Tag: mental illness recovery

I was misdiagnosed as bipolar for 6 years. I’m only now getting my life back.

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I have spent a ridiculously long time trying to get my sh*t together. That’s just the honest truth. A big part of that has to do with the fact that I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, which resulted in a six-year-long goose chase, trying medications that were never actually going to work.

It took a savvy psychiatrist, an incredibly patient therapist, two nightmarish hospitalizations, and a battery of psychotropic medications to finally sort out the problem.

I wasn’t bipolar at all. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, and complex PTSD. And as such, we needed a whole different approach.

I tried antidepressants for the first time. It was like the sun parting through the clouds, with a chorus of angelic voices being heard in the distance (this sounds dramatic, but seriously, it was a huge relief). I started trauma-informed therapy and I learned more about OCD (“pure obsessional” in particular, the kind that I struggle with).

Slowly but surely, something shifted. I started feeling calm. I started feeling… happy? And as I moved away from “survival mode” — really, the only headspace I’d ever known — I was able to ask myself questions I’d never thought to ask.

What makes me feel joy? Who do I want to spend my time with? What goals do I have for myself and my personal growth? What do I enjoy doing, and how do I make more time for it? What kind of future do I want for myself?

These were trains of thought that I’d never explored before. A lot of my previous ruminations focused on keeping myself safe, creating more stability, coping with mental illness, hanging onto my job while deeply depressed, surviving until my next appointment. It was how to get through the day, more or less.

But now? There’s so much more space — in my brain and in my life — to start exploring what makes life worth living.

And that’s just it. That’s what many people don’t understand about mental illness. You can’t hold on for a brighter future you’ve never envisioned and are incapable of imagining. You can’t create happiness out of thin air, when you lack the resources and space to pursue it. When you are trying to survive for another 24 hours, that struggle eclipses everything else.

Imagine living with this for most of your life. How, then, are you supposed to envision — much less understand — something that you’ve never truly experienced or had?

Feeling genuine happiness and safety for the first time feels like waking up from a very bad dream. I rebound from disappoint and sadness quickly. I’m calm in the face of stress and conflict. I’m optimistic and energetic, which is a strange thing to say, because those aren’t words I would’ve ever associated with myself.

And that’s just it: I think some people have the impression that once a mentally ill person seeks out help, it’s only a matter of time before things get better.

But that’s not always true. Even in the best case scenario, for someone like me who was compliant and persistent — and whose care was accessible — it took years before we understood the complexity of what I was dealing with and how to treat it.

I’m left wondering if this is how I was supposed to feel all along, and how many years that misdiagnosis robbed me of. I’m not one to dwell on that sort of thing, but it highlights a really terrible reality for some people when they’re navigating psychiatry — sometimes, one wrong diagnosis on our chart can send us down the wrong path for years.

In my case, a psychiatrist I saw for fifteen minutes when I was 18 years old drastically impacted the next decade of my life. A psychiatrist who, by the way, said I was too young (and my grades in school were too good) to need her help, and accused me of exaggerating my pain just to get medication.

She put “bipolar” in my file, until a new psychiatrist six years later looked at the many medications I was on with little progress and said to me, “Something isn’t right.”

I’m grateful to be truly well and invested in my life for the first time. I’m also incredibly sad for the many folks that don’t receive the care they need and, as a result, spend years barking up the wrong tree and suffering from totally preventable crises.

It took one psychiatric hospitalization to flag for my clinicians that something wasn’t working, and yet another hospitalization months later to safely pull me off of the many (completely wrong) medications that I was on. Meds that turned out to be not only very powerful drugs, but completely unnecessary ones.

I’m now building a life for myself that makes me incredibly happy, while grieving the time that it took to get here.

And that’s… well, how it goes sometimes. My mental health journey has taught me so much about my own resilience, and I cherish this happiness in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise if it came easily to me. Just the same, it’s a sobering reminder of the consequences when someone gets it wrong.

It took eight years total to finally get the proper care for my mental health.

