Making Meaning

I read an article recently about finding meaning in your life when you have bipolar disorder. It has resonated with me as I have been feeling lately, even on my good days, that my life has become somewhat small and meaningless.

What I mean is that I used to have so many facets in my life; my work, my studies, my friends, my creative endeavours, through which I found meaning in my life, and many of those have all but disappeared due to my bipolar disorder or subsequent treatment, shrinking my life and limiting the areas in which I might find meaning.

I'm currently only working part-time which leaves me with days when I have vast expanses of unoccupied time to fill. I understand that it's necessary for me to be working part-time at the moment; my stamina is still not what it has been and I tire easily, but some days I face an empty afternoon and genuinely wonder at how on earth I'm going to fill it. There's always TV or fooling around on the internet, but these things don't really add to any grand sense of meaning in my life, they feel like activities to mark time.

I used to occupy more of my time with friends. My illness isolated me and has left me at times feeling friendless. I know this to not be the case but it's difficult to maintain friendships when I'm sick and barely able to leave the house or afterwards, in recovery, when I'm taking such painstaking care of myself and trying not to exhaust myself. People drift away and it can feel like they've turned away instead. At the moment I'm trying to reconnect with some of those drifted friends but where previously I could pack a full day with socialising I now know I need to pace myself and do one activity per day, so it's a slow process of reconnecting with the outside world.

I think one of the greatest losses is in my creative life. I used to write plays. While I was never prodigious or disciplined in writing regularly, it was something I always had a hand in. I'm unsure whether there's a dulling down of my senses from the medication or if it's just that my brain is still too preoccupied with its own illness to contemplate anything else, but I have no inclination to write a play now and feel like I may never again. While there should be no need for a creative outlet when there is no creative outpouring, it was something I used to define my personality. But now, if I'm not creative play-writing Katie, I wonder who am I?

There are of course still areas in which I find meaning. I adore being Auntie Katie to my three wonderful nephews and I find that my role in their lives is a rich one, I hope for them as well as me. I hold a treasured place in my family, something being sick has actually made me more aware of with the care and affection that has been afforded to me in this time.

And there's also this blog. It's a solitary exercise to write this and I often feel like it's purely an exercise in self indulgence but then the feedback I get makes me feel like it is worthwhile.

This week I am beginning a course of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with a new therapist. I suppose this also has me thinking about the meaning in my life as part of ACT is committing to values in your life, so I'll need to define them. I'm hoping this will be a guided process and in weeks to come I'll be able to tell you more about the values I am realising in my life. In the meantime, thank you for reading and by doing so contributing meaning to my small but hopefully expanding life.