Life With Bipolar Disorder

I haven't given many specifics about bipolar disorder, my particular mental illness. By strict definition, it means that I get extremely depressed, to the point of becoming suicidal. Then my mood swings until I get euphoric that lots of things can happen. One area I want to address is something the psychiatrists call "religiousity".

I was baptized Roman Catholic, but durng college at the University of California at Berkeley, I was Catholic in name only. When I heard the voice in my mind claiming to be God, I became a super Catholic because essentially I thought I was the next Moses. After all, the voice said it was God and that it had a mission for me.

Still, hearing the "god" voice began the destruction of my life. Nothing good came of my religious experiences except that I finally rejected God and embraced atheism.

For a long time, I had religious experiences. For example, I would find writing in my Bible that I didn't write. I thought that God had written in my Bible. Everyone, especially the priests, said that I wrote in my Bible myself and just forgot that I did it. The funny thing is one time a passage that was underlined in my Bible was read at church a few weeks after I discovered it. Things like that convinced me that the supernatural was happening to me. Of course, nobody believed me. They always came up with "logical" explanations, even if their explanations were impossible considering what I knew about a so-called supernatural experience.

When people failed to contrive an adequate explanation for my supernatural experiences, they fell back to the "you're just crazy" default blanket explanation. For example, I saw a toy shield with a cross on it rotate several times and move across my couch in my apartment in North Carolina. When I told people about things like this, they dismissed it as a hallucination. It didn't matter if they were my family, priests, or psychiatrists.

I didn't know what exactly I was trying to prove with my supernatural experiences. The more supernatural experiences I had, the higher the dosage of antipsychotic medication my psychiatrists prescribed to suppress them. When they failed to suppress the supernatural phenomena, the psychiatrists labeled me as having schizoaffective disorder, which is the default diagnosis that means, "I don't know what's wrong with you."

I once saw a book titled "God's Lite Chicken Soup for the Spirit" materialize in my brother's hand in the book store. I paid the cashier for it like any other book. I figured that God gave it to me. It was January 1996, and the inside cover of the book said it was first printed in March 1996, two months in the future.

I labeled supernatural occurences like this "minor miracles", but they gave me so much grief. When I showed people the book, nobody thought there was anything special about it. My brother didn't even remember giving me the book, much less it materializing in his hand. People to whom I showed the materializing book from the future came up with a plethora of explanations like I just took the book from the bookshelves of the bookstore.

Eventually, I became so upset that my campus minister recommended that I seek spiritual direction, which is basically therapy the Roman Catholic way. Priests are the most skeptical people about the supernatural. I had several spiritual directors over time, and the last one said my mental illness started at the same time as my supernatural experiences. Therefore the mental illness caused the supposedly supernatural events.

I'll admit I have experiences that having nothing to do with religion. Can anyone explain this one? After 9/11, I began to feel earthquakes that nobody else could feel. My psychiatrist said that I probably was having tactile hallucinations, which are ones that people feel without stimulus. He said it was a little unusual for a tactile hallucination.

Sometimes, I plain just hear voices in my head. They go away by themselves or with medication. Nowadays I have terrible anxiety. The kookiest thing I ever saw was a cross made out of fire and surrounded by circles of fire. I could never explain that one. That thing started my whole religion trip. I was certain I was Moses #2 after seeing that.

Still, my preoccupation with faith led to my eventual destruction. Here I type away while everybody else passes me on the highway of life. My worst enemy from high school is now a police officer, one of the "good guys". People I knew from high school and college went on to earn higher degrees and became doctors, professors, naval officers, engineers, optometrists, and a host of other professionals. They live life to the fullest, while I suck taxpayers' money. My dream was to be a scientist, but my belief in the collective delusion known as God killed my dream.