion I’d spoken to him about in my initial appointment, let me know that psychiatrists now preferred the term “manic depression” with their patients, a more accessible and symptom-specific term than bipolar, it was felt. “One’s mood and behaviour,” as the doctor explained for me to better understand, “could fluctuate from feelings of jubilant well-being, intense engagement and emotionally-charged manic activity one moment, to sad, brooding, depression and despair the next.” 
In answer to my subsequent question as to whether bipolar and “manic depression” were in fact the same thing, my psychologist pondered a moment then said, “More or less. It’s not as though there’s an equator between the two poles, if you see what I mean.” I confessed that I didn’t, admitting, as well, that the analogy threw me off. The equator I could sort of understand, but the poles left me, well, cold. 
You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when just the other day I happened to read in a biography of the legendary film-maker Orson Welles, that not only had he suffered from bipolar illness/manic depression all his life, the director of Citizen Kane, the greatest film of all time according to many critics — an acknowledged genius by the time he was twenty-five — felt that all his achievements in film and theatre were made possible by his bipolar personality. 
True, he worked himself to the point of exhaustion, entered into high-risk financial arrangements, over-ate, over-drank, generally overdid things in every aspect of his life so that, by his own admission, it was always out of control and on the brink of disaster, plunging him into depths of despair so dark he was sure “the light at the end of the tunnel had gone out.” But look at the results: a body of work that was unsurpassed in originality, imagination and artistic quality. 
In an interview with a journalist later in his life, talking about these two distinct (i.e. bipolar) facets of his character and how they might have affected his work, Welles responded: “For thirty years, people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don’t. Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.” 
The clouds began to clear. Everything about me had always seemed to feel like a contradiction too. I’d been trying to bring X and Y together in a new bipolar-free person, when there was a perfectly good bipolar one in me already. Sometimes I was the wild and crazed philistine, sometimes the sensitive, creative aesthete. I knew very well what it was like to actually want to do someone (or myself) harm during psychotically supercharged moments of pure madness, but then feel like serenely peaceful St. Francis of Assisi the next. 
Here I’d been striving all these years for that X and Y reconciliation, standing at the equator trying to melt the ice between the two poles and have them meld together, without realizing that they’re just different sides of the same coin that is Me — and they always will be. The best thing I can do is simply let them be. Recognize, as Welles triumphantly suggested, that life is made out of oppositions. “All of us live between the poles.”

PAUL ILLIDGE’s books include THE GLASS CAGE (theatre), BEYOND THE FOUNTAINHEAD (architecture), THE LUNATIC AND THE LORDS (law), CAN YOU GIVE ME SOMETHING FOR THAT? (the pharmaceutical industry), THE PAGE, THE STAGE, THE DIGITAL AGE (Beyond AI). His current work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Open Minds Quarterly, Grain, New English Review, Toronto Life Magazine, Mental Health Talk, Exile, Dumbo Press, Sybil Journal, The Adelaide Review.