part0011

Every year, on January 1, I would decide on a new style of handwriting for the coming year—maybe it was calligraphy-inspired or incorporated some cursive or involved a typewriter-like lowercase “a.” I liked the idea of having something fresh for the new year.

I mentioned this personal tradition one year at camp and a girl said, offhand, “That’s a mark of mental illness, you know. They can tell people have, like, schizophrenia or split personality disorder if their handwriting changes.”

So I had, like, schizophrenia or something. Great.

We didn’t really use “google” as a verb back then, even though the search engine was technically around by the time I was fourteen, but I googled the hell out of what it means to change your handwriting when I got home from camp. Schizophrenia came up a lot, which I was fairly certain I didn’t have, yet the thought I might be crazy kept nagging me for years. But this research brought me to discover the “science” of graphology, which takes psychology and applies it to visual art interpretation. The way you dot your i or the size of the space between your letters might reveal something about you. Even if I didn’t believe I had schizophrenia or everything I learned about graphology, I did come to understand handwriting could indicate certain neuromuscular disorders that affect the ability to steady your hand or send a signal from your brain to your pen.

But to me, that was beside the point. A girl at camp told me I was nuts because I liked restyling my handwriting, and I couldn’t let that thought go. It was like being called crazy because you liked dyeing or cutting your hair into different styles, or because you liked wearing wild outfits. I wasn’t just quirky. I was crazy .

The thing is, I did feel crazy. I felt crazy all the time. I was fourteen, and for at least four years, I had been angry about every little thing and nothing at all. I would get into screaming matches with my older sister and my parents. I was dramatic and had many feelings. I would rant in my online journal and spill my thoughts, naming every person I thought had wronged me, every person I had a crush on, every person I was jealous of. Any little thing could make me cry. My feelings of crazy weren’t only emotional, though. They were physical, too. My stomach always hurt, and I caught every bug that went around. I could never breathe like a normal person. I learned later this was a combination of celiac disease, vocal cord dysfunction, and fibromyalgia; but at the time, experiencing these things without a name for them did not help my moods.

Online, I could be—and was—completely unrestrained in my emotions. Strangers who commented laughed about how melodramatic I was, while friends asked why I was so angry. I didn’t think I was “angry,” which to me meant wearing all black and listening to screamy music. I was just sharing my feelings, as fast and unfiltered as they came. I couldn’t understand why people thought I was different, so angry , when I thought I was acting the same as everyone else my age did—writing confessionals on the internet.

At school, I was belligerent when I didn’t like a subject or a teacher, and I spoke out of turn excitedly if there happened to be a topic I liked on any given day. I was a “good student” in the traditional sense of the term: I earned good grades and was accepted to every college I applied to. School wasn’t a challenge to me, though, and it didn’t take much hard work or engagement to do well. I wasn’t invested in it.

In my free time, I gravitated toward movies and books about people doing drugs and people with mental illness, or, most often, media about people doing drugs to numb their mental illnesses. The foggy, blurred look of the cinematography and voice of the text went perfectly with the way I felt I was making my way through the world—sometimes moving through it like a blob and other times reexperiencing the same thing over and over and over, like déjà vu. Watching and reading those things made me feel edgy, too, and I was desperate to be cool and to have people notice me.

Around this time, I started to get the idea that I might have bipolar disorder, wondering if that might explain how I could have so much energy and enthusiasm, only to be dejected and try to hide away a few weeks later. I didn’t know much about bipolar disorder, except that it was something I had learned about in movies and books, and that it had to do with feeling different from day to day. But as I began looking closer at what bipolar disorder was, the criteria did not fit me. I had to do something really wild, like run away or parachute out of a plane or get hooked on drugs to truly have the disease. Bipolar disorder was something other people had to notice, and nobody said I had anything other than anger issues. I was duly punished when I did something wrong and lost friends when I was cruel to them. That just made me a regular teenager. Nobody in my life told me I needed real help, only that I needed to shape up. Only that I had a persecution complex and needed to get over myself. Only that I should take a quaalude and calm down (said flippantly, the way many people reduce mental illness to nothing more than an annoying habit).

