Time limit?

Though I have spent much of my life with the same symptoms I have now, I think I had this idea that this illness would be transitory. Like, oh yeah, that was the time period I owned a restaurant, that was when I had kids, those were the years when we homeschooled, then there were a few years when I was manic depressive, then I got better and did some other stuff. Kind of like a fashion phase or something. Though the symptoms have at times been more and less severe, they have in general worsened as I've gotten older. Add to that the prognosis I've been handed (which isn't an absolute, I know, but I think it has some validity), and I'm not sure how I could have deluded myself into thinking that everything would be peachy keen and somehow my life would be "normal" or my own.

I did not seek treatment for years and years because A) I didn't want to hear what I already knew and B) I was really anti-meds/allopathy. And who wants to be diagnosed with a mental illness? I was the SANE and NORMAL one in the family. I was sober, had a family, blah blah blah. Nic was the one that went CRAZY. Daddy was the CRAZY one. Mary Lee was CRAZY. Oh, gosh, there but for the grace of god go I, that's what I would think. For real.

When in reality, it is not normal for an eight year old to try to commit suicide (I didn't have very good follow through), it is not normal for a teenager to have horrible insomnia and want to die all of the time, or to be hyper-promiscuous, it wasn't normal that my response to a fight with my husband of the time would send me to the fire tower so I could jump off... on a weekly basis. Those are just a few details pointing to my instability over the years. But I did not "believe" in modern medicines or psychiatry-- those "fucking pill pushers." I didn't want someone to tell me that my world view was wrong or not normal. But what was happening was akin to a super-volcano building up pressure, building it up and building it up until it erupted and destroyed entire continents of my life.

When I finally erupted, finally got a diagnosis, finally ended up in the mental hospital and on medications, I was given one of the worst prognoses one can get when diagnosed with manic depression. Bipolar 1, rapid cycling, with mostly mixed states and some psychosis. Not to mention a personality disorder. (Which is a Dx I really fucking resent, but I can't reject.) I was told that the best I could hope for would be stability, and possibly short periods of remission.

The personality disorder couldn't have been helped (maybe), though I could have learned some coping mechanisms if I had been in therapy early enough. But the fucking manic depression?! Mother fucker. It is believed that early treatment can lead to a better outcome thanks to something called "kindling." And my particular version-- early onset, late treatment, left me with decades of kindling. Decades of my brain wiring itself into a fucked up loop of fucked-uppedness. By ignoring what was happening, I set myself up for a much more serious disease than if someone had gotten me help when I was a child, or if I had gotten myself help when I got older. I am left with not only decades of learning ineffective behaviors which I have to unlearn, but an illness that is now resistant to most medications. A brain that responds in really whacky ways to medicines that help most people.

Fuck.

And the worst part? I still feel as if it is a moral failing. It doesn't matter how many times I tell myself that it is legitimately a physical illness that manifests behaviorally, all I can think is WEAK CRAZY FUCKING BITCH.