As you may know from my last post, I had my first real session in group therapy this week. I’ve been allowing it to percolate for the last couple of days, as I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it.

Initially, I was pleased when I arrived – I had been quite disheartened (shallow as it may seem) by the appearance of all participants in the initial meeting. It had seemed to me that the Universe was telling me: “Hazel, you’re bipolar; this means you’re going to be fat, unkempt and generally peculiar until such as time as you die in whatever way seems best”.

At length, I’m pleased to say, I managed to tell the Universe to Bite Me.

Still, that first impression lingered, so I was very pleased when three new members of the group appeared on Monday, all looking far healthier. One of them is even a girl of about my age (another thing that intimidated me was that all were at least a decade older than me). She was slim, attractive and about to get married. The picture, it seemed, of physical and mental health. I apologise profusely for seeming so superficial with these comments. It is not that I don’t understand how people with bipolar and other mental health issues come to look the way they do – I currently look the same - what bothered me was the fact that in an entire group there was not a single person who seemed to have overcome the fairly basic hurdle of managing their personal (physical) health and hygiene. It may only be me, but I find the physical a lot easier to cope with than the mental, so what hope could we possibly have of getting better? That is not to say it is easy to pull yourself out of the hole which leads to a complete disinterest in your own appearance, or that it is a simple thing to shift the extra weight gained due to endless meds and various other factors. My point, I suppose, it that I had hoped to see some glimmer of light at the end of my own hideously unatractive tunnel.

So, superficial or not, I found my spirits raised considerably by the appearance of three people who at least looked healthy; what they felt was an entirely different kettle of fish.

Still, this was not enough to dispel my ever-present self-consciousness. I got five minutes in and realised that the bra I was wearing was, for reasons unknown, creaking like the arse end of a haunted mansion. I spent the remainder of the time trying to sit perfectly still.

Have you ever tried to sit perfectly still? The mere thought of it makes you want to move. Add to that the fact that I was growing more anxious with each passing second and it was a rather impossible task. So, I creaked my way through, trying really hard to pretend the noises were not emanating from me. At one point, I may even had made a casual remark about the radiator, along the lines of ‘god that radiator creaks, hahaaaha’.

Inevitably this only resulted in making me look even more ridiculous than I sounded.

Things got progressively worse from then on. Despite going in feeling rather optimistic, within the first ten minutes I found myself sitting in mute horror, tears sliding down my face. I dashed them away as quickly as they fell, unsure why I was even shedding them, and worried that people would think me foolish. Nobody appeared to notice. This made me feel worse – even in a group that was supposed to be focusing on helping us with our moods and feelings, I was so invisible that not a single person even noticed my silent agony (God, I’m so fucking melodramatic when I’m upset, seriously, I have to mentally slap myself at times).

Having considered it at length since, I’ve realised why I started crying. Our group leader was asking us what we hoped to get out of the group, and what could be done to make us more comfortable within our sessions. Someone had mentioned that they had issues with people being so unable to understand them, that their friends had (for the most part) abandoned them at one point or another, and so they found it very dificult to open up. Trusting each other, this person said, would make it easier to be there. It was a comment that hit really close to home with me, on a point which is so upsetting I rarely think about it.

To say that I have trust ‘issues’ is like saying that a person who has died of thirst could perhaps have done with a sip of water. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but one of the major reasons is the very thing this comment made me think about.

A few years ago, I had just finished my MA and was faced with the prospect of life outside university for the first time in four and half years. This, to me, seemed like the most luscious kind of freedom. I don’t know whether it was that sensation of liberty and independence, or merely coincidence, but it would mark the beginning of the worst period of mania I have ever experienced.

I took a job down south. I’m a northerner through and through and I detest the south: all that flatness and the endless pig pens, not to mention the fact the only beer they have is IPA, but I digress. I made a lot of new friends in this new job, or at least I thought I had; far more friends in fact than I recalled ever having before. I’ve never been good in social situations, in part due to the black pits of depression I so often tumble into. Perhaps it was the additional notion that I was, for once in my life, living like a normal person, I’m not sure, but my mood continued to sky rocket, and with it went all control I had. There reached a point where these friends I had made grew – at least as far as I can tell looking back – simply sick of me. And that was that; I was excluded. So easily. The wave I’d been riding suddenly broke, my mood plummeted, I became convinced they all hated me, a perspective not aided when I lost my job to boot.

It may be that it was the fall that left me feeling they were so hostile towards me, or it may be that they genuinely were. Honestly, I couldn’t blame them, I can’t have been pleasant to be around at that time.

I got another job, and started all over again, with more new friends. Without the mania, I did better this time, but the credit crunch hit and once again I found myself jobless. Alone.

I was forced to move back in with my parents, something which for me was quite possible the worst kind of hell imaginable, for reasons having nothing to do with me and everything to do with my father (yes, I got Daddy issues too, aren’t a just a veritable hallmark card). The depression became steadily worse. At times I would find myself abruptly pulled out of it, and I would a few days, or a few weeks, of functional normality, and then back to Hades I went. It was not long after this that I registered with a new Dr and was (finally) diagnosed.

The reason I started crying was simple: it was the thought that being bipolar had resulted in me spending most of my life alone, had ruined every relationship I had ever had, and would continue to do so. As you might gather, I am often very self-pitying when it comes to my social life, but that’s a topic for another day. What I found though, as I listened to the rest of the group talk, was that they had, for the most part, all had similar experiences at some point . I began to speak, tentatively, and weigh in here and there with a thought or opinion. They listened, they understood. Some had even been in the same position.

There are times when I believe myself to be truly incapable of having ‘normal’ relationships – be they friendships or romantic entanglements – and this is something I have felt for years. Long before I was diagnosed, long before I was symptomatic, long before I was old enough to even spell bipolar. I have always felt odd. Whether this is in fact due to the bipolar, or simply down to me being socially awkward I have no idea. I will probably never know. What I do know is that, seeing a woman of my age, talking about having very similar experiences to my own, and then going on to talk about her upcoming wedding, it occurred to me that, even if being bipolar IS the reason I have always felt like this, it doesn’t mean I always WILL feel like this.

It’s a strange and beautiful thing to be given back hope for the future, when not so long ago you firmly believed there was no future intended for you.