I’ve always maintained that my experience with bipolar disorder has been a blessing. Sure, I spent many of my younger years in hiding, undiagnosed, chemicals raging unchecked through my brain, but those years were spent daydreaming fantastical worlds that I would later put to paper, worlds that I’d be lucky enough to see published for a wider audience. Sure, I juggle restless manic nights with the sucking hollow of depression, but being allowed to experience these extremes offers me insight and compassion. These thin-skinned days, though, I could do without. On these days, a knock can send you flying, a knock that you’d not have even noticed on other days. If you’re not careful, a nudge can send you sliding down into a mucky ditch. If you can keep your feet, or hold on to the edge, great, but sometimes you don’t have the resources to try.

I understand that my mental illness comes as a package deal. I can’t pick and choose which bits to file away. If I want the fingers-flying, 14k word days of mania, if I want the ultra-sensitive moments of understanding and clarity, I have to take the nervous paranoia that sometimes strikes, the impossible-to-please OCD rigidity that can cause me to freeze up, the rapid cycling uncertainty that makes me doubt my perceptions, all those comorbid fleas that travel on the Black Dog.

Many of you experience the same package deals; this comes with that, and that comes with this over here, these nasty little side dishes. Some days, it’s harder to see the advantages offered by a mental illness, if you’ve ever seen them at all. I do, personally, and I can only speak to my own experience. I know this thin-skinned noose will loosen, and I will rebound one way or another. The Black Dog never stays for long, just long enough for you to doubt he’s ever going to leave.

But we are stronger than the Dog.

After all these years, we have learned his tricks. He tells us life is pointless, and we know he’s lying; the point of life is eating ice cream and drinking tea and hugging loved ones. The Dog tells us that we’re failing, and we prove him wrong; every time we set aside the knife, we have won. He tells us we will hurt forever, and we begin to doubt; we search our tool box for comfort and self-care. Battle after battle, scar upon scar, we continue to win. We are unbroken.

That’s the way through. We hang on until the hard time passes.

And then the blessing returns as if by some magic, a chemical magic inside the body (or in the spirit, if you prefer); the Dog slinks off with his tail between his legs, and we chase behind him with our music and our laughter and our ice cream dripping down our cones, and we smile up at the sun, and life is good.

He’ll be back. I know this. We are a package deal.

But we are stronger than the Dog.