Author: admin

Let’s Begin the Journey!

I’m so excited to have you with me in my journey. Be careful because it’s a bumpy one. Let’s explore all the sights to see!

My childhood starts the journey off on the right foot as I was bubbly and fascinated by the world around me. Life was so exciting. The first bump in my path showed up as I started to have panic attacks at the age of five. Aside from that, life was typical. I breezed through school and even discovered my talent for dancing along the way.

The next bump in my life appeared when I hit fourteen years old and the true saga of a life with mental illness began. After high school, come to Belgium with me as I take part in a foreign exchange program. I had a blast learning French, eating lots of waffles and chocolate and living an entirely different life. Unfortunately, all of the fun of life abroad came to a crashing end as I spiraled into psychosis and met the beast of bipolar disorder face-to-face.

Although the next bumps in my life are big whammies, I would love for you to stick with me through them because I have been very lonely throughout this part of my journey. I would love for someone to understand what life is like when it is filled with despair, terror, frustration, anger, loneliness, shame, delusions and even near-death experiences.

At that point, the bumps in my path became mountains. I remember staring at those mountains, having no idea what to do with them. Thirteen years later, I started to climb them. I found in myself, courage, discipline, strength and focus that guided my path. Over time, I picked the pace up and reinvented myself just in time to make it to the mountain peak. What a beautiful view up here. I would love for you to see it for yourself.

Since I scaled this mountain and conquered it, I don’t really have many bumps in my life. Certainly a few here and there, but I just hop over them. I want to share all that I know with you because there is so much to say and you are clearly so loved.

What Are the Bumps in My Path?

So, my life is full of bumps. At this point, I have explained when these bumps happened and even mentioned that they eventually turned into mountains. But these bumps are yet to be explained. I should dive into my diagnosis to give you an inside look.

Bipolar disorder is described as a mood disorder. People with this illness have moods that swing from the dark despair of depression to the exact opposite, which is mania. Depression is pretty self-explanatory but many people don’t know what mania is. Mania causes a person to have energy levels that are bizarrely high, which is quite dangerous for many reasons. When these moods get extreme enough, they are classified as “episodes.”

The illness is broken down into two categories: bipolar 1 and bipolar 2. People with bipolar 1 have mostly manic episodes and people with bipolar 2 have mostly depressive episodes. I suffer from bipolar 1.

At the first onset of my illness when I was a teenager, I fought manic depression, which seems like an oxymoron. It was a combination of my mood being high and low at the same time. The best way for me to explain it is that, even though I was depressed, my mind was running a million miles a minute. It caused me to cogitate intensely on my depressive thoughts and then everything would snowball. I lost my best friend because of it.

After suffering so long from manic depression, my mood swung in the other direction and I had two manic episodes where I became delusional and was hospitalized for quite a long while. That’s when these bumps turned into mountains. I have become such a seasoned hiker as I have scaled each one of them.

But the important part is that, over time and through many frustrations, I have made it over these mountains. The landscape of battling bipolar disorder these days does not resemble anything that it used to be. I want to tell you all about it.

My Parents’ Bumpy Lives

I am not the only one with bumps in my path! Unfortunately, by default of my illness, I have given many of them to my parents. After displaying clear signs of anxiety as a child and then struggling with bipolar disorder at the mere age of fourteen, my mom had her hands full. That’s when her road got bumpy. It was the beginning of her journey in helping her sick child.

My bumps were pretty consistent and somewhat manageable for many years. There were no alarm bells just yet. But everything exploded the day that I was diagnosed with a profound case of mental illness. Thus it began!

Once I found myself in the throws of bipolar disorder, the amount of bumps that my parents faced was jarring. I should name a few. I have to begin by explaining my irritability since it is the biggest marker of bipolar disorder. People can’t understand the magnitude of having to deal with such a thing until they have been there themselves.

The most hurtful bump was that I constantly tried to push them out of my life. During my episodes I sometimes even screamed and used profanity as the means to do it. As I clearly felt tormented every day of my episodes and even after them, I seemed unreachable by my parents. How awful of a situation is that for a parent to go through? My mom even told me one day that she felt like “I had died and she didn’t know if she would ever get her daughter back.”

The end of my episodes was not the end of the bumps that they faced. There were doctor’s appointments to be scheduled, medications to sort out and decisions to be made. It seemed like I would never work my way out of my moods. Grief surfaced as another bump in my parents’ way as they knew how worthless I felt. As I blended into crowds of people who would never do anything with their lives, my parents couldn’t convince me that my life was filled with potential.

Spanning years ahead in my life, I wrote my memoir at the age of thirty-six. Oh boy, is it filled with bumps! After reading it, my dad was shocked to find out that there was so much that I have been through that he knew nothing about. He wants all parents of children with bipolar disorder to know that there is so much more under the surface than they even realize. He told me that my book humbled him.

But I don’t live this way anymore, so what is the difference? The difference is how my parents faced their bumps. It wasn’t just their relentless strength and wisdom. It is all elaborate, seemingly a dance that they perfected. I would love for you to know all about how my parents fought their own beasts of my bipolar disorder.