Welcome to the Bipolar Podcast Episode 15: My Desire To Change Has Cost Me Everything. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to the series in the footer of the website, bipolarexcellence.com.

This is a heavy one. I live and breathe this topic like almost no one else I meet in my day to day life. It’s only other people like me that want to work with someone like me or do something like what I’m doing, or the people I follow where I’ve ever even come across this topic.

All right. So your desire to change. If you’re some degree of bipolar, except for that one very light version… it’s been years. I haven’t had to talk about the types in forever, and I don’t really focus on that anymore. But there’s one, it’s a hypo, something.

I can’t remember. You have like bipolar light. You’re eclectic. You’re the slightly odd friend, slightly unpredictable, but there’s no chaos connected to it. If you’re that person, maybe you don’t want to change all that much. It could be highly enjoyable and you could be quite effective right there.

But if you’re one of the other breeds of bipolar, you’ve definitely wanted to change that because all the rest hurts. In your desire to change from that, woven into it really is, the bipolar is just a symptom of a larger issue. You should change. The bipolar is trying to wake you up to that fact. So you’re trying to change to beat the bipolar.

And then by default, you’re satisfying a much larger goal, whether you like it or not. You need to change. It’s a big part of why bipolar ever showed up in your life. What happens is you can get on a roll, and let me just say right away, this isn’t a bad thing. You get on a roll and you just want to start changing everything because part of you wakes up, which is an awesome thing.

You wake up to who you actually are, or at least you begin to, and you get interested in a lot of new avenues that you never did before. And when you pursue these lines of thought, pursue whatever projects pop into your head off the back of that, your old world starts to go away.

Or it’s not being serviced properly by you anymore. And this can cause a lot of grief and friction and sadness and loneliness.

When you get to a point, and I’m going to speak of just myself, where you realize where you’re at in life, none of it’s working for you. If you got your good health, that’s one thing. But other than that, you want everything, you know, everything else needs to be different. This causes a cataclysmic chain, a chain of events in your entire reality. Friends that have been with you for years, you’re going to start ignoring them.

Or you’re going to see that to be friends with some of the people that you want to be, or maybe you already are, but you’re going to notice you can’t keep up. I know for me, mostly, that was economically. The simplest damn things, like going to get a fucking sandwich at a diner so that you could kick around an idea, I couldn’t afford.

And so even in the act of excelling and trying to succeed, you’re going to have to pull away from those people as well. Or I should say you might have to. Because, at least with a lack of money, you’re always the dead weight. You can’t afford anything. Personally, that became very disheartening for me. Very depressing.

I never figured out an easy way to fix that. There was no way, other than to create the work and present the work. I’m doing that with you right now. Much of your life either evaporates or bleeds away or it just changes so much that you’re adrift. That’s what it feels like as it’s happening. But this is actually a good thing.

You’re in pursuit of something that’s bigger than yourself.

In part, if anybody, if you’re a family person or just have a friend or two who are still somebody you really care about, want to help, you need to help… there’s people relying on you to do well. And you’re even going to have to ignore them because the work has to take primary focus.

Now, of course you can’t ignore your family too much. I have. In a certain respect, I still do because I got it as good as I could get it with taking care of them while creating this, because this thing that you’re listening to right now? The scope of the system I’ve built and the work I have to do to maintain it is fairly phenomenal compared to what an employee has to deal with in a day, to get their pay.

And I only have X amount of energy units to apply to any one thing. And this is the thing that’s pulling the rest of my life along for the ride. This is the thing that’s bringing me closer all the time to where it is I actually want to be.

This is the thing that’s actually letting me live the way I want to live.

That’s all well and good, but I guess what I’m saying is, you’re going to need to have to buckle down, somewhere deep in your heart and get hardcore about this stuff. If what you’re trying to do is so off the wall in the minds of everyone around you? You have no choice, but to cut those ties, or to let them lie fallow, to ghost people, to do whatever you got to do, because there comes a point… there’s a point of no turning back.

You reached this point where you realize this thing has to happen. Then this thing becomes your life. The good news is the longer you do it, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more it both pays you, so you can afford the systems and tools to automate a lot of it.

Or you would just get smarter to create the systems and tools you need to automate a lot of it, which gets you some of that time back and you can tentatively reconnect with some of these people.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. If you get lucky enough, you’ll have friends that get what this is, cause they’re on their own run of some sort and, and they’re willing to be okay with you only reaching out every couple of years or something maybe. They don’t take it personal.