So what have I learned? A few things. For one, I’ve learned to question my clinicians again, and again, and again. At the risk of being annoying, I’ve found that being more active in my care has led to better outcomes. I’ve learned how to advocate for myself and how to fire a clinician, too. (I talk a little more about these things in this blog.)

I’ve also learned what kind of therapy works best for me, and I’m a lot less bashful about letting a therapist know if and when something isn’t helping me (and just as importantly, when something is helping!).

It’s upsetting that we have to work so hard to get the care we deserve. But it can also be empowering, in a way, when we realize that we aren’t entirely helpless.

I wish someone had told me eight years ago that I was allowed to reject any diagnosis, any clinician, and any kind of treatment that didn’t feel right. But now that I know, I’m finally getting what I need.

So if no one has told you this before, I’m happy to be the first: You deserve the best possible care. By any means possible. Seriously.

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I’m Not Settling For ‘Good Enough,’ And Your Psychiatrist Shouldn’t Either

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Crazy Talk is a mental health advice column, getting real about life with a mental illness. While I’m not a medical doctor, I’m living the good life with depression, OCD, and complex trauma, unapologetically owning my “crazy.” We’re talking all things mental health — trauma, happy pills, mood episodes, and whatever else you tweet me about! Check out last week’s column here.

Recently, I wrote a Twitter thread about what it’s been like to finally find the right medications. “Finally getting the right psychiatric medications,” I wrote, “was like realizing I’d been playing my life on ‘expert’ mode with a broken controller.” 

The response? Overwhelming. And one question that popped up a lot in that thread and in my inbox was something to the effect of, “Is ‘good enough’ with my mental health a good place to settle? Or should I not be settling at all?”

To answer this question, we have to dive into my history a little bit.

In 2016, I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and outpatient programs. For years, I was misdiagnosed as having bipolar disorder, which meant I was put on countless medications that weren’t very effective for what I was actually dealing with. Back then, my philosophy had always been, “If I’m not suicidal, I’m fine.”

This resulted in a pretty well-established pattern. I’d struggle for a while, I’d coast. My medications sedated me, but a lot of my symptoms were always beneath the surface. I wasn’t totally miserable, but I was never truly happy.

Then something would trigger me — next thing I knew, I’d be flung into a complete crisis.

After one too many breakdowns, I found my current psychiatrist. He took one look at the seven or eight medications I was on and said to me, “Something isn’t right.” I explained to him that despite all the pills, I was never really more than just okay. And he was the first doctor I’d ever met that told me that “just okay” isn’t actually okay.

Let me repeat that: “Just okay” isn’t actually okay, especially if it doesn’t last.

Thus began the long process of reassessing all of my diagnoses and completely transforming my medication regimen. The process was so involved, I had to be hospitalized so I could be closely monitored while coming off of four medications quickly and simultaneously. And while it wasn’t exactly fun, it was the beginning of getting my life back.

Because with a real advocate in my corner, the goal was no longer survival. The goal was recovery. The goal was becoming my best self. The goal was finally living.

Here’s the thing: If you’ve been depressed and anxious for your whole life like me, you may not actually know what it feels like to be mentally healthy. This makes it easy to settle. This makes it easy to say, “If I don’t want to kill myself every second of every day, this is probably fine.”

The bar is set so low, we accept a quality of life that doesn’t have a whole lot of “quality” to it at all.

And our clinicians don’t always help in this regard. If we’re willing to settle, sometimes they are, too. I once saw a psychiatrist who said to me, “If your grades in school are fine, I don’t know what you need from me.” (Spoiler alert: I needed antidepressants, Doc.)

Sometimes when we aspire to be “okay” or “functional” — get decent grades, hold down a job, be able to shower and comb our hair — we forget that there’s more to life than just being okay.

There’s being able to appreciate a piping hot cup of coffee in the morning. There’s doing work or finding a hobby that’s meaningful to us. There’s enjoying the company of our friends. There’s having passion, ambition, and investment in something more, something bigger. It’s a good thing to be able to survive, and it’s important, too. But I’d like to believe we all deserve more than that.

