Hi, my name is Cassandra and I am 30 years old.  I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type two nearly exactly a decade ago. 

That is not precisely true, as I was initially only diagnosed with major depressive disorder.  The antidepressants sent me rapid cycling and a few months later I was on lithium.

I know a lot of people with various mood control issues tend to be misdiagnosed with bipolar.  I know a lot of people with mental health conditions in general have very bad experiences with diagnosis and medications, and I certainly had my fair share.

The story I want to tell is not about the treatments, it’s not about the hospital stays or the relationships I destroyed and jobs I lost.  Those things certainly happened, but I bore them with relative grace and varying levels of apathy.  No, the worst part of having bipolar was the loss of my identity.  I know that my reaction is not unusual.

Before my symptoms incapacitated me in college, I was very high performing.  Every classroom I walked into, within a lesson or two people would look to me for the answer.  The gifted and talented program put a label and a teacher on the case, to address my strangeness and exceptionality. 

I would try to be quiet and unassuming, but it was like I walked with a spotlight shining on me.  I came to expect the attention in high school, learning to be patient and spending half of my time helping my classmates. 

I decided to go to college for physics, because it was the most complicated thing taught at my high school.  I loved it, the confusion, the imagination involved to try to fit the math to a system, the eventual realization.  I chose it because I felt I had a duty to my intelligence to do something difficult with it, something that came easily to only few. 

I also drew and had quite the artistic skill and would spend hours sketching, but I didn’t see it as anything very useful.  It wasn’t my duty to make art, I felt like plenty of people could make pretty pictures.  Pretty pictures don’t change the course of history.  You can see, I was putting quite the load of responsibility on my shoulders.

I don’t think I am alone in this, I certainly wasn’t the only one driving themselves to exhaustion on math problems and research papers at my high school or college.  Classrooms are comparison factories, where children show up and get ranked like steaks next to one another.  Anyone in the top 10%, or who could with practice get there, found themselves with a load of potential upon their young shoulders.  That is, if they listened to the adults in their lives. I certainly did.

When I found my mind failing on me, the symptoms of a lifelong condition starting, I felt as though the whole foundation of my identity had been blown away in the storm. I was left with nothing except tattered fragments of self. 

I hated what I saw, I hated who I was. At first I tried going back to school, it was all I knew, and I was a year away from graduation.  But my internal struggles were still swirling so loudly I couldn’t hear the professor.

I had always been sensitive, a procrastinator, afraid of failure, a perfectionist.  I had always bore them temperamentally, with fits of brilliance.  Now all those negative thoughts raced, louder, gaining momentum, and I had none of the ways I used to cope to fall back on. 

I attributed them to my disorder, I thought they were symptoms of my down swings, the mixed states, the things I was told the meds would stop.  I suppose, looking back, a good therapist might have been able to help, but I don’t know that anything would have gotten me to let go of those ideas.

In desperation, I went to work as a cashier for minimum wage.  I walked in, shell shocked, humbled, panicked.  I had no idea what else to do, I needed to feed myself, I needed to live.  I couldn’t believe they hired me, I felt so worthless. 

It would take me another 8 years to realize the value in the education I had received.  The hole of failure I fell into as a college dropout hid everything from me.  I worked at a fast food restaurant.  I worked as a server, at a call center, at a state park. 

I would walk through these places softly, never fitting in, scaring people.  The symptoms of the disorder caused me to have trouble keeping jobs, mostly because I would hit an up swing and quit and in a fit of frantic energy find something new.  My resume for those 8 years would have been 5 pages long had I included everything. 

The things I did reinforced my feelings of having failed, and my feelings caused my behavior.  I have seen this happen to so many people.  The stories we tell ourselves are self fulfilling prophecies.

It may not surprise you that my intelligence did not help me be a fantastic cashier.  It did not make me a stellar dispatcher, or server, or receptionist.  I felt sharply my own limitations, watching other people get more tips and enjoy themselves and make friends and get promoted. 

Another thing I realized in these jobs was that I was working alongside college graduates.  At nearly every job, people with degrees were serving tables and taking calls and just… doing the same thing as me: the failure.  I knew why I was there, and I wondered what was wrong with them.

But now I know that the same thing was wrong with both of us.  We had told ourselves the wrong story about ourselves.  Every day I told myself I couldn’t do more, I couldn’t expect more out of myself because I might let myself down.  I couldn’t sell myself in an interview, because I might let the company down. 

I simply didn’t know what was valuable, I had no idea what I could do.  I didn’t know what I was.  I told myself I was an irresponsible, unreliable bipolar flake and the only reason I kept scraping by was because about half the time life was nearly livable.  And every down swing, those old mental pathways through the dark forest of my brain told me the same things that sent me to the hospital at 20 years old.

Then the pandemic hit.  I lost my job, my husband lost his job, but we got unemployment and had savings so we just… quarantined.  For the first 9 months I sat there, shell shocked, terrified, feeling like everything stable in my life was gone. 

