It's Just Me - (Anonymous)

Some of you reading this might not know what a wonderful person the author of this blog is. She's kind, loving, intelligent and drop dead hilarious. I met her through my support group, and she is like a sister to me. The Bipolar Support Group has been a life changing and life saving experience for me. Finding that group and meeting and becoming so close to others in the group has been incredible. Having bipolar disorder can make you feel profoundly alone. It has been the one place where I have been able to feel understood, and it's the place where I have met the people I now consider to be like a second family to me. If you're suffering, check it out. You won't believe how it can feel to have the support of people who live what you are living.

I am a 41 year old single mother of two little boys who are the light of my life. I am an attorney and I own my own practice. My parents and brothers and sister are my best friends in the whole world. I am part of a truly amazing family and I'm thankful for them every day. After getting divorced at the age of 38, and having resolved to be alone, I accidentally met the love of my life at age 40. I have a wonderful psychiatrist who respects me, works with me and truly cares about me. I know so many people through my job, through living in a small town and through the two different universities I have graduated from, but the few people I listed above, and my second family at MDJunction are the only people who know me. For clients, judges, other attorneys, people in my community, people I volunteer with and on and on, I wear a mask and hide so much of who I am. It makes me sad to have to do that, but if I didn't, no one would hire me and I have two children to support, so wearing the mask is the high price I pay. It is exhausting.

For as long as I can remember, I have lived on the edge of a world everyone else seems to understand. I always thought that everyone else had the same feelings I do, but that they just understood how to handle them, whereas I did not. It was only after being diagnosed and finding the right combination of medications that I realized this wasn't true.

The rest of the world does not feel the way I do. I am a rapid cycler. I can go from manic to profoundly depressed in the course of a few weeks or a few days or a few hours. When I am manic, I don't sleep for days at a time. I have so many ideas that I can't keep up with my mind. I have so many different projects going on at the same time, but I often don't finish any of them. For some people with bipolar disorder, the manic phase is when they feel really great, but we are all different. When I am manic, I feel so anxious and out of control. I live in a state of fear. I cannot have a conversation with anyone because it feels as if they can't understand the desperate importance of my thoughts. During manic phases, I have said and done things to the people I love that are hurtful. I have made horrendous decisions and have spent money I didn't have.

Then comes the crash. It's a horrible, dark hole that is filled with a void. The void is hopelessness, self loathing, powerlessness, and fear. It is the feeling that I am such a bad person that I don't deserve the air that I breath. When I am depressed, I often feel as if I shouldn't be taking up space in the world, and I try to make myself smaller and smaller by talking less and less, leaving the house only when absolutely necessary and constantly believing the voice that tells me over and over and over again that I am less than, lower than and that I have done something unforgivable and so deserve to feel the pain. It is crying and crying and crying.

Whether depressed or manic, and even now that I am basically stable on medication, I always have racing and repetitive thoughts. A snippet of a song playing over and over, along with a fragmented to do list and "movies" my mind creates of past, present and future events, all at the same time. Even when I am asleep, I dream constantly and vividly. When my partner sleeps next to me, he tells me in the morning of the many conversations I have during the night. My mind doesn't rest very often.

For years before I was diagnosed, I punished myself through destructive behavior. I allowed myself to be used and abused, believing it was all I deserved. I self medicated my way through episodes, sometimes successfully but more often with consequences that just made life more difficult.

Through all those years before I was diagnosed, I wore a mask for the world. I wore a mask for family and friends and professors and bosses and anyone with whom I had any contact. No one ever knew me. No one could. It was exhausting to be me. I lived life in a constant state of fear, even during the good times.

I was diagnosed with depression after the birth of my first child eleven years ago. I was diagnosed as bipolar after the birth of my second child eight years ago. I was hospitalized twice because I wanted to die. I only accepted my diagnosis within the last two years, after several years of therapy and after years of being on one anti-depressant after another, which only ever made things worse.

I now take five different medications several times a day. It took months of trial and error to find the right combination of medications, but it was worth it. I still have ups and downs. My moods still swing from mania to depression. The medications make the swings less profound and more manageable. Logging on to MDJunction every day and getting the support I need from people who understand me is almost as important as the medications. Although the side effects of my medications can be difficult to live with and they unquestionably negatively affect my artistic creativity, it's still worth it. My world falls apart far less often now and I don't live in a constant state of fear. I know I will have to take medication for the rest of my life. That's ok.

For those of you who create the stigma surrounding mental illness through your ignorance, it's time for you to learn what it's all about. For those of you who suffer with this disorder in silence, know you're not alone. I can only hope that as more of us become willing to share our stories, there will be greater understanding and acceptance, and the stigma will slowly disappear. I am a good person. I am a good mother, daughter, sister, lawyer, friend and lover. I am sensitive and compassionate and smart and loving. The fact that I can say that and mean it on most days now is the best feeling, and holding those days in my mind and having people remind me of those things about myself helps me get through the other days when I still hate myself.

That's as much of my story as I can tell you. The rest is in my mind and my mind alone, and it really isn't something that can be explained. It's just me.