Do you remember the last time you laughed deeply, maybe even until you cried? Do you remember the last time something good happened, and you couldn’t wait to call your friend and blather on about it? Do you remember the last time you actually gave a fuck about your life? Felt excited? Felt interested? Felt curious?

I spent most of my life going through the motions. I may not have always felt empty, but it took a long time to ever feel full. And while surviving is your top priority, I don’t want to live in a world where mentally ill people give up on thriving, with clinicians that enable us to.

Sometimes we do need to coast. Pace is everything, and this mental illness thing is a long freakin’ haul. But coasting should be a pit stop, not a final destination. This is especially important to remember, because too often while we’re coasting, we miss some of the warning signs (like boredom, for example) that can evolve into full-blown depression.

While it’s not reasonable to expect a dramatic shift overnight, it’s not unreasonable to say, “Actually, I want to be more than just okay. I want to be well.”

You deserve to be well. And you deserve a clinician who believes that you can be.

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An Open Letter To My Teenage Self (Before You Try To End Your Life)

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Dear Teenage Sam,

I want to tell you where I was this morning.

I woke up with the California sunshine peaking through the blinds, falling on my face, colliding with my eyes. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is, waking up like that. It’s my favorite way to wake up, and we get to wake up this way every day now.

While I was drinking my coffee, I was curled up on the couch crying. You and I don’t do much crying these days, because you fell in love, moved across the country, and found an antidepressant that helped you to understand what happiness actually feels like.

(We used to cry a lot. You never understood why – but I promise, you will one day.)

I have a brilliant friend who says that recovering from depression is kind of similar to wearing high heels for a long time – that moment when your feet touch the ground, and you remember what walking is supposed to feel like.

When you wiggle your toes, stretch your feet, and remember what solid ground is like underneath you.

This morning I was crying because I finally understood what that really meant.

Put another way:

Yesterday, I lit a lighter by myself for the first time.

We were always afraid of fire, you know, afraid of something catching fire or getting burned. 25 years old, and I’d never made a fire until last night.

(And I think this can account for, at least in part, why you’ve never taken up smoking cigarettes.)

When I held it in my hand, I knew at last what it was like to hold fire. What it was like to glow brightly without getting burned.

And I learned that it wasn’t fire that we were so afraid of – it was the belief that we could never be trusted with something like that. That, given the chance, we would always destroy something good. That we could come so close, and draw so near, but we could never control the fire.

(And I think this can account for, at least in part, why bonfires and fireplaces always frightened you a little.)

But last night, I held the light between my fingers. I watched the flame flickering and dancing in the dark, and I finally understood that I could trust myself again.

Sam, do you understand what I mean?

I mean that, one morning, you will wake up and know what it’s like to move through the world without aching feet, the ground reliable and solid and soft underneath you. And you’ll know joy not just as the absence of pain, but the PRESENCE of something.

Something ecstatic and whole and hopeful that you didn’t know you could feel.

I mean that, one night, you will know what it feels like to be bright and unstoppable and in motion, without fearing what might happen if you get carried away – if you love too hard, if you feel too much, if you trust yourself too deeply. You will love, you will feel, and you will trust with beautiful abandon.

You will know what it’s like to be in awe of yourself, startled but not afraid.

I promise, there will come a morning – tears sliding down like beautiful gems scattered across your cheeks – and you will say underneath your breath, “This is the way I was supposed to feel.”

This moment will be made possible only because you survived.

I can’t stop you from trying. I know that. I know this because I spent many years looking for you behind closed doors, flashbacks deceiving me, trying to spare you before you stopped breathing.

I know this because I remember how desperate you were to end your pain. There wasn’t a single force in the universe that could’ve intervened.

(When you’re older, you’ll become acquainted with emergency rooms, and meet the doctors that will ultimately diagnose and save you.)

I forgave you a long time ago – for this, and all the trauma to follow – from the moment you woke up, as the room spun and closed in all around you and I knew you needed someone to care for you.

