Posted on by Trevor Elms · 11 Comments

Experiences.

I had a tattoo session recently where my friend as well as tattoo artist Jayce and I got to talking about all the stupid shit I signed myself up for as a kid.

We got to talking about this because I legitimately was about to jump into another stupid idea on a whim. Graham, another artist at the shop who I have gotten to know pretty decently over the last ~40 hours at All Sacred — made mention of something. He just blurted out while Jayce was adjusting his machine for going too fast –

“You should just do it. Check it out, get tatted with it going that fast.”

I responded without a second thought:

“Fuck it, why not? Let’s do it.” — though immediately pivoted and asked a pertinent question,

“Wait, if you actually try to tattoo me is it going to mess up the tattoo?” There is no stupid questions, only stupid answers — but I think we all know the answer I got to that question.

I told Jayce to just keep working on his stellar artwork and we’ll revisit the idea after the session, because I truly was interested.

I was interested because it was an experience I had not gone through before.

This is a very big part of my personality that I very much embrace within some bounds of personal safety. The motto “try everything once” is a creed I believe in.

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Growing up I opted to do things like take an XL water balloon sling at full blast in the back — point blank.

I opted to to be taped in a cardboard box and slid down a flight of stairs, rolled down Niblick Dr. in a garbage can, as well as sled over a large cactus patch (we all did that one, multiple times).

My earliest memory of something like this — I don’t think I could have been much older than four or five. My cousin Kevin who is a little over a year older than me and absolutely brilliant, convinced me of a grand farce.

If I were to ride my Mongoose bicycle down my grandparent’s wooden stairs a magical fish would give me three wishes. I’m not sure where he got the idea of a fish, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter what he told me. All I needed was a cool thing to do and a reason to do it.

One thing I need to mention about the stairs, and this memory. They led to my grandparent’s driveway down a very acutely angled hill. The driveway is not very wide, and the stairs are perpendicular to it.

Did I mention there was a flatbed trailer on the opposite side and a partition of very old, very stoic pine trees behind that?

You can see where this is going from here. I ended up flying ass over handlebars across the flatbed to land softly in a bed of pine and branches. Thankfully young children don’t have much mass, so I got a scrape here and there as well as a way cool story.

Actually, how could I forget when my brother had me take the snow tube down the back of the house? I hit a log going at a decent whip and backflipped into an olympian-like landing.

I was two years old.

Story after story keeps popping into my head but I think I’ve illustrated enough here. This is a part of my personality that I now know I was born with. My experiences go beyond daredevil nonsense though, and that is just one of the extremes that I had the penchant to explore.

I want to share my experiences traveling the world and exploring different cultures from as early as five years old.

I think one of the greatest things my family ever did was move outside of the United States to live in Asia and discover the planet. My father took an opportunity to succeed and support his family in a promotion that meant he had to leave the U.S. behind — and he packed up his family with it.

This was in 1995 and he was working for PictureTel which was working on (and succeeding at) video conferencing over the internet before the majority of people even had it. We moved to Hong Kong and our lives were never the same. It was the 1990s, which I think in the future will be remembered a lot like the roaring 1920s. What I mean by this is when we moved to Hong Kong PictureTel didn’t just set us up there and that’s where we stayed 100% of the time.

PictureTel regularly paid for my father to take his entire family with him across countries and continents.

Places like Australia, Bali, the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines (though we couldn’t leave the resort), & Thailand. All before I turned 9 years old. I think there’s a couple more in there I am missing, but just those blow my mind when I think about it.

With those three years in my early childhood alone I had seen and experienced more parts of the world and more cultures than most people will ever get to. This gave me a level of wisdom about acceptance and tolerance for those different than me that is now just inherent in me. I cannot understand not being accepting and tolerable of those different than you. When it comes to race, religion, rehabilitation, gender, sexual preference, personality disorder, mental illness, learning disability, birth defect, or beyond. If it is not affecting another person directly, negatively, I believe “Live and Let Live” to be a commandment of life we should live by.

It is my thirst for experience that gives me a lot of happiness in life.

It has also handed me plenty of strife. However, the biggest lesson I learned from reading “What the Buddha Taught” is that Life is Suffering. We cannot have the good without the bad. We cannot feel what truly makes this world and this life beautiful without understanding and experiencing what makes it dark and foreboding.

That doesn’t mean you need my experiences. Everyone’s are their own. But we do need to try and glean as much knowledge and wisdom about our experiences as we grow so we can continue to learn from them. All of them, not just the ones we like to remember to make ourselves feel better.

The ones we remember whether we want to or not.

I leave you by repeating this:

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Photo by John Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 16 Comments

Waking Up Bipolar.

“I am not bipolar, no matter how many doctors have attempted to diagnose me with it.”

– Myself, February 12th, 2009.

I am going to use this as a bit of a writing prompt for how things change over time. How a person can grow up and come to realize that just believing in something hard enough, isn’t going to make it true. This is a part of my story.

I am not bipolar. That was a fact.

The thing is, I am bipolar. I just wouldn’t or couldn’t admit it to myself due to a sense of pride, or something larger. A feeling that after my mental break with reality that I could still be a normal person. It was just a one time thing, I could pick myself up and go on going on in life like everything was normal.

And I did, and it was — except for that it wasn’t.

After completing out-patient and probationary treatment I didn’t take anything or talk to anyone for my bipolar for years. I kept at my job and my relationships with my then girlfriend (now wife) and family continuing to find opportunity after opportunity to find work and succeed. To an onlooker from the outside looking in, I’m sure everything was normal. I’ve gotten good at that — normal.