Other friendships require more maintenance than that and they will take it personal and you might lose some friends as I have, just through inattentiveness. And it sucks. I’ve had people in my life that I never wanted to go away. And they’ve gone away because I was in no position to live my life alongside theirs.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s icky as it’s happening, but. Eye on the prize, right. I keep myself focused on what’s coming next and by doing so I draw the people to me that can appreciate such a thing. And year after year, the kinds of friends I have and the way we work together has changed compared to the friends I had way back when. Even the awesome ones.

It just, the thing sorts itself out. Yes, you can be too hyper-focused on a mission and you can just destroy your whole world effortlessly, by doing the whole mad scientist routine and working days and weeks straight without coming up out of your lab.

But I don’t know. I don’t know, man. I think even that’s required. I think to a certain degree, there are going to be some unhealthy stretches, unhealthy in some respect, stretches in your life as you push your vision forward. And that’s simply the cost. It’s simply the cost.

The only thing I can tell you is as time goes by you’ll, you’ll learn how to have friends and service your responsibilities, your personal responsibilities, better as you go. Because it’s, you’ll just get better at it all. Trust me.

I wish I could have said it more eloquently than that, but you have to be up for this ride. It’s going to be bumpy. Gonna have a lot of long stretches of quietness where nothing’s happening, other than you pounding away at the keyboard, or just quietly thinking to where smoke’s coming out of your ears and you’re trying to piece together how this thing’s supposed to go.

You have no choice if the mission is important enough, but to get used to the fact that a lot of your old world’s gonna fade away. You’re not always going to do it right. The fading. It’s not going to be a clean cut. It’s going to cause bad feelings.

But keep in mind, you’re not on this earth to please anyone else. You were born for some kind of reason and if you’ve landed at my doorstep, you either fully understand that, or you got an idea, you got an inkling of an idea that that’s you. And this is the Warrior’s path.

It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be smooth. You’re going to hurt people in the process, potentially. Potentially. Some of you are going to kind of cruise right on through this and just get where you got to go with only minor alterations to how you proceed in a day.

I was not that fortunate. I really still am not. But, I dig the hell out of doing this with you guys. I’m new to this iteration of what I’m doing, but it’s already brought people my way that have blown my mind and improved my life, who understand where I’m at and are cool with it.

And I’m getting more excited by the day by what this podcast and the website and everything else I do with it is creating. It’s even making me better at my day job, where I work at a halfway house with addicts. I have a really good time helping these people and in the way I do it. And that also feeds how I work with you guys here.

They’re a, blanking on the word again, symbiotic. They’re symbiotic. They feed off of and help each other. That was something I didn’t exactly see coming. When I got this latest job, I’ve had 50 some odd jobs, I didn’t want any more jobs. I just wanted to go full-time with this. Hasn’t made enough money for that to happen yet?

It’s getting there though. It is definitely getting there. And I’ve been at this 20 some odd years.

There are surprises that are quite beneficial in just keeping going, if you remain receptive to them and open. You’ll spot them when they happen. You gotta relax some of your old views. That’s something you should routinely look at doing anyway. And you’re gonna find in the long run, a lot of what you thought was a cost was really an investment.

And maybe, once you reach the place where you’re more stable all by yourself and you don’t have to hurl yourself at this mission day in and day out, you get a little breathing room, which is the point.

You’ll be able to get some of those friendships back. You’ll be able to make some of those people from your old life, an active part of your new life. Some of them anyway. And it’ll all have been worth it.

It’ll be worth it, whether you do that or not. Cause it simply is. If I wasn’t here doing this now, who knows which one of you out there would have never done what you’re trying to do? You heard me say a thing the way I say it and it clicked and you were off to the races. And one day you’ll be able to say, this guy, this lunatic with a beard, said some shit that just set the whole next thing off and running.

We might not ever see each other or be in contact ever. Cause I have people like that. I have coaches in my past that I either worked with them once or I’ve never worked with them. I just read their newsletters, but certain things get said, and it has changed the very thing I’m doing right here with you now. And they don’t even know it.

Some of them aren’t even coaches anymore or they’ve morphed into something else. That’s what I’m doing now with you. If I don’t do this, one of you would have lost. And I feel a certain amount of responsibility to keep that from happening. You’re going to be doing the same.

Hopefully we’ll be doing it together in some fashion and it’s going to be damned exciting. All right, guys, hang in there and do the work, alright? Take care.