I had no idea. I figured I was just severely depressed, since I'd had recurrent depression since I was 14, and that I was suffering from burnout due to my schedule the spring before when I'd done an opera, my senior recital, and performed as a guest artist in someone else's recital on top of 22 hours of semester coursework. And then realized I'd gotten winter and summer "burnout" every single year since I started college.

I didn't know it was a cyclical pattern until I went looking... and then I started seeing other things I'd done that were, well, kind of out of character for me, like believing I had the power to detect and hunt werewolves. I can literally look at my college degree audit and tell when I was having a mood episode, like... how did I miss all of this?

But yeah. Honestly I didn't care about the label. I just wanted to feel better. Mood stabilizers have helped immensely, and even though I have moments where I want to be like "the heck with this, I'm fine!" and throw them away, I try to remind myself what it was like before.