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

Here’s to adrenaline. Here’s to dramatic abandon of protocol. Here’s to treasured pain and purple rain. Here’s to chasing our souls, burning across to sky. Here’s to drinking the ash as it falls, and not...

I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.

In the terms of ‘Mental Illness’ Isn’t stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it’s poison. There has...

Because of my bipolar condition I will have to take anti psychotics until I die but hopefully a handful of them won’t be the last thing I taste

Oh! This’ll impress you – I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says...

Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb – one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly...

Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don’t know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken.

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known...

Crazy isn’t a condition it’s a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family’s well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment’s the easy part. Without honesty, without...

I like my writing career and it’s progression, I’d rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that...

I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste – it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column...

He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back,...

Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace...

When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what’s real

Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating...

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because...

In the beginning I revelled in being so rebellious and bad. I had recently discovered the new age book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, which incorporated the power of visualization and affirmations....

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...

Somewhere between love and hate lies confusion, misunderstanding and desperate hope.

There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part...

When it comes to most true bipolars, consider this thought: Genius by birth, bipolar by design.

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell....

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between…I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like...