Psyke.org

Michele

My Story

Copyright Michele

My name is Michele. I am fourteen years old and I have bipolar disease. I was first diagnosed with depression when I was about eleven. It wasn’t a bad case, at that time I was just very moody and unpleasant. Depression runs in my family, my grandfather is bipolar along with my mother’s brother. My grandmother has severe anxiety but I am the only one out of my five person family that actually had it. My mother, father and two sisters had escaped from its wrath, I unfortunately didn’t. For the next two years my depression was there but it didn’t escalate.

Once junior high came around my depression started increasing. I would be not only moody but just plain rude and unsettled. My friends who stuck by me and still do were my saviours in 7th grade. I don’t know what I would have done without them.

My parents who had noticed the definite change in myself threw me in therapy and bumped up my medication levels which helped a little but the therapy just made me mad. I hated it. I’m the kind of person where I hate talking about myself but if you give me a piece of paper and a pencil I can convey exactly how I feel in exact detail. So you could imagine how annoyed and upset the therapy would make me. I remember literally just sitting on the couches looking the therapist right in the eyes totally stone faced. I didn’t want to say a word and I would always let them no that not by words but through my eyes. They always seemed to get the picture.

In the middle of 8th grade is when it all went downhill. I just started getting really antisocial. I mean I am a very loud girl and I kept that loudness and happiness but it was different. It was the mask of who I used to be when I wasn’t so depressed. I hated going out and doing things with my family and sometimes even friends and I still do. There’s just something about being alone that is comforting to me. When I was really down I would write. It would range from poetry to just me rambling on. But most of all I would draw. What I would capture with the pen and paper would be nauseating or scary to the average person. But when I did it and looked at it, it was beauty. I would just sit and draw for hours.

And then It started to get so bad that I couldn’t even think straight. My eyes were always droopy and my face was long. My head constantly spinning. And I even lost a little faith. Then there was this one day in school where I just lost it. I couldn’t stand the people around me, I couldn’t stand the noise, I couldn’t stand school, I couldn’t stand anything but most of all I couldn’t stand myself. I was in religion class which was my home room. We had no lockers so we had a coat room thing with cubbies for our books. I just all of the sudden popped and started bursting into tears and no one knew why, I didn’t even know why. I couldn’t stop I ran in the coat room grabbed a pencil and a notebook and just wrote. I was in that coat room for an hour just writing. People would come in and look at me but I would just stare at them until they realised I wanted them out. I filled thirteen pages in that notebook that day. In just that one hour I had written it all down and still I couldn’t stop crying. Luckily the bell rang fifteen minutes after I was done, still in tears I got on my bus curled myself up and fell asleep. When my stop came I got off ran in my house and collapsed on the floor. I just lay there my cheeks and eyes burning and swollen from every tear and each time one fell down my cheek it would just sting all the way down.

I felt so lost and cold. I hated myself for who I was and what I became. I was all alone in my house and I felt so worthless. And at that moment I decided I wanted to take my own life. Suicide had always been on my mind I didn’t want to live. I just wanted to make the pain stop I was so sick of suffering and being the freak. So I grabbed a knife and I held it over my heart.

My heart was racing so fast I remember feeling the beat. My mind was racing and my hands were shaking. I remember feeling the tip of the blade on my skin. I was just about to do it to end it all right there when my best friends face popped up in my head. In that second I dropped the knife and I backed up away from it. My whole body was shaking. I realised I didn’t want to kill myself I just wanted to make the suffering end. And that is when I got another idea.

I picked up a smaller knife and I slit my wrist. I don’t know why but seeing the blood made me feel better. So I did it again and again and again. Before I knew it I didn’t even know how many times I had done it.

I thought I had found something that can help me. But I was lucky, I was one of the few that realised it only brings relief for a minute or two. It will never go away. So now I was left with my depression and my mutilated wrists.

I didn’t tell anyone about my wrists and suicide attempt for about two months. I hid it by wearing long sleeve shirts all the time. Finally it all got out and I was put on a very very high dose of bipolar medication. And my wrists have been clear for about a year now and I will never go back.

In the past year I have used my experiences to help other people. I may only be fourteen but I have been told that I am one of the most mature and respectable people you will ever meet. I don’t do it for me though, I do it because I love helping people. I love knowing that I make a difference and even though that difference is so small in the big picture it is still a huge difference to those whose lives I have effected. I now don’t want to die. There are days I want to be alone but I would never want to die. I live to help others.

Now I look back and my faith is stronger then ever. Without my faith I wouldn’t be here. I have grown through all my hardships and mistakes. In a way I am thankful I have learnt so much from it. I mean I know now in life some things that people die still not knowing the answer too. But probably the most important thing I have realised is that you have to believe in yourself, because well, once you can do that, you can do anything you put your heart into.

 

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