I was a young lady who muddled her way through this world. Lost in bizarre depression and mood disorder, with a heavy load on my shoulders, I was uncertain about the direction of my future. I had thoughts of suicide from a very young age and much of my time was spent either contemplating suicide or experimenting with it.

Plummeting into darkness on occasion made me a burden. When insomnia attacks, I get frustrated and the anxiety builds up — that deep gut feeling where everything is my fault. It’s 3 A.M. and I think about all the times people have promised me that things will get better. But they don’t.

I’m in the office with the psychiatrist and he diagnoses me with the “bad medicine.” He tells me it works for manic-depressive symptoms in children. It was the dark purple kind. In other words — bipolar. But my mood disorder is not that heavily diagnosed yet.

I turn to my laptop in my room. I take a sip of coffee or tea and close my eyes. I look at the blue capsules that hold my pills. I can’t forget to take my medicine or dangerous things happen. Terrible things. It’s never simple to live with but it keeps me stable most of the time.

I keep a list of the times I’ve changed myself. It’s located in the back of my closet, concealed beneath old sweatshirts that I don’t wear anymore. The pushpin binds itself to the wall from the cracking plaster; it reveals the times I’ve become a different person.

I track the months and color-code for whenever my mood changes, I switch crowds, or flip my attitude around. Sometimes, I think it’s getting better since I don’t let it interfere with my life or change who I really am.

It’s strange. I delved into emptiness because I focused on the absence of living. If I were really better off alone, I would not feel the need to connect with others. I would isolate myself and never need anyone. I had my illness to overcome.

With neglected makeup and last night’s eyeliner smeared over my face, it looks as if they’re tire marks. The sky is obnoxiously blue. If it rains it would match my mood.

It’s different with friendships. If I can’t fix problems between my parents, or my inner voice, at least I can talk to Linda. I grab the phone off the bedside table and talk to my middle-school best friend before she moved to California.

She listens while I turn on my crying-and-talking fast mixture. At the end of our conversation, she sings me a song (vanilla twilight), which makes everything okay again.

In a mid-second of a blink, I found out things get much worse later in life. If you are blessed enough that God doesn’t give you a crippling illness and anxiety to count the days until your life ends, consider yourself lucky.

I remember my psychiatrist telling me to be myself. That’s the only way.

It was a long struggle back to reality. After, I decided to keep a journal. I began getting my poems published by various magazines and journals. I also worked for The Student Review. Things started to change again.

Being diagnosed at an early age has helped my recovery since then. There was a time where all my social interactions were unethical because I couldn’t find stability. It’s like a virus, it takes all of my strength to fight it.

And the memories. My inspiration has always reached out to show me a different path. I believe there is faith in even the littlest parts of life.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 27 Feb 2013
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.