The Unusual Perks of Mental Illness

Sometimes, a major weakness is a major strength.

Mental illness is a major component of my life. It affects so many aspects of how I live that it’s become an integral part of who I am. Huge life decisions are made taking into account my bipolar.

And, like any illness, there are major downsides that have a huge impact on a given day. Bouts of depression can wreck multiple months of my life. A run of mania can lead to bad decisions. The ever-present anxiety makes simple tasks hard.

These symptoms can cause me great difficulty and pain. Depression sucks, and there’s no varnishing that truth. However, not all aspects of my illness are negative.

That’s not to say that my symptoms are good. Being anxious, depressed, manic, or neurotic are all crappy feelings, and I don’t particularly care for them. However, they all inform the wiring of my brain and are all a part of me in some way. Because these symptoms affect my brain functioning, they naturally inform how I work in unique ways.

I am a neurotic person. I tend to fixate on past mistakes and negative feedback and events, and they tend to ruin my wellbeing when this fixation flares up. I also obsess over every possible outcome of relatively simple conversations, driving myself to madness over a hundred hypothetical scenarios that will never happen.

These same traits assist me at work. My fixation on mistakes and aversion to negative feedback translates to attention to detail in my work, meaning I make fewer critical mistakes in my writing. My obsession with every possible outcome translates to complex processes and mechanisms that guide my work process and help me succeed at my job.

Other traits that negatively affect my life have positive outcomes in other ways. Being late to anything tends to make me panic, and I tend to be hyper-fixated on time. It certainly helps me get to meetings and appointments on time if not early, which reflects well on me as an employee and a professional.

I also operate using strict routines that drive my daily life. For example, I am fully conscious of how much time it takes to get to work and how the traffic signals operate on my whole route. This fixation on routine can ruin my day if I’m running late, but also helps me manage multiple deadlines using standardized practices I’ve developed.

If I’m in the midst of a manic streak, I tend to act recklessly and make poor life choices. I am also incredibly productive with my work and have launched several side projects from manic states.

Not all symptoms of my bipolar can be made unequivocally positive. Depression is depression, and it’s hard to put a shine on it. However, often when coming out of my depression, I feel a sense of renewal that helps me jump-start new ideas or better self-care practices. The deep, dark introspection of the depressive state often leads to major revelations when you pull out of it.

Not everyone is capable of putting a positive spin on their symptoms. I am fortunate that my symptoms are well-controlled by my meds, which allows me to apply their positive effects at work and in life. However, others may not be able to control their symptoms well enough to reach this point, and not all symptoms have positive sides.

Everyone is wired differently, and for some, it’s hard if not impossible to achieve an upside. That’s not a personal failing on their part in the same way that mental illness is not a moral failing. Sometimes, your illness prevents any potential upside, and sometimes, your illness doesn’t have an upside at all. That’s okay.

For me, I do my best to pull value from my illness. It’s a blessing and a curse in that way — my biggest weakness feeds my greatest strengths and enables me to be better.

It’s not always sunshine and roses, though. When I’m hyper-productive during a manic phase, I still have self-destructive tendencies that affect my life negatively. My drive to be timely is fantastic, but not when I’m having a panic attack in my car because I’m running five minutes late.

It’s just a matter of give and take in my mind. I was born with my bipolar and am forced to live with it, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t give me something in return.

I’ve always been a bit more self-aware than normal, and years of therapy and forced introspection have helped build on that skill. I’m also an analytical person, preferring logic and processes and systems. That may or may not be a product of my neurotic side, but it’s part of me either way.

So, being self-aware, introspective, and analytical, I’ve dedicated a lot of time in my life to finding ways to exploit the complex system that is my brain. How can I make my negative qualities work for me as well as against me? How can I channel my problems into solutions for other things?

This may seem like trying to draw blood from a stone. I’m cursed with a mental illness, after all. How can that be good? As I’ve described above, there’s a lot of good to be had from my more self-destructive tendencies. It’s just a matter of finding it.

Turns out there’s plenty of blood in this stone.