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In the interest of full disclosure
When I talk about myself as emotionally unstable, I'm being literal. I'm taking both Cymbalta and Clonazepam. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, and one of them had a grandmother who was manic-depressive. There's agoraphobia and panic attacks slithering around on one grandmother's side.
And the second grandmother? That's where you hit mental instability pay-dirt. All but one of my father's uncles died in the mental hospital. That one was the over-achiever of the family; he died in prison.
My father was manic-depressive, heavy on the manic, hospitalized many times, on Lithium when he died.
My mother has panic attacks and has had serious agoraphobia. She (and I) have the symptoms of one of the milder forms of manic-depression, heavy on the anxiety (and with me depression), light on the mania.
Like my father, I'm high-functioning. [The man would come out of the mental hospital and go right back to work. His only addiction was to cigarettes, and he took his medication religiously.] I don't drink, smoke, gamble, or have random sexual encounters. I was in a committed relationship that lasted twenty-five years and ended only because she died five years ago. I've held the same job for thirty years. After some moving around, Pat and I settled in a house next door to my parents, and have been here since 1986. I'm not in debt. I've never been arrested. I am overweight and my house is a mess. The only one who's diagnosed me is me, and my mother concurs. When I told all this to my last psychiatrist, I told him I was mildly manic-depressive, but not very good at it.
I describe myself as emotionally unstable because my emotions are where the instability shows. I cry easily, I have periods where I feel (metaphorically) as though I'm standing on a wobbly stool with my hands tied behind my back. I have periods where I feel as though my shadow is simply too heavy, and periods where the weight of other people's thoughts keep me immobilized. (I tell my therapist these things and she writes them down because they're both poetic and accurate. There are some things you can only be accurate about by being poetical.)
Besides all that, I'm terribly nearsighted and have an over-active imagination. Life comes at me in puzzling images that my imagination interprets before the rational part of my mind gets a chance. Those interpretations could be scary when I was a little girl, but now they're usually amusing.
I honestly don't understand most other people, which makes them potentially dangerous. I'm always saying things that seem perfectly reasonable to me, but upset other people, and they almost never tell me what they're upset about. (I do have a very silly sense of humor and a very serious way of expressing myself, which confuses people.)
I don't feel compelled to write this--I write about this stuff all the time in my private journal. I'm writing it because I want to, because if people are angry or upset with me because of nothing more than misunderstandings, this seems the easiest way to clear them up.
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Have you ever heard of the Four Agreements by Ruiz?
1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don't take anything personally.
3. Don't make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.
Most people do not operate under any of these principles, but making an attempt to do so for myself seems to ease stress.
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I feel like Yossarian in "Catch-22" when he kept saying that people were shooting at him. And some reasonable person would tell him that they were shooting at everybody. To which Yossarrian would reply, "What difference does that make?"