Christine

My name is Christine. I’m 37 years old. I’m a single mom to three, and I’m living with bipolar.

Growing up, my moods would go from extreme highs to extreme lows. When my depression hits, it can be bad. I won’t want to get out of bed. When the mania hits, I want to just go, go, go, or just scream, scream, scream. I can just feel the anger rise up in my body. Back in the day before anybody knew anything about it, it just got brushed off as being a miserable person. Nothing was happy. Nothing was cheerful. It was just like I existed.

As a teenager, you start thinking about your future. And when you feel like that, you don’t think that you have a future. I was 15 years old at the time of the suicide attempt. I was scared at that moment to actually follow through with it. I believe it was a cry for help, that I didn’t really want to die. They put me on my first of many medications. No medication ever seemed to work for a long period of time.

When I found out I was pregnant, I did the stupidest thing and stopped taking any and all medications that I was on. It took most of my energy to get out of bed, to be a mother. Wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t take him outside to play. I didn’t want to be around anybody. I didn’t want to see the sunlight.

When I went to the doctor, they were asking me symptoms, my mood swings, the highs, the lows, how I was feeling, and that’s when they determined that it wasn’t just depression I was suffering from, but that I was also bipolar.

It was actually a relief when I received my diagnosis because I knew then that I wasn’t just a miserable person. There was actually a label, there was actually a name for it. And now that I had this name for it, I could move forward. The stigma with it is you’re just crazy, and that’s not the truth. The doctors can actually help you manage. I did my research on it. I learned about medications, therapy treatments, and I made an appointment with a specialist to try to stable myself out.

I love my physician. She is the best person ever. She will sit there and listen to anything I have to say, be there for me, tell me to call her any time I need her. You need to make sure that you have a great relationship with whichever doctor that you’re seeing. Me and the twins’ father, my bipolar put a big strain on our relationship. He could do something as simple as not take the garbage out, and I was kicking him out of the house.

The reason I chose to share my story is I know when I was first diagnosed with being bipolar, there was a big stigma around it. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And I’m just hoping that if there is one person out there that is feeling the same way that I felt, that they can see that there is hope, there is a chance to feel better, and you don’t have to give up on yourself. My hope for the future is that the more I continue, the more I’ll be able to educate others that are going through this same journey.

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