I was a month ago diagnosed with bipolar type 2, together with ASS. I experience sleep problems.
Some feelings in this article are familiar. To me, it was the feeling of being excluded for life from people.
Also I am going through work problems. I find myself at a difficult place in life now...
My wife has bipolar and I've got ASS. Remember that you're your own person in the first place, period. You're not your label, you merely /have/ a label. TFA makes this mistake from the outset in the title. It should've read "having" not "being".
There's no cure for these labels, but one can recover. To quote Patricia Deegan:
Recovery does not refer to an end product or result.It does not mean that one is “cured”.In fact, recovery is marked by an ever-deepening acceptance of our limitations.But now, rather than being an occasion for despair, we find that our personal limitations are the ground from which spring our own unique possibilities.This is the paradox of recovery i.e., that in accepting what we cannot do or be, we begin to discover who we can be and what we can do.Thus, recovery is a process.It is a way of life.It is an attitude and a way of approaching the day’s challenges.It is not a perfectly linear process.Like the sea rose, recovery has its seasons, its time of downward growth into the darkness to secure new roots and then the times of breaking out into the sunlight.But most of all recovery is a slow, deliberate process that occurs by poking through one little grain of sand at a time.
Only you are the expert of you. That said, there exist recovery colleges that can provide peer support. You're not alone.
So we're both Dutch then? In Dutch, recovery is "herstel" and a recovery college is either just that, or a "huis van herstel".
I can definitely recommend the HWG, which stands for "Herstel Werk Groep". Consult your SPV for this, as various GGZ services offer this free of charge.
