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My psychological well being journey started once I was eleven years outdated. It was 1991, and Kurt Cobain hadn’t stepped as much as the mic to sing “All Apologies” but. He hadn’t smashed one guitar out of rage in public. Hadn’t but dyed his hair purple in a match of mania for all to see.
At eleven years outdated I used to be purported to be all bubblegum and board video games. Riding my bike and laughing with buddies.
Instead, I spent most of my days caught in some purgatory—caught between the push of tween hormones and one thing that felt extra sinister broiling beneath the floor.
When a psychiatrist lastly mentioned the phrase “bipolar” to my mom and recommended a dose of lithium, she was terrified. Mental well being was not a buzzword. There was a stigma hooked up to the prognosis and an implication that my mom had achieved one thing improper.
So we moved on.
We would maintain transferring on to new therapists all through my teen years. Making makes an attempt at speak remedy—solely to find that there have been some secrets and techniques that my mom did not need to be disclosed. Trying completely different cocktails of medicines. Maybe Zoloft. Maybe Ritalin. Maybe the brand new surprise drug on the time, Prozac.
None of those labored. Everything simply made my world extra foggy and complicated.
By the time I hit my “rebellious” teenage years, I used to be crawling out of my pores and skin. I couldn’t escape myself, so I began self-medicating. Weed and booze have been my medicine of selection, and I spent a variety of time experimenting with completely different mixtures to see which one may take me the farthest outdoors of myself. Of course, this simply made my temper swings extra erratic and extreme, and I pushed down my actual feelings till I used to be a shell of myself.
I rock-bottomed in my 20s. I vacillated between sorority president and black-out drunk. During my upswings, I used to be an A pupil, making the dean’s listing and planning meals drives for battered ladies’s shelters. In my downswings, I might binge drink and get up on the ground of a frat home, questioning the place my buddies had gone and what I had achieved to make them depart me.