Living With Bipolar I

Trigger Warning: Suicidal Thoughts & Mental Illness

I have so much to write about and so much to say. I always have so much to say about everything— except once I'm done crashing out and being angry, and it's time to apologize. Calmly explaining why I was upset and nicely reiterating the argument is near impossible. The only words out of my mouth are I'm sorry. I have no explanation for my reactive response or why I become so explosive.

Once I learned I had bipolar I, everything made sense.

Being bipolar has affected my day to day life since my symptoms became apparent. I always blamed it on mood swings due to puberty, PMS, or the fact that I'm just depressed. My whole life, I had always known there was something wrong with me. Well, maybe a lot is wrong with me.

I began having disturbing thoughts at a very young age. I started self-harming at 11 years old. I often thought about death and suicide, but it had subsided by the time I hit puberty. I was still depressed, but the depression was just being overly consumed by boys and hatred for my body.

At 15, I started treatment for depression and anxiety. It's clinically shown that the medication I was on negatively affects bipolar patients. My doctor was a quack, seriously misdiagnosing me (He wasn’t, I’m just bitter that its hard to catch bipolar disorder in girls until they’ve approached womanhood), and the medication gave me a bad reaction, only inducing my mania. I felt insane. I WAS insane. I felt paranoid, disturbed, and like a monster. When I turned 18, I got concerningly worse. I wasn’t hurting myself anymore, but I began acting out of character. I was self-absorbed, overly sensitive, and easily irritated. Having a conversation with me was nearly impossible most days. I always blew up, began acting rudely towards the ones I love, and became ignorant. I started to make awful decisions and put myself in dangerous situations. I was acting unsafe, upset, and anxious; I cried every single day for about a year straight. I hated who I was, the decisions I had made, and where I was in life. At 19, I got my official diagnosis of Bipolar I. I finally understood myself. Why I felt so confused and helpless in my own mind. Medication for Bipolar Disorder really helped when I first started. I felt level-headed— brand new. I felt more creative and free, no longer anxious! Until the medication stopped working. Life began to get worse and worse. I went through some extremely sensitive stuff towards the end of 2024 that completely depleated any sanity I had left. Maybe I’ll talk about that here one day, it still affects me to this day. I never recovered fully from it, so you can only imagine how much it ruined me when it was fresh. I was in a depressive pit of hopelessness dragging on day by day. I got better for a while after my 20th birthday, but I never felt like I was normal. There was still something deeply wrong.

In the spring of 2025, I began to have overwhelming anxiety attacks that would last me days. My chest would get tight, I felt like my stomach was a pit, I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I could hardly drive some days because I was so derealized. I would leave work early most days, or have panic attacks in the bathroom. I would go home after work, and sleep until the next day. I had no motivation for anything else. I pushed my friends as far away from me as I could until they were gone. I had no connection with my family because I pushed them away too. All I had was my boyfriend at the time. The only dopamine I could find was when I was with him. I spent every single second of his availability with him. I felt like I was suffocating the only person there for me. I felt too broken to be without him and I was afraid he thought the same thing. Around this time is when I found out for the first time I was getting cheated on. I just progressively got worse after also getting heartbroken and feeling like he thought of me the same way I thought of myself. Too broken and mentally ill to love.

We had worked things out at the time and it wasn’t so, but to this day, with anyone, I feel too broken and sick to be loved.

Most days, I would have suicidal thoughts. Even on my best days. I remember I went on a beautiful trip with my ex-boyfriend to see my favorite band play at the Hollywood Bowl. I was so amazed at the live music that I loved so much. The visuals of the stage, the sweet sound of Adrianne Lenker’s voice felt like a dream. It was a dream. We had gone to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles earlier that day and had just the best time. We went to Denny’s (our favorite restaurant) and talked for hours until the concert. I felt alive and like my life was complete— but I was so sad. Unbearably sad. Despite the fact that I was somewhere I loved so much, having the time of my life with my favorite person in the world, everything in my head went quiet, and the only thought I had was:

It doesn’t matter, any of it. I’m going to kill myself anyway.

I wasn’t well at all. From then on, I just kept telling myself that nothing mattered. The fight I had with my boyfriend that day didn’t matter, the job I had didn’t matter, how I looked didn’t matter— there wasn’t a single thing I cared about because I had this deep, disgusting, leering feeling that I was just going to end my own life anyway.

I wasn’t concerned about my suicidal ideation because it didn’t feel serious. I never felt like I would actually kill myself; I just thought about it all the time. All the time. I thought about it so much that I actually started getting scared of myself because it started to feel like a legitimate option. When I lost my job, when I didn’t have money to pay my bills, when I checked my credit score, when I remember what they did to me, when I thought about how much I missed him, when I thought about all my regrets and how awfully life had treated me, I felt that none of it mattered because someday somehow I was going to end my life. I would go home from work for my lunch breaks and just cry all the way there, and the whole way back. I cried every second I was alone. On top of it, I was going through a breakup I regretted, and trying to make sense of why my mind wanted me dead. No one I hung out with, nowhere I went, nothing I bought, nothing I ate made it better. I was fighting for my life for months. I changed my appearance every other week, dyeing my hair, changing my makeup trying to feel better or different. I wanted to metaphorically kill the girl that was begging to be dead anyway. I used to go to the lake by my house so I could be alone and cry as loud as I wanted. I’d be on my knees just begging God to kill me so I wouldn’t have to do it myself. I knew I had to change. I never speak about my feelings, and I knew it was really bad when I told my mom about it. I missed so much work at my new job I couldn’t afford to lose. So I went back to my psychiatrist to begin a new medication and to start therapy.

It’s currently been a month and a half since my last suicidal thought. I’m not 100% still, I’m not where I hoped to be by 21, but I made it. My birthday is this Sunday, January 11th, and I’m more than excited to truly begin being in my 20s.

Bipolar has truly changed my life since my diagnosis. I truly didn’t think I’d ever experience enjoying being alive again. I don’t know what changed or when the veil lifted.