Bipolar Mum Journey

Where does it come from? Why can we feel invincible one moment and like absolute shit the next? I’ve felt like this for as long as I can remember. One day I’d be the class clown, making everyone laugh. The next, I wouldn’t even show up to school. It’s always been one extreme or the other. The middle ground, the stable parts don’t feel like stability at all. They’re just numb phases. No happiness, no drive. Just emptiness.

I don’t open up so people show me support (although I’m grateful of course). But it matters that people understand that even the strong ones have days when everything falls apart.

Who planted these doubts so deep in us? Whose voices echo in the back of our minds?

For me, it’s been many. Toxic family members who only approved of me when I catered to them. A mother who couldn’t accept my taste in music, clothes, or anything that didn’t fit her idea of a life worth living. Constant judgment because I didn’t mirror her.

Then there are the men. The ones who hurt me again and again. Who treated me like I was nothing but a piece of meat. Who took what wasn’t theirs to take. Who violated me in unimaginable ways.

That’s always been the biggest weight: men telling me to shrink. Be quieter. Be less. Don’t wear that. Don’t laugh like that. Don’t talk to her. Don’t talk to him. Rules and punishments, always. Until the only freedom I had was keeping tiny secrets and then dragging around the shame that came with them.

The constant pressure. I’ve always been a free spirit. Chill, carefree, not obsessed with image. Yet even now, strangers online come for my looks, like that’s all I am. That’s why I push back, posting without makeup, being loud on purpose, even eating in ways that some would call unflattering, just to piss off the haters.

Most days, it’s water off a duck’s back. But on the dark days, the self-loathing, bipolar dip days every nasty comment, every bit of judgment from childhood to now, plays in my mind like a fucking autocue.

Who does that to someone? Why? What the hell did I do to deserve it?

I don’t know. Maybe I never will.