I did something similar in 8th grade---wrote new lyrics for an old song standard at that time called "I Gotta Be Me (Unfortunately)". Tells you a bit about my life growing up with a social-climbing mother and clueless father. My English teacher actually told me she was worried about me (I'd turned the poem in for a class assignment) but in those days nobody wanted to see a kid 'labeled', so it never went any further than that.

Sometimes I wish my folks were still alive so I could ask them about the time they took me to a child psychiatrist because I had night terrors. He thought there was something wrong with me because I drew my balloon strings straight, rather then wavy like most kids did. My parents never took me back.

I also remember hearing my mother talking to my father about 'manic depression' sometime after this, although I don't know if it was in reference to me or someone in one of her Photoplay magazines. Later on I suffered a long-lasting depression after my grandmother died, and now I realize that what they were doing when they gave me different kinds of pills was attempting to treat it, rather than some mystery illness like they told me.

So the clues were there all along, only in those days no one was labeled manic-depressive at 13. I was pretty decent at hiding it, even from myself, so when I finally did receive the label 40 years later it was a shock to my nervous system. Now I know I've had bipolar for most, if not all my life, and it explains so much about the difficulties I had in trying to be "normal" while growing up, and indeed throughout my adult years.