It’s inside though. It’s the roller coaster of two very associative emotions that constantly feed into each other in the worst of ways. I do not have typical bipolar, you see. I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression. I still have moments of mania, but it isn’t as frequent or as unmanageable as BP1. This is an extremely important distinction. Typically, with a lot of the anger I would regularly feel — I had just gotten used to hiding it from the rest of the world, or, at least not giving in to it outwardly. This would result in absolute eruptions about the smallest of things. In fact, I had two nicknames growing up, one “Meat”, which sticks to this day and came around purely because I don’t consider a meal a meal without it. The other however is less endearing, “Angry Man”.

I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression.

Angry Man came around when all stamping of every little micro-frustration just couldn’t be stamped down any more. I would erupt at something as small as someone asking me to pick up my things. I can’t think of a great example right now, because usually in those moments I could only see red and I no longer am able to think or control myself before I speak or act. It got me in trouble plenty of times.

My depression is not as strong as some other people, thankfully. It’s fairly easy for me to “ignore” in a way without medication. I used to like to describe myself in two ways. I had two emotions to share: ambivalence, or anger. The ambivalence is my depression. I just didn’t care, and don’t care about life and myself sometimes. Like it doesn’t matter.

But then, things all came crashing to a head one day.

I can’t remember the exact day precisely, but I know it was about two to two-and-a-half years ago. It was about 3:00 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. Then a thought crossed my mind that hadn’t in quite some time.

“I should just kill myself. I know I have the balls to follow through, why the fuck not?”

This was, if I am remembering correctly, after a night where Megan and I did not get along very well. I believe there was something trivial she did that set me off and then we preceded to escalate on each other. This is a low point in my life because I think I came very close to hitting her that night.

So that exchange, coupled with my inherent nihilism and depression fueled by anger gave me the thought. Why not? There’s plenty of reasons why not that I don’t need to get into here, and what’s nice is I had plenty running through my head just after I asked myself that question. However that is a very serious question to ask oneself, for that to be a serious thought after nearly hitting my wife? I knew something was wrong with me.

So I went into the bedroom to wake Megan up and tell her I was concerned about myself.

Talking about my concern turned into “I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”, but it wasn’t that clear. It was a different kind of eruption that I’m really not all that used to. An absolute deluge of tears and blubbering facial contortion while huddled in the fetal position grasping at my wife like lost child.

It was that night I realized that maybe my ambivalence was also me just stamping down my depression as well, and that was the first of what could be some very bad eruptions ending in the worst kind that affects everyone who loves us.

The next morning I looked into my health insurance and found a psychologist with good reviews nearby. I found someone who I felt based purely on a few lines of text and other superficial nonsense could mesh with me — so I went for it. I mentioned my suicidal thoughts and made an appointment as soon as possible.

When I got to see him we hit the ground running on those thoughts to find out the why, and evolved from there. In just a few sessions we did in fact settle on bipolar which I had been previously diagnosed with. However he was the very first to mention bipolar 2, cite its differences, and how they are relevant to my behavior in every day life.

“I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”

My psychologist who I am still seeing about 4 times a year then referred me to my psychiatrist who worked with me on the long journey over a year through about 5 pills to find the exact one that would work for me. This is an adventure to say the least, and I will say that my prior drug history allowed me to have a very quick grasp on how different medications affected me. It also gave me a very clear idea of exactly the type of pill I wanted.

I wanted something that I could not feel or tell was in my system whatsoever. Couldn’t even tell a change in my behavior at all, but I wanted everyone else around me to be able to tell. And I found it, Trileptal, Oxcarbazepine, my magical Yin-Yang pill.

Magical is entirely the wrong word and right word at the same time.

Pills are not a magical fix for everything, or even anything. They aren’t magical and especially when it comes to mental health they are a tool in a wide breadth of tools within the box for someone to use. They do not and will not ever fix everything entirely, but they should if used correctly help make it easier for the person to function and be aware of themselves. I was even lucky in that I knew what I wanted and it only took me about 5 pills to get there. I just hope it doesn’t ever stop working.

Pills though are magical in that I often am truly far more in tune with my body and mind and am balanced to boot. Balance is something I have always really had difficulty with, and I always will. The balance that Oxcarbazepine has helped me be able to find along with family support has really made me feel like I am finally in a space where living in tandem with and being open about my bipolar is a healthy thing.

I just need our country and the world to understand that mental illness isn’t a disease that keeps us from being human, or functional, or caring. If there was less of a stigma maybe people would get more help.  I believe there is a vast majority of people out there with mental illness struggling because they are afraid of how they will be perceived. I can assure you it is much more freeing and healthy to just accept it and try to find a way to work with it.

This turned out to be much longer than I was originally intending, but it is an important subject to me.

I believe everyone should talk to a therapist, they don’t even need to be a psychologist.

We as imperfect human beings need an unbiased third party to just dump all our head trash that we don’t want to burden anyone else with. It’s unhealthy to keep those things inside — they can develop into worse problems if not taken care of.

So to bring this back around to the beginning, I went from being staunch about not being bipolar to coming to and understanding years later that it is okay to be so. If you need help, get it. Sometimes even if you don’t believe you need it.

National Suicide Help Line: Call 1-800-273-8255

Please call someone, anyone if you are having suicidal thoughts. Sometimes just talking to someone can make all the difference in the world.

©2017 Trevor Elms