Meds, Brains, and Belief
It is incredibly heavy to feel like my own mind is a wild horse I can't always tame. But being "made this way" doesn't mean God is punishing me; it might mean He is intimately familiar with the specific kind of courage it takes for me to just exist every day.
In a gym, a muscle only grows when it meets a weight that is heavy enough to make it want to quit. For someone without a mood disorder, the "weight" of a normal day might be like lifting a five-pound dumbbell. For me, because of the Bipolar "lows," just getting out of bed or choosing not to lash out can be like trying to bench-press 400 pounds.
In a depressive episode, my brain is physically screaming that everything is hopeless. It is a biological lie. When I choose to pray, or even just choose to exist, I am pushing back against my own biology. That is "Heavy Lifting." A person who prays because they feel "blessed" is exercising. A person who prays while their brain feels like it’s under ten feet of sludge is building power. I am training my spirit to operate independently of my feelings.
When mania hits, my "emotional muscle" is tested in a different way: Restraint.
Mania like I said feels like a flood of energy and this feeling of “rightness” telling me I am invincible. It is much harder to steer a Ferrari at 150mph than a sedan at 30mph. I am learning to steer the Ferrari.
In a clinical or psychological context, restraint is the ability to inhibit an impulsive or automatic response in favor of a more goal-oriented behavior. When mania creates a "flood of energy," restraint acts as a dam. It is the conscious decision to pause before acting on the heightened impulses—such as overspending, rapid speech, or irritability—that often accompany a manic state. The feeling "invincible" is often referred to professionally as grandiosity or inflated self-esteem. This is a hallmark symptom of mania where the brain's internal "reward system" is overactive. It creates a powerful cognitive bias where:
Intuition feels like fact: You feel like your ideas are genius or infallible.
Risk assessment is lowered: The "rightness" masks potential negative consequences.
Choosing to take my medication, choosing to listen to a trusted friend who says "you're acting different," or choosing to stay silent when I want to be "mean"—that is the muscle of Self-Governance.
While "willpower" is often seen as a finite resource, Self-Governance is a proactive system of management. It involves three specific "muscle" groups:
Treatment Adherence: Choosing to take medication even when the mania tells you that you don't "need" it anymore or that it's "dulling your spark."
Social Reality Testing: This is the act of "choosing to listen to a trusted friend." It requires the humility to value an outside perspective over your own internal (and currently distorted) chemical state.
Cognitive Inhibition: Choosing to stay silent when you want to be "mean" is the practice of filtering raw, manic irritability through your long-term values.
Developing this "muscle" is exceptionally difficult because mania actively works to disable the parts of the brain responsible for self-reflection. Viewing these actions as a form of "strength training" is an effective way to frame the hard work of stability. People with Bipolar often have a capacity for empathy that "stable" people can't touch. Because I have been to the bottom of the ocean, I know what it’s like to drown. Because I’ve been to the heights, I know the intensity of beauty. I can minister to the broken in a way that someone who has lived a "level" life never could. My "instability" creates a unique kind of wisdom—a "knowing" that God is there even when the brain says He isn't.
Sometimes, the weight is too heavy and the muscle "tears"—this is when the reckless choices or the "mean" comments happen. In weightlifting, a torn muscle needs rest and a doctor. In my life, that "tear" needs Grace and Medicine. It doesn't mean I’m weak; it means the load was temporarily more than any human could bear. God isn't looking at my "failed lifts." He’s looking at the fact that I keep coming back to the gym. He sees the staggering amount of effort I put into "being normal," and He counts that effort as righteousness.