“Living with Bipolar Disorder and BPD is like living with several versions of yourself in your head all at once. There's the calm, cool, and collected you. There's the raging angry you. There's even the "I need to be a baby today" version of you. It's hard waking up in the morning and not knowing which version wants to come out to play today. Even with medication, things are sometimes
hard to manage.

Antidepressants caused my brain to fall even further off of the polar scale. They were upping me so much that I was flipping into mania. I was impulsive and I was having an incredibly hard time sitting still and focusing in my classes.

It can be so frustrating when I finally have the energy to positively interact and someone asks me "hey, are you manic?" It makes me feel like my happiness is invalid because of my mental illness. It can be really easy to forget who I am outside of my bipolar disorder. Sometimes I go through really long periods of depression and when the fog lifts, it can feel like I've missed an entire year of my life. Sometimes I go through long periods of hypomania and feel on top of the world. I recently graduated college Summa Cum Laude. I'd love to say that it was all in part to my intelligence, but really I know that I owe part of that honor to my hypomania.I aced that semester with an A and a B.


I have come to a place now where I always tell people that I *have* bipolar disorder-- I am NOT bipolar. I refuse to let it gain control of my life.

I also live with Borderline Personality Disorder.  While my BD mood swings tend to happen slowly over time, with BPD my mood swings can range from day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute. They are incredibly exhausting and painful because with BPD comes intense emotions. We are some of the most empathetic people on the planet. In my case, and in many other cases, my BPD came as a result of years of narcissistic abuse. Many people complain that people who suffer from BPD are narcissistic and attention-seeking. But we are far from it. We simply struggle with maintaining stable moods or control of ourselves. We don't set out to hurt people. In fact, when we do, we ruminate on it for days and weeks. We get urges to self-harm because the pain of our actions can be too much even for us. It's like constantly losing a battle with yourself. Even though you don't want to do any of these things, it can be so incredibly hard not to.

One of the hardest things about having BPD is splitting. If I’m in a happy place with someone, I get attached rather quickly as a result of this. The second they let me down, even for the simplest of things, I immediately split and hate that person. I only think negative things about them and want them out of my life forever. After the episode is over, it's like repairing the damage to your house after a tornado. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can recover a lot. However, sometimes you're not so lucky and you damage that relationship forever.

The stigma around both of these has always made it hard for me to openly discuss what I go through. I tend to retreat and become a hermit when I recognize episodes or moody periods coming on simply to avoid other people and the terrible things that they say. I hope that one day people will become more educated and stop shying away from learning how to be friends with people who suffer from mental illnesses.”