I grieve for the young person I was who had so much promise - class valedictorian, summa cum laude B.S. in microbiology at Texas A&M University (all A's, one B, better grades than most of the pre-med students in my class), M.S. in Cell & Molecular Biology, journal articles, my first author publication quite widely cited. As it was, 2 years of grad school was all the work I managed. I tried teaching, research, another research job, and the longest I lasted at any of those was 1 month. And of course, 2 years is nowhere near long enough to qualify for SSDI.


Bipolar was always lurking in the form of depression in high school, anorexia in college, but it got bad around age 25, 26 and never stopped.


I mourn too for what could have been if the first stupid psychiatrist I saw wasn't all obsessed with "social anxiety disorder" (all the rage in the late 1990s) and throwing Paxil at me left & right and instead saw a 20 year old weighing less than 95 lb. who was very depressed (but also had the signs of bipolar mixed in with that) and given me a proper diagnosis. Instead I had to climb out of a terrible eating disorder pretty much on my own. I wish I'd appreciated my beauty then instead of thinking I was so fat because now I look at my wedding photos (weight restored) and realize I was beautiful. I have a picture of me with my husband and daughter when she was around 3 years old and we were on vacation, remembering I felt so fat the whole vacation because I'd gained muscle from weight training and now think, "If I'd been taller, I could have been a fitness model."


I wish once I had been given the right diagnosis, they'd tried me on lithium, because it is the first thing that's ever quieted all the voices in my head. Well, not voices, my own thoughts, but they feel like voices.


I have fibromyalgia too, and I hate when it flares up. Right now, I'm having hip/leg pain unrelated to fibro and completely hating that. I can't even run across the house to answer a phone or the door. Some nights the pain wakes me up. But of course, I was lucky enough to get a perforated ulcer, so no more NSAIDs for me. Tylenol might as well be candy.


Looking back sucks so much. I do hold out hope for the future even if it's not the future I had planned when I was 18 years old. It's life though, and it's easy to forget the things we have and should be thankful for. I was on the phone yesterday with my 86 year old grandmother (still lives on her own) about her past, and she told me she'd always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but she had to stop going to school after 8th grade as the bus ride was too long and made her sick, and her father had to remove some part from the car to keep it from freezing in the winter, so he couldn't take her to school. She went to school not knowing English (had to learn on her own), having no electricity until she was 10 years old, owning only one book as a child, a gift from a teacher ("Black Beauty"). Her parents were sharecroppers, and they were extremely poor. She had 5 kids; 2 of them drowned when one was 17, one 19. My grandfather was a raging alcoholic (and bipolar, I suspect) and yet she just kept going on. She's the strongest person I know.


And I think, man, if I'd had my grandmother's life, I'd never have made it. I am grateful for what I have, even if it comes with bipolar and panic disorder and an eating disorder and fibromyalgia and GI issues.