My Big Decision Making a big change in life is always intimidating. Meaning, stuff can go wrong and by the time it does it may be too late to change your mind. My big decision was made nearly four years ago now, and it was a big decision, but one I never regretted! After years [...]
My name is Stefanie, 32 from Oregon. I live with Bipolar, Depression and Acute Stress Reaction Disorder. I have struggled with Bipolar since I was in the 6th grade. It has been a roller coaster ride of trials of medications for me over the years. I got to the point I gave up because nothing [...]
What my mental health failure did and is doing for my future success, Failure is what teaches us valuable lessons. Growing up, my parents encouraged me to go for things I wanted, good or bad and either gain the success or learn from the failure. But one event in my life that I considered an [...]
It was rare that my sister, Sandi, and I visited my father at the same time, but that summer things had fallen into place, and we spent the last weeks of July crammed into a trailer five miles outside Belton. The trailer was half a century old, eight feet wide and forty feet long, but [...]
Bipolar Tide My mind moves like the ocean, coming and going with the moon. The tide rolls in—mania, I am at the top of the world. There’s nothing I can do, mental waves crashing down. Vision distorted by emotion, can’t trust my brain anyhow. The tide rolls out-depression, I am the lowest of the lows. [...]
When I found my father’s journals, I knew I had to stop running away from mental illness. They were at the bottom of a box containing his unpublished plays and stories that revealed his struggles during the time I was growing up. By the time I read them I was a successful psychotherapist with a [...]
I was standing there, head lowered down as low as it could possibly go. The bailiff had just told me to rise as some honorable judge made his way through the courtroom and took a seat on his iron throne. Not a single fuck was given. That day as the antipsychotic medication I’d been forcibly [...]
As a male living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Bipolar Disorder, it often takes us years to figure out what is wrong with us, and sometimes we create a lot of destruction in the wake of even finding out that something is wrong. It’s hard to remember exactly when my story began, but I can [...]
*Trigger warning -self harm If you had told me I would be where I am today fifteen, ten, or five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I was not always the light-hearted, employed, and (for the most part) stable writer that sits before you behind her mac screen. Quite the opposite - not so [...]
Looking back on my behavior over the past forty years, I can pinpoint certain events that I realize now, were not of normal behavior. Being ultra-sensitive to television shows (crying over an American Express commercial), finding myself completely destroyed and depressed when it came to rejection, feelings of complete desperation of trying to hold onto [...]