You need to be brave. And you were brave, Sam, you have always been brave.

This is a remarkable thing you’ll learn about yourself soon – that you might always struggle with the impulse to hurt yourself, but you will never lose the instinct to care for yourself, stitching up your own wounds.

Surviving is what you do. You will survive this, too.

I know this now, having courageously and stubbornly picked myself up so many times, a lesson I learned from watching you.

—

If you or someone you know are thinking about suicide, you can always call:

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Let’s Talk About Self-Sabotage.

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Confession: When I’m happy, I freak out.

A blog-reader-turned-bestie (yes, sometimes I befriend y’all in real life because you are lovely human beings) and I were recently talking about this over milkshakes. Being happy is terrifying when you aren’t quite used to it.

You know, that dreaded sense that the other shoe will fall? Yeah. That. It’s the worst.

The pressure of trying to sustain something that we’re not used to can create a lot of stress for us. And we might feel the impulse to self-sabotage, especially when we don’t have the support we need to cope.

Sometimes I even have suicidal thoughts when I’m happy. Do you?

The idea that I’ve peaked, and that I might as well die now while things are still good. It seems like the perfect time. Then I fall down the rabbit hole of, “Am I actually happy if I’m having thoughts like these?” (Save yourself the time: Yes. Suicidal thoughts aren’t exclusively the domain of depression.)

And of course, I don’t know how to explain this to the folks I love – that joy is triggering, because I am so used to that joy being taken away from me.

Mental illness has taught me that happiness is inherently unstable and temporary, that I shouldn’t trust it. That mistrust is the product of repeated trauma. It can make me impulsive, hypersensitive, and fearful. It makes it difficult to be grounded.

And worst of all? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I start to act out because of that fear, which reinforces the fear itself.

I thought it was just me, until I started talking about it. I actually found that lots of people with mental illness or experiences of trauma have this same mistrust of joy. It can lead us to making some lousy choices – in an attempt to regain control and cope with the fear, we make some misguided decisions and push away the very happiness we’ve so desperately wanted for ourselves.

Sound familiar?

Being happy makes me a little crazy. And if you’ve ever thought you were the only one, I assure you – it’s actually a really common thing.

When you’ve spent years associating happiness with the calm before the storm, it’s no surprise that you might associate joy with a lack of safety. In fact, maybe you find depression or anxiety to be a little safer – because it’s more predictable, something more known to you.

I’m here to tell you, friend, that this is totally understandable. Brains are very malleable things – and trauma can lead us to develop some pretty maladaptive impulses, including the impulse to self-sabotage.

I am the Prince of Self-Sabotage. Happiness absolutely terrifies me. It terrifies me because  it feels like it’s only ever betrayed me. Just when I think that I’ve gotten into a good rhythm, life throws me a curveball and I’m not only depressed again, but also grieving the loss of the stability I thought I’d finally had.

Has happiness betrayed you? If so, it’s no surprise that your first instinct is to push it away.

Recently, I’ve gotten to a good place again. Courtesy of Wellbutrin (quickly becoming a favorite of mine), the most sarcastic/excellent psychiatrist on the planet, the love and support of community, new job prospects that leave me totally ecstatic about what’s to come, and personal growth that surprises and delights me every day.

And of course, cue the terrible thoughts like, “Okay, what gives? When does the other shoe drop?” and even, “I kind of feel like taking a chainsaw and splitting myself in half” (to which my psychiatrist asks me, “Um, do you have access to a chainsaw?” Fear not, Doc. No, I do not).

What’s a kid to do? Well, in my opinion, it starts with just acknowledging that happiness is scary, and that’s 100% okay.

Sounds deceptively simple. But you and I both know this is easier said than done. I have to remind myself of this fifty times a day – that there isn’t a disaster waiting for me around every corner. I have to remind myself that I’ve been conditioned overtime to believe that happiness isn’t safe, but that doesn’t make it true.

