This was the start of my life with Bipolar Disorder… a very hard and sometimes devastating disorder. I didn’t just wake up one morning and start having symptoms… I’d always felt this way but it just started to culminate in my teens. I was always an intense person… a child with imaginary friends that treated me better than any other human could. I felt emotions triple-fold… no emotion simply was… they were deep and intense. I didn’t have many friends and found more comfort around the adults in my life. I had many medical problems… leaving me with no choice but to quit the sports I loved. I was an overweight child due to thyroid problems… therefore I got teased by my peers even into highschool. I sometimes hated going to school because of that. I never told my mother however… she and my father were battling their own problems and I didn’t feel that I should bother her even more than she needed. The night in question happened in the spring of 1990. I had been caught in a bunch of lies and I lost it. If I could have fallen asleep and never woken up… I would have. That was the wake-up call that both my parents and I needed… I finally got the therapy I needed. After extensive personal therapy and a little family therapy (that really didn’t do much) I was finally referred to a psychiatrist. He was the one who labeled me (at that time) manic-depressive. I was put on Lithium and sent on my merry way. It helped a little bit, but I didn’t like the fact that I was mentally ill and found myself getting off the lithium here and there without my mother knowing.
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