For the vast majority of my life, we thought I was just depressed. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely was. The first time I ever remember being depressed was when I was 3 years old. When I would get in my depressive funks I just couldn’t get out of them. In fact, when I was about 12-15 I was severely depressed for pretty much that entire time.

But there was something else that was going on that was hard to explain. I had a hard time regulating my emotions. I would react to things with such passion – whether negatively or positively – that it shocked people. We thought that it was because I feel very deeply and that, socially, I was two years behind my peers. Over the next 15 years or so that’s how I explained myself to others. Until this summer, after I discharged from the mental health hospital.

The picture above is me while visiting one of my best friends in Oregon in early June. For the first time during the year, I started feeling a little more normal. I loved being with her because we hadn’t seen each other in person for about 5 years, I was happy to get away from the mess that was my life, and for the first time in months I was resting.

Even though I’m smiling and I was relatively happy that day, I was still coming down from my mixed state. The means I was manic and depressed at the same time. I’d had a plan to find a razor and cut my wrists while my friend wasn’t around in the trailer we slept in. On our drive that day she put on the soundtrack to Dear Evan Hanson and I bawled my eyes out because I felt so alone, broken, hopeless, and I just wanted to feel okay. But I didn’t know if I would.

About 5 days after the above picture was taken I checked myself into the mental health hospital. While there the psychiatrist put me on a second medication for mood stabilization. That started helping and I thought I was done.

Nope. After you’re discharged from the hospital you need a follow up appointment with a psychiatrist. Since the one my counselor recommended to me didn’t have any openings until the next month, I saw someone else for the initial follow up. In July I saw my current psychiatrist. After our 40 minute less where I told her pretty much my entire mental health history, she looked and me and said, “Do you know what you have? I think you do.”

I hesitated for a moment, then said, “Bipolar?”

“Yes! You have all the symptoms of being bipolar depressive!”

I was floor, relieved, and scared all at the same time. For about a year I’d been wondering if I was bipolar. My ex-boyfriend told me one time that he was tired of the “emotional whiplash” he felt and that he never knew when I was going to get angry. Whenever I asked people if I was bipolar, though, they typically said I didn’t act like most people with bipolar.

My psychiatrist then explained what my symptoms where and everything started making sense. The majority of society categorizes people with bipolar as not sleeping for days on end, having high energy, and swinging back and forth between emotions very quickly. Those are some of the symptoms, but there are so many more symptoms to bipolar. Part of the reason bipolar is so hard to diagnose is because of all those symptoms!

My mania is not staying up all night for several days and working on projects incessantly. My mania is rage. I have always struggled with anger and, to a point, anger feels very comfortable to me. It’s an emotion that’s like a blanket. When I get mad, I get mad. I also get extremely irritable and inpatient. Looking back, I’ve only had a mania episode once, maybe twice in my life. Going full-blown mania isn’t common for me, but because I had a manic episode this summer I qualify as bipolar I.

More often than not my severe episodes are being depressed. That’s the blackness in my brain, the exhaustion, difficulty getting out of bed, having no motivation to do anything, lack of joy in my hobbies, feeling numb inside or crying a lot, and isolating. I tend to not eat very much and when I do, it’s usually take out because I’m too exhausted to grocery shop and cook.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve been able to catch the hypomania. Hypomania is where you’re a tiny bit manic, but not full-blown manic. So things are elevated just a little bit but not enough to affect your day-to-day living too much. For me, my hypomania is typically focusing intently on one project and obsessing over it and wanting to clean/organize/meal prep all the things. My mind tends to race a lot more than normal and I start thinking about all the things I want to do (like starting my podcast and being consistent with this blog). It typically lasts a week or so and then I go back to “normal” energy levels. My hypomanic episodes are the only time when I don’t want to sleep, but I’m good at catching myself and making myself go to bed. I typically go to bed later, but I’m always able to fall asleep.

It’s a lot. Having bipolar is intense. That’s the one word I would use to describe it: intense. The emotions, the exhaustion that comes from swinging from one side of the emotional spectrum to the other (which does not happen every day), the difficulty regulating emotions, remembering to take all my medication…. Currently I’m on 3 medications and a vitamin D supplement. In fact, I have an AM/PM pill box to help keep everything organized.

One of the things that scared me the most when I got my bipolar diagnoses was telling family and friends. I was afraid that once I told people they would stop talking to me because of how difficult I am. I don’t mean to be, but bipolar is a difficult mental illness – not only on the person who has it but for their loved ones as well. To my surprise, though, my friends just said, “Oh, okay. That’s good to know. How do you feel?” or something along those lines. Some agreed with me that it did explain some of my behavior that was a little confusing. No one has treated me differently. In fact, a lot of people have said, “How can I help you and support you?”

My family has been great. I don’t spam with with as much bipolar information anymore, but they’ve been really receptive to the information I have shared and as I’ve explained how I see those symptoms in me. I think it’s safe to say that they, too, were relived to have a solid answer to my behavior.

When I got my diagnosis, there was a part of me that felt like I had been living a lie for my whole life. I thought I was just depressed, when actually there had been a second component I didn’t know about. Over the months I’ve had to remind myself I wasn’t a liar – I just didn’t know. I wasn’t at a place yet where my bipolar could be diagnosed. On average it takes 5-10 years for someone to be diagnosed with bipolar. With moving around so much as a kid and being so transitory in my early and mid twenties, I didn’t have a consistent opportunity to focus on my mental health as much as I should have. Now that I’m finally stable in one place, it’s easier for me to listen to my brain.

At first I felt like I completely different person. When I was told I was bipolar depressive, I felt like I didn’t know myself anymore. Thankfully that’s gone away now. I’m still the same Kim I was before. The only difference is that I’m a little more comfortable in my own skin.

#Together4MH