This is a search term that led someone here the other day. I was sorry it didn’t make a direct hit with that exact sentence somewhere in the blog. What is the hierarchy of needs for someone with bipolar? We’re so used to Maslow’s Triangle, which starts with physiological needs and progresses up to self-actualization, that I’ll go with it.

For bipolars, you have to switch these around a little. Ok, keep the physiological needs where they are – we’re animals, not robots or dislocated souls bouncing around the internet, even though it may feel that way most of the time.

But then, Safety. Safety is tinged with the idea that the bipolar person is somehow out to do some harm to themselves, either directly or indirectly. That saber tooth tiger is now us: we’re the ones who get the adrenaline going, out of nowhere. We can sometimes be the threat. The only thing that can overcome this better than medications is Love/Belonging. They need to come before Safety. And Understanding must be added, or Love and Belonging can’t happen.

Esteem… whew, this is like climbing a mountain, or a very huge, very slippery triangle. What do you mean self-esteem? That went away a long time ago, when we discovered we weren’t in control of how we were feeling most of the time, and most of that time was taken up with self-recriminating depression. We may have to skip Esteem and jump straight to Self-actualization.

I believe that Self-actualization is possible without loving yourself first, which is why bipolars spin wildly from action to action, project to project, looking for something, when nothing will make itself apparent until one day we get lucky and a vocation comes along to reconnect us with the world. So – food and shelter, or Physiological needs, then Love, Belonging and Understanding. Then Self-actualization – having a creative mind, using one’s intelligence, working on things successfully – and only then can bipolars achieve self-esteem. But this is the top of the triangle, so it’s the hardest to get to. Because we can be in the middle of flow, of total immersion in the here and the now, and suddenly be laid flat by crushing depressions. And first to drop out from under us is our self-esteem … what little we had to begin with.

So, from Safety on up, we find ourselves in trouble, but it’s not impossible to make it to the top. Or maybe not impossible to get there, fall down a little, get back up there again, fall … the rhythm conducted by the rotating weirdness inside the bipolar person’s mind .

Acting like a man means not being so irritable with my wife. Saturday, Independence Day, I reacted so strongly against her telling me that the dishes needed doing that I started a fight. It was to be our day of getting out and seeing Brooklyn, shopping for a neighborhood. And although we did get out, the trip was hugely compromised by the bad mood cloud I created that hung over the day. I’m so bad on weekends, so unsure of myself on weekend mornings when I don’t have any structure.

And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Structure. Creating and maintaining. I can create, but maintaining has been a bit of a problem, especially on the days when in the past I’d have no structure – in other words, on the weekend days when I used to be able to tolerate a complete lack of structure and kind of glaze my eyes over and loaf through the day. Now I need a work schedule for the weekend days. Also, the presence of my wife makes me feel shiftless and worthless. I’ve been out of a job for about 4 weeks now, and although I’ll be starting a new one in about two weeks, I still feel like a layabout heel. My structure during the week isn’t as hard to define: wake up around 5:30 a.m., write until around 7, get ready with my wife to go to work, walk her to the subway station, then come home and surf the internet without direction for about two hours. Then, a mega nap, then take care of some daily life paperwork and then video games. What a day, what progress. Then, the weekend comes around and I’m forced to see for myself how little I’ve accomplished, how little fulfillment of my goals is going on, and I cave. I collapse.

Facebook is a tough one, too. Those pages designed to inspire a kind of envy in others. Those boastful updates and home pages where people present a kind of all-partying all-joy version of themselves. Whenever a person has any kind of success, up it goes onto Facebook. I watch the world pass me by on those pages, my friends’, my acquaintances’ successes slowly grinding me down and making me pity myself. It all comes back to self-actualization and how hard mental illness makes that.

This is what I’ve been thinking about. Maslow’s heirarchy of self-actualization. Quoting from Wikipedia (always a good idea):

Maslow explicitly defines self-actualization to be “the desire for self-fulfillment, namely the tendency for him [the individual] to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

Let’s see… Physiologial needs.. do they include the need for pure sanity, a mind working without compromises? And what about Esteem? Where does bipolar leave you there? There seem to be so many impediments to climbing this pyramid thrown up by mental illness.

I begin to think in these terms when I’m in the middle of an uptick, the beginnings of a hypomania. You could say it started on Saturday with the irritability. Today, I bought a pair of sunglasses I can’t afford. But I’m not entirely without reason: I made sure there was a solid return policy at the store, should I come to realize that they were an impulse buy and totally not for me.

That’s the search for the Physiological — impulse buying. Looking for Physiological and Safety needs in purchasing things. Trying to make up for the large hole in my life that bipolar has blown, like a shotgun, I buy things sometimes that I do not need in a kind of attempt at the pyramid. And the Facebook rant? That’s me seeing other people seemingly self-actualizing, boasting about their Safety, Esteem, Belonging. Hell, those traits are there in the very act of posting about ones self, advertising one’s own life. This must be the reason I never post on Facebook and sometimes break down into tears when I read the updates of others – I just don’t have the mastery of the triangle down. I’m trying to be a man, trying to climb that slope the best I can.