It’s also good to check in with myself about how I’m dealing with that stress. Am I reaching out for support from a therapist and/or friend? Am I talking about my fears or ignoring them? Am I staying busy? Am I taking care of myself?

I’m a big fan lately of guided meditation when I’m not feeling so grounded. More specifically, there’s this app that I can’t shut up about called Stop, Breathe & Think, which recommends a few meditations (and even yoga videos!) based on your emotions (imagine, like, a self-care mood ring).

You tell it how you’re feeling, and it makes custom recommendations for you. When I find myself freaking out – like my skin is crawling or I’m claustrophobic in my own body – it’s the perfect thing. (Nope, they didn’t ask for the plug – I just love and appreciate them that much.)

A lot of people believe that self-care is only crucial when you’re in a bad place. But I’ve found that self-care is absolutely critical when I’m happy – because the moment I’ve stopped prioritizing my mental health is when I’m actually most vulnerable.

Let me repeat that, because it’s super important: The moment I’ve stopped prioritizing my mental health is when I’m most vulnerable.

Got it?

I know it might seem counterintuitive to reach out for help when you’re happy, of all things, but it can be very necessary if your happiness is a stressor.

And this is a process, of course, one that I know will be ongoing throughout my life. But it helps to know that I’m not alone. And I hope that this reminder can be helpful to you, too.

When we start seeing happiness as a completely understandable trigger and learn to be gentle with ourselves, instead of letting trauma dictate how we should respond, we can start to do the really important work of recovery and healing – which is absolutely something each and every one of us deserves. Yourself included.

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Please Keep Inviting Me To Brunch

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I don’t know, in actuality, what it’s like to be set on fire.

The closest thing I have – which I am convinced must be similar to burning alive – is my most recent bout of depression, in which I was in such agonizing and relentless pain that I became the emotional equivalent of a rotisserie chicken.

I felt certain that this would be the episode that pushed me to end my life. And then before I knew it, I was in the emergency room (again).

I had spent the weeks leading up to my hospitalization confined to my bed, promising my friends that tomorrow would be the day I found the strength to stand up – responding to Facebook invitations with a “maybe” and the determination that, yes, I would be at that brunch, I would bring orange juice, I would get better.

But I couldn’t.

Movie nights and picnics and parties flew by without me, the photos popping up on my news feed as a reminder that being mentally ill sometimes meant being trapped, no matter how desperately I wanted to see people, to make connections. Each passing day became a struggle to remember what it felt like to have fun, much less to be seen.

I sent the same message in various permutations: “I’m sorry I can’t make it – I’m just too depressed.” “I’m sorry to bail at the last second, I just don’t have it in me.” “I’m sorry I’m such a flake, my anxiety is just bananas right now.”

I always hoped they could read between the lines, knowing that what I was really saying was, “Please don’t give up on me.”

Every invitation I rejected came with a silent, desperate plea of, “Please don’t let this be the last time you invite me.”

Because the truth is, even though I’d missed ten brunches and six birthday parties and countless invitations for drinks, I didn’t want them to stop inviting me. Their invitation meant that they knew I was still alive, that they still cared about me, that they wanted me to be there, that they were thinking of me.

And what depressed person – or any person, really – doesn’t want to be thought of? Especially in their darkest, most frightening place.

“Maybe” to some is an annoyance or a cop-out when you don’t want to say “no,” but for me, when I RSVP’d with “maybe,” it was my way of saying, “I still have hope that things could get better.”

On the other side of all this, I needed to know there was a life filled with friends and laughter and waffles, and that everyone was just waiting for me, for whenever I was finally ready.

When I left the hospital, those invites were the only thing that reminded me that I could have a “normal” life again.

Those invites said to me that my mental illness didn’t make me less valuable as a friend, less wanted as a companion, and less worthy of support, love, and delicious breakfast foods. I was wanted – not in spite of my illnesses, but exactly as I was. No matter what my struggles looked like, I was still wanted.

I wasn’t damaged goods. I was still… me.

