My Mental Illness Absolutely Affects My Job
What? Did you think it didn’t?
Content warning: mental illness, depression, suicide and suicidal urges.
I have bipolar disorder, and I have been formally diagnosed with it since I was about 14. Prior to that, I had received a misdiagnosis of depression at the age of 12, which is about when my illness manifested. As I am now pushing 40, I have been living, and sometimes struggling, with my bipolar disorder for more than two-thirds of my life now.
Put a different way, if my bipolar disorder was a person, that person would have been able to graduate college with a Master’s degree by now.
That said, as the person living with said bipolar disorder, I have had quite the range of experiences over the course of my life to this point. My teenage years were spent alternating between doing some typical teenage things while also trying a variety of meds, rapidly gaining and losing weight due to said meds, and trying to not either have constant angry outbursts or get suicidally depressed.
Well, I survived, graduated high school, then graduated college with a Bachelor’s degree. I found my calling — being a grant writer — and made it into a career. Along the way, I got married, bought a house, and wound up with four cats along the way.
