Dastardly Diagnoses

if you took an x-ray of my journey to a bipolar 1 diagnosis, you’d see something hideous lurking under the skin.

Something dastardly, so ugly even a mother couldn’t love it.

It started with trauma and loss. When I was 9, i was in a car accident where the pedestrian who was hit went into a coma and died. When I rode home in the back of a cop car, my parents simply brushed that experience aside, which taught me to do the same with my own emotions and experiences.

It wasn’t until freshman year of college that my tendency to stuff down emotions and pretend the trauma wasn’t happening caught up to me. My panic attacks became wildly unmanageable and my depressive episodes began to stretch longer and longer from mere puddles to entire oceans worth of pain.

Then came the diagnoses: Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Major Depressive Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the medications only seemed to make the symptoms worse.

When I attempted suicide in 2018, I blacked out for about a year, and someone finally said it: Bipolar 1.

The periods of long productivity with minimal sleep, the feeling of being on top of the world followed by a crash into darkness and misery, and of course, psychosis and hallucination seasons all finally added up to one thing, a disorder that made sense for my experience.

No longer did my trauma add up to multiple potentials. I could name the dastardly thing, the underlying beast that I had fought for years.

Yet now that the beast had a dastardly name, what was next for me?

It came time for me to make a choice, to continue down a dark and perilous road with a beast by another name or to heal, slowly and sometimes even painfully.

I choose to heal.

For even an x-ray shows a break, then a fracture, then a fully healed bone if we allow it space to heal.

So now I take the medicines and I do the hard work that it takes to heal. I practice mental hygiene every day, and I watch the beast by another name become tamed.

My hope for those who need to do the same is that the journey is less painful than mine because you read my story and learn from it. To heal, you must practice daily, focusing on hygiene in a way that works for you.

I am no expert in your life, but I am pretty learned in my own. So feel free to stick around and join me as I heal. Maybe you can teach me a practice or two along the way too.

Whatever you do, don’t let any diagnosis stop you from becoming a healed version of yourself. For you and I deserve better than to wallow in blinding pain. I mean that. Bipolar or not, I believe that we are all children of the living God, and therefore, we deserve healing and love and light.

Whatever your diagnosis, never forget who you are.

Arishama