And yet I kept circling back to the thought that I must have something wrong with me because of my handwriting . Was I crazy? Was there something to that habit I couldn’t see? Even later on in high school, when I dropped the tradition and just let my handwriting be what it wanted to be, I was hyperaware anytime a piece of my writing was more or less scribbly than usual, larger or smaller than usual, or otherwise off. What did it say about me? Would my teachers or family notice that the notes I left or the shopping lists I made looked different? Did they think I was crazy?

You know what that is? An obsessive behavior.

You know what mental illness I do have? Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

I was very resistant when a psychiatrist told me, almost as an afterthought, that I had OCD. That disorder was for people who counted ceiling tiles and kissed doorknobs twenty-two times every Tuesday; at least, that’s how I’d always seen it (on TV, in books, in movies, in the media, etc.). I might double-check my alarm clock before bed, but that was it.

My mental illness wasn’t OCD alone, though. Rather, OCD was the disorder that was “comorbid” with bipolar II disorder, the same illness that I suspected I’d had for years. It was confirmed my freshman year of college.

Bipolar II is the one that doesn’t look like the movies. There is no skydiving or regular self-harm, but smaller, and often more frequent, shifts from mania (high energy) to depression and back again. Those periods when I didn’t need to sleep very much, had frantic and chaotic thought and writing patterns, or would forget to eat meals? Mania. Entering mid-February and feeling, without fail, like everything is hopeless and exhausting and worthless for at least two months? Depression. And that thing I did where I would replay some embarrassing or enraging thing that had happened previously over and over for weeks? Sometimes still thinking about it months later? Always worrying that I’m not doing enough of something or concentrating on the wrong thing in life? Like maybe being overly worried about my penmanship? That’s called obsessing over something. Without a doubt, the psychiatrist pegged me: bipolar with OCD.

The diagnosis was a relief. I wouldn’t say it was like coming to a finish line in a marathon, because illness is endless work, but it was like running for a long time and finally coming to a water station. I’m not done yet, but at least someone is giving me a hand and I have time to take a breath.

What’s, well, crazy about the whole thing is that even though I felt awful for years and did enough research to get half of my diagnosis right, I never would have sought a diagnosis on my own. It took a friend hauling me to the counseling center on campus, when she had her own appointment, for me to understand that I didn’t have the blues or melodrama-itis but a diagnosable, treatable illness. I needed that diagnosis—any diagnosis, as long as it explained how I was feeling—and it was vindicating. But it also meant I couldn’t shy away from reality anymore, and that was scary. Once you know you have an illness, any kind of illness, it’s challenging to ignore it. Even if you choose not to do anything about it, you’re now hyperaware of any behavior that you know you shouldn’t be engaging in or of any symptom that shows through. You can, even if you would prefer not to, identify when you are doing something that is a hallmark or symptom of the disease, and you realize you are a textbook case.

A diagnosis is an amazing thing. It’s only the first step in many, because there’s medication and therapy and coping mechanisms to tease out, and that takes a long time. But the peace that comes with having a term for what you experience—a term that’s not just “crazy” or “in your head” or “a complex”—is priceless. I never would have known that I had an anxiety disorder if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. Thinking too much about everything was my norm; I was twenty-five before I realized that the way I think and focus and stare and obsess is not actually the way most other people act. My reality was what I assumed to be the reality of everyone.

Now that I know what I have and what it looks like, I have not only professionals who have my back but also the benefit of past experience to help me understand myself better. I can recognize when my moods are about to change, and I can plan for that. I can warn people I work with that if they interrupt me in the middle of something, even if it’s a mundane task, I will not pay attention to what they’re saying because I will be so caught up with finishing whatever it is I am doing—which is one reason I finish busywork much quicker than most people. I am engrossed with the repetitiveness of it all. I’ve discovered over the years that I should try not to start new television shows when I have work deadlines, because I don’t have the ability to stop watching until I’ve finished all the available episodes. If I know I’m going to have a busy, socially exhausting day when I can use my mania to my advantage, I try to calendar downtime for the following day so that I can recharge and recuperate.

I spent at least ten years of my life feeling off. But in a simple diagnosis, plus a ton of work, trial and error with prescriptions, and introspection, I feel more powerful and in control of myself than I did my entire childhood and adolescence. I only wish someone had told me not that I was “crazy” but that I was sick, and there was a way to get better.