I started my medication in mid 2020 after my diagnosis, and I reached the full dose I’m currently on in August 2020. Thought I’d show what my mood has been like since then, and reflect a bit on the past year.

I have been tracking my mood using the Bipolar UK mood scale and my own spreadsheet.

Some reflections in no particular order:

Ups and downs still happen. I have relatively long periods of a consistent neutral mood, but I still have low days (and some high ones) here and there. But they became less frequent, less severe, less long-lasting (a couple days of feeling low as opposed to a couple months), and way more manageable.

Meds take time to kick in. Although I was in a much better place when I left the hospital after a few weeks titrating meds, it took me another six months or so to reach a point where my mood was stable and where I felt in control and confident in my ability to manage it.

The first few months are scary. Coming out of a mixed episode while inpatient after a suicide attempt was scary. Wanting to be alive for the first time is scary. Every slight mood change had me worried I was about to spiral out of control again.

Intrusive suicidal thoughts took a while to go away. I still have them sometimes, but rarely. They were more common at the beginning. I didn’t want to die, but after being suicidal for over a decade, it was just my brain’s go-to thought.

It took time to know myself. I didn’t instinctively know what my healthy range of emotion is. I had to re-learn what normal sadness and normal joy looks like for me, what’s a normal reaction and what’s a warning sign of oncoming depression or hypomania.

It’s not always the bipolar disorder. I have frequent migraines (not chronic, but close) and part of the prodrome for me is a depressed mood with increased anxiety. Many of the lows in my chart are migraine-related, which is something that took me a few months to identify.

It’s not just medication. I wouldn’t be alive without medication, let alone function without it. But meds alone don’t do all the work. When my mood goes up or down, it’s a lot less severe and more manageable than it would be without meds, but it’s up to me to use coping skills to get it under control and get back up (or back down) to something neutral.

My baseline leans more towards the low side. I’m more likely to have low than high moods when I deviate from neutral. This might be the nature of my bipolar, or it might just be the nature of my life circumstances (a crappy job atmosphere, migraines, some dysphoria as I sit on a long waiting list for surgery). But it’s completely manageable.

I haven’t fully come to terms with it yet. I fact-check and research most information I come across. I’ve read about migraines, about gender dysphoria, about why bright sunlight makes me sneeze, about so many things in my life big and small. I still haven’t read much about bipolar disorder besides self-management strategies because I’m not ready to fact-check how much of a progressive illness it might be, or how likely it may or may not be that my meds will stop being effective or that I will have another episode. But I don’t like living in ignorance, so I’m working on it.

I don’t take stability for granted. I know I’m not cured or fixed. I know I’ll live with this for the rest of my life, and I have a few decades of life ahead of me if nothing gets in the way. I track my mood, I’m self-aware of my thoughts and emotions, I take my meds, and I avoid any known triggers to the best of my ability. I know stability is not forever guaranteed, so I’m grateful for it and I try my best to maintain it.

It will be interesting to see how things go as the years go by. They might get worse at some point, but I’m confident in my ability to handle them better than I was able to in the past.