My psychological well being journey started once I was eleven years outdated.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At eleven years outdated I used to be presupposed to be all bubblegum and board video games. Driving my bike and laughing with associates.
As an alternative, 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. Psychological well being was not a buzzword. There was a stigma hooked up to the prognosis and an implication that my mom had carried out one thing improper.
So we moved on.
We might hold transferring on to new therapists all through my teen years. Making makes an attempt at discuss remedy—solely to find that there have been some secrets and techniques that my mom did not wish to be disclosed. Making an attempt totally different cocktails of medicines. Possibly Zoloft. Possibly Ritalin. Possibly the brand new surprise drug on the time, Prozac.
None of those labored. All the pieces simply made my world extra foggy and complicated.
By the point 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 had been my medication of alternative, and I spent lots of time experimenting with totally different mixtures to see which one might take me the farthest outdoors of myself. In fact, 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. Throughout my upswings, I used to be an A scholar, making the dean’s checklist and planning meals drives for battered ladies’s shelters. In my downswings, I’d binge drink and get up on the ground of a frat home, questioning the place my associates had gone and what I had carried out to make them depart me.
