Imposter Bipolar Syndrome

I had therapy today and I was talking about my last manic episode, and as I was telling about this, I felt like I had made it up. As if, I know these symptoms and I had kind of LET myself have those symptoms, like I was exaggerating them to make myself more sick in the moment out of… attention seeking? (I was alone, but… you know… for my own attention?) I have this cognitive dissonance because, part of me has always felt like I’m not really THAT sick, I’m just exaggerating it.

I think about other people with bipolar and I think they have a much worse time than me, or… I think of people with bipolar and I think… they are so much less dramatic in their symptoms than I am. And both ways of thinking lead to the conclusion… I’m just making it up. I’m not really sick. I’ve just done this for attention, and then I got a diagnosis, so I was able to fine-tune the faking of my symptoms because… I’m really smart and I can fool people.

I really do have a high IQ, that isn’t even my own thinking, that’s… in my medical records. So… I can trust that that is real. And if I trust that that is real, I can infer that I could use my IQ to trick people to believe that I’m sick, even if I’m not… Like… I could make it believable.

I’m not sure why that would make any sense… I don’t really enjoy being bipolar. I do EVERYTHING possible to hide my symptoms so nobody sees them (Sir and SB are with me too much for me to escape them seeing… but literally no one else gets to see.) So, I don’t know what attention I would hypothetically be getting… besides my psychiatrist who treated me. But he was about the least attention-providing human I could imagine. And not in a mean way, so it wasn’t like I felt like I NEEDED his attention. He just didn’t make a big deal about anything. Didn’t take my medications for two weeks? He’d say, “Are you going to start taking them again?” Taking my medication regularly? He’d say, “Do you plan to continue taking your medication?” It was just… he was completely uninvested in my choices about my disease. So doing anything to get his attention would have been… really… would have resulted in no positive outcome for me. So it probably doesn’t make sense on a behaviorist level that I would fake symptoms for his attention. I didn’t get any different attention with or without symptoms.

I didn’t let my family see my symptoms (at least once I moved out of the house and could hide out alone when I was having symptoms). I haven’t let my partners see my symptoms (except K and now Sir and SB). I just… find them embarrassing and out of control. I am embarrassed even when I share them after the fact on my blog, and worry that people will think less of me if they know how bad I get.

All of this evidence adds up to an active avoidance of attention for my disease… Except for the fact that I talk about it instead of hiding it completely…

And that makes me think I want attention. If I didn’t want attention, I’d keep it completely secret, right? Nobody would even know I have bipolar, if I REALLY didn’t want attention.

So I must be making it up and just want the attention and I don’t actually have bipolar.

So, that means I can stop having symptoms (since they’re made up) and I can be normal.

I really fucking want to eat, but I have anhedonia depression right now and everything tastes like sawdust… Which makes the thought of even bothering to eat just too fucking depressing to deal with so I will solve it by just not eating at all.

Any moment now I’m going to stop being bipolar because I’m really only just making it up for attention… If I’m making it up, I can just choose to stop…

And… I’ll also start accepting logical conclusions supported by my own fucking reasoning rather than succumbing to irrational impostor syndrome.

Starting now…

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Now…

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Any second…

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Sometimes it takes a minute to kick in…

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Fuck.