When trying to recount a life, especially a life that has been touched by mental illness, it can be hard to paint a broad enough picture. It’s difficult to document a story full of soaring highs and earth shattering lows in a way that does not give the reader whiplash. How can one possibly encapsulate the true essence, the underlying theme, of a tale that has gone in so many different directions at so many different times?
For the sake of creating a baseline to build from, and a general understanding of who I am and why I choose to share these stories, I will have to try to achieve such a thing. Because my life has thus far been so full of trial and error, success and loss, calm and calamity, the best I can do is to give you a series of small glimpses into the places I have been on the road to where I am today.
When I was six years old, I found myself in detention nearly every day for talking too much and being a distraction to my peers. I excelled in my schoolwork, but I exhausted my teacher with my constant, unrelenting energy.
When I was eight years old, my teacher pulled me aside during lunch period and taught me the word “lethargic”. She had noticed a sudden change in personality, from a bubbling, hyperactive classroom participant to a slow-moving, disinterested loner. She asked if there was anything going on at home that I needed to talk about.
When I was twelve years old, I was frequently sent to run laps around the building, so that I could burn off my excess energy and give the teacher and my classmates a break from my incessant, impulsive interjections.
At age fifteen I experienced a sexual assault, and my behavioral issues intensified. I grew angry and combative, skipping classes daily and maintaining the seats in the Dean’s office waiting room a cozy, 98.6 degrees warm.
When I was seventeen, I graduated from high school a year early with straight A’s in a double load of courses. I spent that summer as an exchange student in Spain.
Nineteen was when everything changed. I was living in an apartment at school, and I became somewhat entangled in a world of drugs. I went through some sort of breakdown that I still don’t entirely understand, and was sent via ambulance to a psych ward, where I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type I and an eating disorder.
By the age of 23, I had been through two intensive outpatient programs, five inpatient hospital stays, and one three-week stint at a residential mental health facility. I struggled fruitlessly with my bipolar, anorexia, anxiety, and ADD. I had dropped out of school, couldn’t hold down a job, and relied on my parents for nearly everything.
At the age of 24 I was out of my parents’ home and living with my fiance, and things were looking up. I attended intensive outpatient one more time for my eating disorder, and have yet to see the inside of a psychiatric hospital since.
With 25 years under my belt now, I am married to the most supportive and loving man I could have ever hoped to meet. We experienced a miscarriage very early on in the marriage, which was devastating to us both, but in the end it served to make us stronger. I am unapologetically and unflinchingly happy in my relationships, and I am currently enrolled in community college to finally finish what I started all those years ago. While I still take several medications and I still struggle with panic attacks, occasional manic and depressive episodes, and periods of minor relapse, I have found new vigor in overcoming each obstacle that life, and my own brain, can create for me.
Through writing about my experiences, I hope to impart some of the wisdom I have gained, share some tricks of the trade I have picked up over time, and to lend a voice to mental illness and the message that life goes on. But just as importantly, I want to use this space to express without shame the often ugly realities of lives that are touched by disorders of this kind. There is no easy way out, only through, and it can get messy. I floundered too long in the dark, and now that I have found some light in my life I want only to cast it onto the wretched shadows that suffocated me, exposing them for what they are. Silence is our downfall, but when we find our voice, we lift up not only ourselves but also any who have the ears to hear it.
I hope that this post finds you in good health, and that, if it does not, my story can lend to you some comfort. I would like to march side by side with you into the wild and unmappable future, heads held high and eyes fixed only on the journey ahead.
Calm and Calamity 