Gone are the days when I used to wear my bipolar disorder like a shield, defending myself against the public stigma waved at me by every passerby, real or just perceived by my paranoid self. Today I just enjoy being myself, usually able to ignore the fact that I even have bipolar disorder at all.

I grew up in a relatively normal middle-class family in a suburb outside Buffalo, New York. Everything was fine until Mom had her “nervous breakdown” when I was 12 years old. She was institutionalized, of course, unable to function “properly” (according to society’s standards) and given shock treatments. When she came home months later, she didn’t even know her own children. Gone was the creative, loving mother I had known.

Perhaps, had they known back then that my mother actually had bipolar disorder, she would have been treated much differently, and hers and my life would have turned out much better. At least I like to think so. We had been so close up to that point, enjoying all the things you think of as typical mother-daughter fare. After her “breakdown,” however, I was pretty much on my own.

For years, I blamed this incident for what I went through. My adolescence was fraught with extreme emotional highs and lows, far greater than those a typical teenager would normally go through. I had to live with the terrible thoughts and feelings that any other person with undiagnosed and unmedicated bipolar disorder has to go through. What a horrible ordeal, especially for a young person! But who knew back then…

It is a good thing that these days they are diagnosing bipolar disorder as young as toddler age, so that young children and young people do not have to go through the horrors that some of us had to experience well into adulthood with undiagnosed and unmedicated bipolar disorder. It was actually the bipolar disorder that was responsible for many of the bad experiences of my life.

Be that as it may, however, a bad past cannot be blamed for a bad present. Lest I wax philosophical, let me explain myself. A very wise therapist told me that I can visit the past, but I cannot dwell in it, as that can be very dangerous for me, causing me to have lingering negative thoughts that can cause me emotional harm. How true! Racing thoughts that would not stop, leading to mania that caused me to be self-destructive before I got on the right medication proved this therapist correct. I listened to her after that.

Having bipolar disorder, regardless of our past, means we have to learn how to live with it in relative peace. Just like in a war, where you might have to learn to live in peace with your enemy. However irrational as it might seem, I view bipolar disorder as my very real enemy. And in order to cope with it, I have had to learn to manage it by learning to live at peace with it, because I have to accept the fact that it will never go away, no matter how much I wish it would.

Sometimes we have to just accept the worst of things. And bipolar disorder falls into that category. However, once you learn to live at peace with that, life becomes much easier.

Wishing you joy and stability,

Remember God loves you and so do I,
Michele