I was 25 when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It was a label that had orbited around me for ten years, but had never quite made it into my atmosphere.
Life up until that point was chaotic. I spent much of my teenage years and early adulthood in crippling depression, often being unable to get out of bed, wash, or feed myself. I’ve also lived with an eating disorder for most of my life which has, at many times, completely overshadowed other aspects of mental illness.
My teenage years were a whirlwind of misery, impulsivity and bad decisions all wrapped up into one messy and hard-to-recall package.
It was during a period of time I spent in psychiatric hospital that bipolar disorder was first mentioned. However it is a difficult illness to diagnose in children and I think everyone around me was playing the ‘watch and wait’ game. So we watched, and we waited.
Over the years, my depression fluctuated, but more and more frequently were these ‘other’ episodes. To start with I thought what I was experiencing was ‘normal’. Maybe this was just how people who weren’t depressed felt. Perhaps other peoples’ baseline was a brain buzzing with ideas and a bursting social calendar and only needing a few hours sleep.
When your life has mostly consisted of an empty mind and isolation and festering in bed for days on end, you don’t really know what it’s like to feel ‘normal’. It was nice to feel this way, and to be able to function in the world.
However, the problem with those episodes is that they didn’t remain ‘functional’, and they were happening more and more.
The direction my mood would go in after a run of night shifts was like flipping a coin – I’d be crying in bed for days or I’d be on my fifth day of no sleep trying to buy my third iPhone, with no solid ground in between.
I’d pack bags in the middle of the night to go hiking across the country and hear my name being whispered from all different directions. I would get deeply and completely obsessed with things – the concept of time, the formulation of how to be famous, redecorating my entire house.
As each of these high episodes got progressively worse, so did the subsequent lows. I was living in a state of emotional whiplash and I knew by this point that this wasn’t, in fact, ‘normal’. I visited the community mental health team after being awake for over 120 hours, writing half a children’s book, redecorating my spare bedroom and cowering behind my sofa for seven hours due to believing there was a man watching me in the garden, where I was handed a selection of patient information leaflets for a number of antipsychotic medications that I would find myself cycling through over the next few years.
That moment felt like my life completely made sense and fell apart all at once. I finally understood why I’d spent the last tens years on a seesaw. In some ways, this was a huge relief.
I could now access treatment that had the potential to stabilise my mood and live my life in a safer and more balanced way.
However, it also meant that this was something I was likely going to have to manage for the rest of my life; and at 25, that seemed like a very, very long time. I cried a lot that day and over the next week, both tears of grief and of gratitude.
We agreed on a medication regime, and this is where the next stage of the battle commenced. I thought getting diagnosed was the hardest part, but I was very, very mistaken.
Psychiatric medication has saved my life and I am so grateful for it, but getting to this point was not an easy journey. It took years of trial and error before I found myself at 29 years old, after more bouts of depression and mania and crisis team interventions and therapy, finally feeling balanced. I now take medication on top of trying to do what I can to take the best care of myself.
I have a crisis plan that I know off by heart, I know my early warning signs, I know who to call.
Living with this illness may feel like a challenge, but as time passes I find myself more at peace with it. When my day to day feels stable, I often worry it is just the calm before the storm.
But as time goes on I realise that when the storm is inevitable, the best thing to do is relish that calm and to make the most of those moments where things feel just a little bit ‘normal’.
Life is always going to be a rollercoaster for those of us with bipolar disorder, but it has become clear to me in the years since my diagnosis that I am just as capable as everybody else, and that I too can experience having a family and a career and a social life and whatever else I want and hope for.
In amongst the chaos, there is a wonderful life to be lived.
Yes, I have bipolar disorder, but I also have so much more.
