I'm sore. Beat up. I've aged five years in the last two. Stress is no joke.

The nauseating up and down of my emotional state made me sick. I don't feel like myself.

My muscles don't hurt, but somehow, my body still aches. It pops and cracks when I stretch. It's been under tension for a long time.

The strain of severe anxiety or crippling depression, followed by the euphoria of bipolar hypomania, dominated my life for several years. Now that I've been stable for a while, I'm hungover from all the stress chemicals.

It's like the adrenaline dump you get when you're about to compete. You've been hyped for so long that your body prepared too early. The hormones you need for your contest dissipate and you're left exhausted.

I'm in that exhausted phase. Mental illness set a torch to my life, and the flames only recently went out. With the smoke cleared, I could see the devastation. I couldn't believe I'd caused it myself.

Coming out of a very high or very low period sends you crashing into reality. While you're depressed, you're removed from the world and unaware of a lot that's happening. When you're hypomanic, you're living on another plane of existence and you don't notice the mayhem going on all around you.

As soon as you stabilize you're left to tally up the damage. For me, nearly everything was lost in the disaster.

The first reaction is shock. The next is: how do I put it back together again? The more pieces were blown to bits, the more daunting the prospect of rebuilding. Depression can follow, starting the cycle all over again.

When I stepped back and looked at my life, it seemed as if I had always been living under a fog. The back and forth of my mood and ADHD gave me a strange relationship with time. It all seemed compressed to me. Everything happened in an instant.

But it was a lifetime of decisions influenced by my disorders. The time was dizzying because of the yoyo that was my feelings. Although I knew I was sometimes acting irrationally, I didn't know why.

I chastised myself relentlessly once I sobered up from my bipolar binge. I didn't make room for the direct relationship between my mental health and my decision-making or the outcomes I experienced. I cut myself no slack.

All I could see was the wreckage. I couldn't comprehend that maybe it had to all come down so I could create something new. There was no bright side. Everything I built seemed to be taken away in a flash. Still, it deteriorated over years and I was only emotionally present a third of the time while it was happening.

I was absent because I was either too low or too high to communicate effectively with the people around me. I was rarely on the same wavelength.

If I was low, I didn't want to talk. I'd shut down and hide.

When I was hypomanic no one understood what I was saying. I was beyond woo-woo.

But when I'm in the middle I don't have the same confidence to be myself as I do when I'm up. Hypomania makes me feel good about myself; as if I have a million interesting things to discuss.

So after my symptoms were under control, my baseline personality was quieter. I wasn't thinking a mile a minute anymore. I had less to say.

The quieter I was, the more I could hear the "I told you so" from my family. They'd warned me I was being reckless; taking chances that might threaten my future. I was sure they didn't know what they were talking about. I trusted my judgment above everyone else's.

Except that it wasn't really my judgment. I wasn't in my right mind most of the times I took an unnecessary risk. I still have to suffer the consequences.

Now that I know how things fell apart, I can plan. I can prepare myself for the next time I'm symptomatic by putting some reminders in place to help me navigate extreme emotions. I can let the people around me know that my behavior may get erratic and if it does, they should tell me.

That was one of the things that led to my downfall. Whenever my ex-wife would tell me I was symptomatic, I wouldn't believe her. As much as she would remind me that we were on the same team, I'd always get defensive. I thought she was questioning my sanity, and it was insulting.

Now I welcome a little well-meaning advice. I'm eager to rebuild and need all the help I can get from everyone around me. Thankfully, a few people stuck around, and they feel comfortable letting me know when I'm not being myself.

I don't know if I know who that is anymore. I spent so much time at either pole that they feel more like me than stability does. As I sift through the rubble, I'm finding remnants of the life I remember, the one I had before I was triggered into a years-long nightmare. But I don't want to have regrets. The damage is done, the blame has been taken, and the renewal has begun.

Hopefully five years from now I can look back on this time as formative. Knowing it all had a purpose would make it worthwhile. I won't look out and see destruction anymore. I'll see possibility — and the beginning of a fresh start.