Over a course of four posts, we have been discussing the numerous cognitive burdens that go with our illness, even when our moods are stable. In fact, for many of us, our mood fluctuations appear minor compared to what we have to deal with when the thinking parts of our brains refuse to cooperate with us.

If only we JUST had a mood disorder. Alas, no question about it, we have a mood AND thinking disorder.

Our brains easily overload. As we get stressed, our frontal lobes tend to go off-line. We have to work our brains harder just to bring them back online to perform even simple tasks. Often we fail.

Other times, it’s as if someone failed to turn on the lights. No one is home. With only slight exaggeration, it’s fair to say there are situations when we struggle to remember our own names.

But this is only one half of the picture. In early posts, I alluded to the fact that our very same brains are capable of running rings around the rest of the population. Indeed, on Facebook, after reading my last piece, dealing with the overlap between cognitive difficulities and fatigue, Zack served up this timely reminder:

This is interesting because I find in general I think far faster, more efficiently, and generally more in-depth than those around me, those who are relatively "normal." Even when I'm depressed. Nights without sleep or with a few hours are the exception to this, though.

I certainly identify with Zack, and I’m sure a lot of you do, as well. Often, I feel very sorry for the pathetically normal. It’s as if they have pocket calculators for brains while we have futuristic versions of iPhones. But there is a major catch: Any iPhone of the future is at best in the beta phase of testing, replete with bugs that would drive any owner crazy. I wonder if the iPhone of the future can even power up reliably.

Meanwhile, here are the pathetically normal all around us, with their laughably ridiculous but perfectly reliable pocket calculator brains, looking down upon us, so smug, so self-satisfied.

Screw you! I want to shout back at them. We bring you the gift of civilization and how do you treat us? You marginalize us. Think - Michelangelo, Newton, Columbus, Beethoven, Alexander Hamilton, Dickens, Van Gogh, Teddy Roosevelt, Hemingway, Elvis, Tesla, and possibly Craig Ventner (who sequenced the human genome).

I’m not through: What is it with you guys? Do you think gravity was just going to discover itself? Do you think your lamentably puny linear processing units that you mistake for brains are capable of producing one Aha! moment, much less an earth-shaking realization that is going to change the world?

Don’t get me started. The so-called “normal” who rock the world aren’t as normal as you may think. Typically, they have mental illness running in their families. The first-degree relatives of those with bipolar, for instance, are your prime candidates for hitting the genetic jackpot. These are people who inherit a lot of the hyper-performing bipolar software without having to contend with all the stuff that malfunctions.