I look inwards and realize what Bipolar means to me, instead of focusing on what others claim it should mean. I believe this is the only way to truly accept my illness and myself.

A life filled, not with events but with tears of sadness and fantastic ecstasy. A kettle of emotions in which I suffer, overcome and survive.

In order to be alive, we must live with emotion; because without emotion we're only existing.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.

And that’s why Mom is always so afraid. If we don’t know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won’t flip out again?

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.