See, my whole adulthood I was the unstable one, but the clock ticked over the same, somewhere in Tokyo people were eating ramen at midnight and somewhere in silicon valley someone was dissolving a startup and life happened to other people.  This time the whole world was different and I was the one that was the same.

 After about 9 months of that I got up one day and decided if I was the only one I could rely on, that would have to be enough.  I started exercising and listening to books about people and how to live.  Books like Man’s Search for Meaning, the famous treatise by the Jewish psychiatrist who survived the holocaust. 

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”

I started to change the story I told about myself.  I started to tell myself that I was inconsistent, but amazing.  That when my mood was up, I would do good things and that when I was down, I would take care of myself for when the sun rose again.  I told myself for the first time that I was not perfect, but I was good enough. 

I now understand that I had been protecting my weaknesses.  I fought to keep them, and that made them bigger, and worse.  When I finally accepted my limitations and loved myself anyway, it freed me to use my abilities.

I took an online course to study data analysis, because that was applied math and involved elements of design as well.  I thought I would be good at it, and I actually thought I deserved to do something I was good at.  So I finished the course and started applying for jobs.

Someone hired me.  It was a weird place, but I was grateful for the opportunity.  Now I have a salaried position for the first time in my life.  I finally accepted that those years at school were not a failure.  They were three years at a good school, working in a physics lab, and I learned a lot.  I flipped the script, and started telling myself that I was valuable again.

Now that I have a tech job, I don’t sit in a room with 30 other people doing the same thing.  Now it’s just me, with a task, doing it as well as I can.  I will never go back to school, because I’ve learned how to teach myself things and now that I know how to learn, I don’t need a classroom. 

This self acceptance, telling myself that I’m enough already, and whatever I will do, I will be strong enough to succeed, means that I do well in interviews.  It means that people like me better, and I make friends easier.  It means that I have the freedom to pursue my own goals and try things.  I can set myself up for failure so many times, but sometimes I fly, and that’s the best feeling in the world.

People say you just need confidence.  But I think it really takes digging yourself through the worst anguish to try something different.  I don’t know why.  People told me I was ridiculous, I was a lovely person, I was enough for lots of things.  But the voices in my head knew me so well… They knew everything I thought and everything I felt.  There was no arguing that they couldn’t counter.  I think it just came down to challenging them, and trying anyway.

I still have bipolar disorder.  It still colors my life, and it still makes me sleep through the day sometimes.  I still take medications and meet with doctors.  But now I realize it’s a disease of energy levels, of mood tone, not of self hate and destruction.  I manufactured that hatred.

Sometimes I fall into it still. Sometimes I walk into those dark woods in my mind, but now I know why.  I remember the things I created yesterday.  I remember how much I’ve survived and the paths I’ve walked and now I tell myself I am the thing to fear.  I am formidable and striking and I walk through the darkness like a witch, cloaked in the knowledge of my own power.

I hear the pain and fear in the voices of zoomers, in their early 20’s and late teens.  I remember being told that mental health tends to get better over the course of a person’s life.  I remember laying in bed sobbing, wondering how my chest could hurt so bad from just sadness, and how anything could ever heal that.  I’ve seen people struggle to move under the weight of their insecurities and die in poverty.  I know better than most the dangers of climate change, and how the future is unstable.  I suppose the present still feels very unstable with social media causing everyone to go crazy.  I understand, the fear is so valid.  It makes sense.  But it’s toxic, don’t let it paralyze you.  Don’t let it make you doubt yourself.  You’re all you have. 

All I know is what I’ve been through. I know some of this sounds trite.  But I want to bring it back to potential.  Potential is a load of shit.  What matters is what you do.  My self doubt and my fear was keeping me from doing the things that I would have been good at, that made me happy. 

There is nothing about my mental health conditions that means I have to suffer.  My bipolar did not make me a failure.  Who decides what winning is anyway?  It’s just life – everyone is doing the best they can.  Hustle culture and competitive capitalistic society can shove it too for a second, because there are a lot more important metrics for success besides dollars. 

When I really knew I had turned the corner was when I took 2 days off work sleeping and cried, and then I thought “Monday I’ll be feeling better, I’ll take care of that report by Wednesday, and everything will be fine.  I took care of myself and did the best I could.”  I gave myself a little gold star, and forgave myself my imperfections. 

Sure my potential was to be a great scientist and professor, but now I’m analyzing some data and making reports, so by logical deduction, my potential was actually just to be an analyst.  The scientist stuff never panned out, so what’s the point of meditating on it? The university system has its flaws anyway, whose to say that would have been more meaningful or a better life, or even mattered.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer the data analyst position to being a receptionist.  It’s more interesting, and I don’t have to use my customer service voice.  But it’s a very new thing, and the only reason I ever got there is because I let go of feeling like a failure.

If any of this resonates with you, if you’ve ever felt like people expected more out of you than you were able to achieve, leave a comment.  If you’ve ever struggled with mental health, or know someone who’s struggling, keep in mind that there are demons upon demons that guide people’s actions.  They are not all chemical.