For 25 years now, I have lived with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. They call it a disorder, but for me, nothing much has changed. It is just order for me. I don’t know better. I don’t know better because I have always lived with myself, and due to circumstances, my bipolar side was suddenly spelled out much more clearly, and I got this label.

I am a cup-is-half-full kinda guy, so I have always worn the label of having a disorder as a badge of honor. The kind of honor you don’t deserve because you are just who you are, I see it more as a recognition that I climbed a tall mountain and survived.

I accept the facts of life as quickly as possible and learn to live with them. What is the point of complaining? No one can make them disappear. It is not easy. I cannot deny it. Knowing that you will feel depressed for a while, counting the days, and ignoring your own mood. Knowing you should not buy that, but also knowing that you will choose now over tomorrow.

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon

After a brief explanation from my doctor about what lithium was, I have never doubted taking it. For more than 25 years, it has helped me. I have seen and spoken to many people who go off their medication when they feel good, and in my experience, that, combined with an irregular life, almost always leads to relapse. Though doctors and scientists can’t exactly explain how lithium works, the record shows that it does, and that was enough for me to accept it.

Living with bipolar disorder also made me interested in how the brain constructs experience. We often think we perceive reality directly, but our brains constantly edit, filter, and prioritize information. Perhaps depression and mania are not simply different moods but different ways this filtering takes place. I know that my experience of the world changes, not as strongly as it once did, but it still changes. I also know that the world itself is not suddenly changing. What changes is the way I experience it.

The depressions and manias typical of bipolar disorder are usually not caused by what happens in life. They can be triggered by events, but more often they simply arrive. They can be triggered, but most of the time they just arrive. This realization has also helped me because what suddenly arrives can also suddenly disappear.

Lithium is important, but I also think that living a regular life is important. Depressions and manias might come suddenly, but a lack of sleep, for instance, can hasten them. A steady job, eating at six, writing, watching TV, and going to bed at ten are not as glamorous as the life I have lived at times, but the costs are, literally, much lower.