There are about a thousand ways that I can write this post. Seeing as it has been awhile since I have written there are also a thousand things that I want and somehow need to say; but I find myself writing today not out of inspiration but out of frustration. I don’t know about normal human beings but frustration for me is one of the hardest feelings for me to reconcile, for me to find my way through. I can handle happiness, sadness, confusion, rage, even fear. But I can’t seem to ever be able to come to a way to understand and forgive frustration.

One of the things that I have learned on this journey is that you must be able to understand where feelings are coming from, you must understand the activities, the events, that can push you through the negativity, and you must understand the motivations not only of your own self but those around you. It is imperative to living a full and rich life that you work to understand humans in each of their incredible complications. Otherwise, for me, I tend to spend hours on that Ferris wheel, looking all around and not seeing anything.

One of the most frustrating things in my own world happens when those I am surrounded with treat me like I have a disease. Let me explain so that you can understand me.

As most readers know I am mentally ill. I have bipolar. It is a disease full of unpredictably. It doesn’t follow a pattern, my symptoms don’t make sense with the actions of my day, and often what I think and see isn’t what the world thinks and sees. I am different, as all humans are. Unfortunately for me, someone decided to try and categorize who and what I am and label it a disease. This means the world that I live in can’t follow the norm, the world that I live in won’t ever be seen on a network comedy. The world that I live in can be dangerous and scary and full of hurt. And those that profess to love me and support me can’t always be what I actually need.

The world that I know has guidelines and fenced in daydreams. The world I know has a simplicity of emotional torment. However, only I can see it, only I know it. I know what my anger looks like and the damage it will do. I know what my happiness looks like and the destruction it so easily can bring. I know what my darkness feels like and I know that there isn’t another human on this earth who understands me the way I can. And therefore, since no one person can ever predict who and what I am, there is no one person that can help me. There is no one person that can read me and react in a way that is healthy for me.

This may be laziness on the part of those who profess to know me. This may be a tragic set of events that have led people to profess to loving me but not actually seeing me. Being mentally ill must be one of the most lonely and desolate states that exist. Because the world is ashamed of you. Because the world is scared of you. Because the world finds no importance in your existence. And if you can’t understand my frustration after that, then I guarantee you are in a category that causes more harm than succor.

It hurts me when people don’t want to treat me as anything but a mass that takes up space. It hurts me when my opinion, my ideas, even my experience is somewhat less because I happen to acquire a disease from a gene that I would literally take a knife to if I could. It makes it difficult to find my way in a world that sees me as less. Because of a disease that, again, I didn’t actually do anything to get, I am wrong more times than I am right, I am always incredibly dramatic instead of actually having thoughts and feelings, and I am always, always, somehow not as perfect as those who surround me. I honestly would run away but there are my children who I will fight for despite how many people think that I can’t. I would run so far and so fast that no one can touch me. One day, I might still do it; I might run.

But today, with those precious children in my sight, I won’t allow myself that out. So I have to deal with the frustration of being treated. I have to deal with the knowledge that I am surrounded by people who are less because they treat me as less. And I have to admit to being surrounded by people who will always think I am wrong, or off, or melodramatic, because they are less. I may love these people, I may actually think well of these people, but it doesn’t change the notion that at the end of the day they have no reason to treat me as anything but a diseased specimen that gives them the internal fortitude and sense that they are somehow better and know more than I ever will.

I am not a political rallying call, no one will ever try and save me. I am not a reason for someone to create a non-profit that will make me feel whole, because there is no one to save me. And I won’t ever be seen but melodramatic anytime I have the audacity to wonder how much more I could be if only those around me weren’t so less. I am less because I have spent the last twenty years being treated as less. My mother does it, my father does it, my husband does it, even at times, my friends do it.

They do it because that is how they cope. They do it because there is no manual to who and what I am. They do it because at the end of the day they need to take control, they need to guide me, they need to hurt me in order to deal with me. I am a difficult person to know much less understand, so it entirely understandable that those who have to live with me would treat me in a way that allows them their own peace; their own happiness. Pushing me down allows those I love to be lifted.

The people that I try and love are not bad people. They are not mean or caustic, or rude to those around them, they simply have found a way to deal with the horror of me in the only way they can. So I should be able to find a way to get through all this frustration. I should be able to find that brick road to travel away from all those I supposedly love. But instead I take it. Sometimes in a fight for my children but mostly because I haven’t found a place or a person who would treat me better.

But one day, one day I will run and find that place that no one else has ever given me the credit to find.