- Submitted by Anonymous

Dual Diagnosis - (Submitted By O Sun)

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This story was submitted to me by a member of my support group - her name is O Sun...

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I came into this world breached. Feet first. But really, the delivery man forced me out head first with the use of forceps. Heaven only knows. Maybe he accidentally squeezed my delicate little cranium too tight with his tools triggering some kind of chemical eruption in my infant brain. Then again doctors are not supposed to reposition a breech by the head right? I couldn't say. What I do know is that from a very early age I had a heavy feeling of displacement. I have been on this search for something or someone to turn me around or realign my neural configuration.

I have lived most of my life shaken up by a volcanic tide of emotions. My moods are always oscillating and I am somewhere inside of them trying to find a life preserver be it illcit drugs (self destructive and futile), modern medicine (a work in progress that knaws at my patience), or therapy (compatibility also takes time and I am a tough match).

When I was first told "You are bipolar" I did not believe it. Not because I was ashamed or in denial, but because it was (and still is) the trend of the mental health world. Everyone under the sun was being diagnosed bipolar and I did not want to end up just another mistaken statistic. However, when I did my research, looking for symptoms and signs I could not relate to in order to challenge my diagnosis, I couldn't find an argument. I was actually overcome with a flood of relief. An explanation was given to me as to why I was experiencing such difficulty and pain in my life. I was able to stop punishing and blaming myself for my intense instability.

I have been hospitalized three times for depression. I was also in the hospital overnight because the cops came to my house and four pointed me. My family called the police because I was out of control and they were worried about what I would do if I left the house (which I really wanted to do at the time and probably would have ended up in some dark alley with strange people doing drugs). Drugs are very much a part of my story because I used them to medicate my uncomfortable fluctuations of mood. I have experienced extemely uncomfortable highs and detrimental lows quite rapidly. All my life I have been on this quest to make myself feel better or at least to get to know what it is like to feel semi-normal. I am dually diagnosed with addiction and bipolar and the road is a very hard and sometimes excruciatingly difficult one. I was put on disability last year because my condition makes it hard for me to hold down a job and fend for myself independently. I am thirty-one and I still live with my parents: I dream of one day having an apartment of my own like so many other people. I also dream of the day when I can feel comfortable in my own skin without drugs. I am sober now, but I am currently experiencing the depressive side of my illness that makes it hard for me to shower and put on my own two shoes in the morning. I have been through many pharmaceutical drugs, most to no avail, and I have to sit with this until my nurse practitioner comes up with the right combination. I feel like my life is in slow motion. I am trying to separate my feelings and intellect so that my intellect will tell me that I am moving through and this will pass. The highs I've experienced are twinged with irritability and it gets to the point where I want to hurt myself or someone else. I take an antipsychotic to relieve myself (and everyone else) of this state. I am currently in an outpatient program for the dually diagnosed and a DBT program to help regulate my moods. This program is like going to school and learning instructions for living; I seemed to miss out on the instructions early on and I get bored with them very easily. I am trying to learn to have patience in order to survive. It takes a lot of patience to get the insurance I need, the doctors I need, finding the right therapy, and not wanting to end my life when my moods start racing or slowing me down and shutting me off.

I watch people go to work and I watch them walk by me and drive and shop and I wonder why they seem so far away and why I don't feel as human as they seem to be. What would life be like if I did not have a mental illness or an addiction? Would it be easier? It looks very easy for some to do the day to day things that are so tremendously hard for me. It seems as if I am looking at life through a glass wall and I am stuck on the other side, in a different dimension. Sometimes it seems that I am a semblance of a person. I never quite feel whole. It is hard not to trust what I will be one minute or one day from the next. My goal is to one day be comfortable and stable and to know what consistency means. Until then...patience.

My Bipolar Experience Submitted by Flaco

( Photograph taken by post author, Flaco )


"Everybody hurts."
-Michael Stipe


A very true statement indeed. From heads of state to trashmen. From kings and queens to court jesters and clowns. People hurting, is as natural, and consistent, as the sun rising. Feelings of immortality, and indestructabilty, are most certainly not; natural feelings. It is not, the sad people we observe, and ponder : "How do they do that?;" but rather the overtly happy ones. That stands out more. Larger than life, get noticed.


My Bipolar diagnosis began when i was 20, in post-adolescence. I am now 35. I had a lot on my table in my 1st year of my music school. Upon coming to the MDJunction Bipolar support group, I noticed a plethora of people with a very similiar diagnosis story, as mine. Early in post-adolescence, with the demanding grind of the 1st year of college, creating a frenzied pace with little sleep. Meeting an overwhelming amount of people, while keeping up an exhausting pace, the likes of which hadn't been seen for somebody, until that point in their life, takes it up a notch.


In therapy for so long, my woes and hurt, were the topic du jour, and nothing was out of the ordinary. When magically, one day, all of them were gone, that was, out of the ordinary. Not normal. The other side. Manic. I felt indestructable. That's when we got the inkling that I was Bipolar. One visit later to a doctor, and it was confirmed.

- Flaco