Jessie
Faith and an angry teenager

What is an angry teenager to do?  Express it.  Live in it.  Feel the shame and grow up with it.  That's how my life was prior to my diagnosis.  I took my rage out on my mother.  She thought I was just an angry teenager facing what normal teens faced.  I had lost my father at an early age and I wasn’t adjusting well at school.  I went through many years this way.  There were so many things in my life that did not make sense.  Confusion... sadness... pain... frustration… thinking I was sick.  Thoughts of suicide followed by thoughts of euphoria.  What was happening in my mind?

I embraced a Christian faith in my early 20's and married a man who would become a minister of that faith.  One day I said I was thinking about going to counseling to find out what was making me feel so crazy.  This was met with, "How will that make us look?" referring to our strength and faith in God. 

Despite that, I sought the help.  I knew that it was only a matter of time before I followed through with the plans of suicide that were on my mind. I couldn't live with myself anymore.  Laughing one minute.  Crying the next.  Unfaithful acts in my marriage due to untreated manic hypersexuality.  I know that I would have gotten divorced if I hadn’t gotten help.  Finally, I was put on medications.  It took awhile to get them stabilized.  I know that the same God I had come to believe in helped that process to happen. 

My husband died a year or so after my initial diagnosis and things went to hell quickly.  I learned the extremes of this illness.  I quit my medications and began to go through the grieving process with only the help of some friends.  I was delusional, hallucinating and very dangerous to myself.  This led to my first hospitalization.  I had been without sleep for several days and I finally had to crash.  I didn't show up at work.  A co-worker came knocking at my door, saw me, consulted my doctor and took me to the hospital. 

It took some time, but I leveled out again and was sent back out on my own.  I wasn’t cured - in fact, there were more hospitalizations after that.  I sometimes think I am OK and that I can go off my medications.  Sometimes I just want to feel the extreme euphoria of mania again.  I want to feel invincible.  I want to create what I can't when I am level.  But in reality, all that happens when I stop taking them is havoc, and it is hell to pay when I crash.  I know that full well now.

I will never pretend to know all about this illness, but I know what it means to my life.  My hope and prayer for others is that they will know there is hope.  I have held the same job for three years now - a milestone for me - and I am grateful for that.  Medications, therapy, friends and my faith have kept me well in this time of recovery.  May God keep you as well.