Through The Filter

You see me. Normal, ordinary, plain Jane me.

I have filters, filters on how I see the world, how I see myself, how I see everything.

The first filter is dark. It's my most common filter. It gives everything, everyone a rather dismal sheen. The world is covered in a veil of grey. There is no reason to be happy, to be glad, to be thankful. This life is just something to get through until you die. There is no joy, no elation, no good. Just grey.

I hate gray.

Through this filter I am fat, insecure, ugly, stupid, lazy, slow, selfish. There is no point to my life, no good that I can be to anyone. I am worthless. I am less than trash.

My second filter is the one I like to think that most people have, I like to think that it is closer to what the real world sees. It's full of light and color and awesome. My brain fires in all directions. I am confident, sexy, funny, charming, seductive, and smart. I am driven. I am powerful and happy. I laugh more. I love the world that I am in, I believe the world is mine.

There are dangerous sides to this filter too.

I have no inhibitions. I have none of the guilt that normally hugs me like a blanket, I have no sense of ownership or responsibility to anyone or anything. My brain fires so fast that I can not get my ideas, my words to come out of my fingertips fast enough. I can not turn off my brain to sleep. I cannot stomach any food because I am constipated by the words, by the thoughts, by the very things that I most love and I cannot get them out of me and into the world fast enough and it breaks and it hurts and I don't know what to do because everything is moving so fast and so hard and if I just keep fighting, just keep trying to sit still in my tiny office in front of this computer screen maybe, maybe, maybe just maybe I can get them to come out in a cohesive paragraph.

And then I look back and it is all wrong and all angry and what I thought was witty sarcasm was really just just me using a thesaurus to drive home a point about laundry and it is all wrong.

So I don't hit publish. I erase it all because it is wrong and I swallow up all of the things that I wish I had said, because I couldn't say them and I continue to suffocate on the thoughts that I cannot push out of my body.

This is Bi-Polar Type II. It is not fancy or exciting. It is not all razor blades and crazy. It's just a mom trying to find the middle so that she doesn't freak her kid the heck out.

Sometimes I succeed.