15

The beginning of my bipolar journey

I spend a month each summer at my parents’ house in California, where I pass by this photo every day in their living room. It was taken months after I overdosed. I look at it and think, this is the girl who asked for her doll before the paramedics took her away. This is the girl who screamed in her sleep in the psych ward.

But this is also the girl who went back to school a week later. The girl who edited the literary magazine and school newspaper, auditioned for plays, took AP classes and went to summer school at Oxford. After I was discharged, my Mom said “it’s good this happened during winter vacation so you don’t miss class.”

My white shirt, the cardigan and silver pendant I bought in Oxford, every page of my school planner filled in. I was trying to make myself look like someone who didn’t have bipolar.

I didn’t feel like a child when I was 15, but I was a child with a life sentence. I was a pediatric bipolar patient, a group considered challenging to treat, surrounded by adults who hinged all their hopes on medication and an hour of therapy every two weeks. I didn’t tell any of them, but I didn’t think I would live past 30. I didn’t know how to.

I wish I could tell the girl in the photo “this is trauma. You won’t call it that until you are in your 40s, but it is. One day you’ll be older than you ever imagined you would be and you’ll realize people will keep on loving you even if you aren’t perfect. The trauma will still be there, but you learn to live with it.”

Now that I’m old enough to be her mother, I can see how hard the girl in the photo tried. I’m grateful that she did. But I’m so sad that she felt like she had to.