Part of this training included a lesson on appropriate language use — to say, “person with bipolar disorder,” or “person living with bipolar disorder,” or “person with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder,” instead of “bipolar” as predicate adjective. We speakers were told that we are not our disease, our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing, and the illness is another, just as a person with cancer is not a “cancer” herself, but a person who has had, through misfortune, a condition at the cellular level.

Really glad to have read that. I never thought of it like that before, and will definitely be more aware of it now. God damn I'd get my degree in psychology in a heartbeat if it didn't mean potentially suffering a stressful, underpayed, overworked life dragging college debt through the mud.

edit: ok wait, I didn't mean it never occurred to me that there's a difference between the individual and the disease. I mean we/I refer to people who have bipolar disorder as "bipolar" which is akin to calling someone "cancer."

also this

feeling “scattered,” as I repeatedly told others, but were pre-psychosis signals and warnings.

To assemble the parts of my mind, which has begun to fall apart – to become “scatterbrained” –

super-edit- I'm making some sort of parallel between this and a couple Radiohead songs, from different albums too. I'm still breaking it all down so no spoilers but I'm probably gonna be making a separate post on this. Woah.