This past Sunday, I got out of bed, took a shower, got on the bus, and finally showed up for brunch. It took countless doctors, a complete overhaul of medication and hormones, and of course, the sweet encouragement of good friends (new and old) to get me there.

But I made it.

It was my first taste of the outside world in a long, long time – and I didn’t realize how much I needed it. The donuts, the video games, the orange juice, and the fluttery feeling in my heart when someone would say that they were glad that I was there, and I could feel how much they meant it.

Because while it’s true that psychiatric interventions have, more or less, put out the fire and tamed my depression, it was being surrounded by good friends that made me finally believe that I could heal.

And with every new invitation, I’m reminded that there are things (and people) worth showing up for.

As it turns out, there’s been no better combination for me than Zoloft and brunch.

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Mental Illness Doesn’t Care How Good You Are

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It is six o’clock in the morning and I wake up suddenly. My body is trembling. My thoughts are beginning to spiral and my breath is shortening – every inhale becomes smaller, and smaller, and smaller until I fear that the oxygen in the room might run out.

I try to remember what my psychiatrist told me, about how breathing through a straw never killed anyone. I swear that this time it might.

When I fall asleep, I dream that I live in a house on the beach. I am staring out at the ocean until I see the waves grow taller, and bigger, and louder. The tide is creeping up on me now. I run inside, waiting for the first floor to flood, then the second. I keep climbing the stairs, trying to get away.

I know that I need to get to higher ground. I abandon the house and start running up a hill. No matter how high I climb, there’s always water on my heels. Sometimes it’s up to my ankles. No matter how fast I run, it’s always at my feet. All I can do is wait for the water to recede and hope that it doesn’t take me with it.

I tell myself, “No one ever drowned in an inch of water, Sam.” I swear that this time I might.

When I wake up again, my partner is next to me. I tell them about my panic attack, and about my dream. “I think I know what it means,” I explain. “That sometimes all you can do is keep searching for higher ground.”

Neither of us needs to acknowledge out loud that we’re talking about my mental illness.

About how, for the last eight months since I was hospitalized, I have watched the waves come in and out, chasing me uphill and luring me back down. I have known the kind of grief of being small in the face of something that could eclipse you, could make you disappear effortlessly.

When I see my psychiatrist later that week, I tell him that I have something to say, and that it isn’t nice. He tells me that I don’t have to be nice, that I should say how I feel. I tell him that I feel broken. I tell him that I feel irredeemable. I tell him that I am ashamed. I tell him that I am tired. I tell him that six medications is too much and too little. I want to know –

“Why you are the way you are,” he says quietly. This is a tender wound that I try to avoid. 

I nod, choking back words – words like, this isn’t fair, I don’t deserve this, I only ever tried to be good, I only ever tried to be kind, I shouldn’t be here, I should never have been here, fuck this and fuck you.

I know that maybe he has asked himself this before, about me, about the others. Because when I look at him, I don’t see pity – I see pain.

The unspoken truth: There is a particular kind of agony that comes with the realization that you could be good in every way, and mental illness will still chew you up and spit you back out.

You can do everything right – take all of your pills, go to all of your therapy appointments, read every bit of literature, do all your self-care – and still be trapped between the incisors, gnawed to pieces in the aftermath of another episode.

Some days, I can be standing on the platform waiting for a train, or cleaning up my apartment, or having lunch with a friend – and like a sudden, unexpected punch in the gut, I want to weep because I know I’ve been good, I want to weep because I know I’ve tried, and here we are.

I’ve tried so hard.

When I tell a friend about my dream, I quietly comment, “The ocean doesn’t care about how good you are.”

They tell me, “I know.”

I keep looking for someplace safe, somewhere high enough, somewhere untouched. And when I think I’ve found it, all I can do is wait. All I can do is wait, overcome with bitterness, overcome with rage, weeping with the force of a hurricane, breathing through a straw.

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How Mental Illness Changed the Way I Feel About Birthdays

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In my mind, celebrating the day I was born didn’t seem like a huge priority. In a way, you could say I’m making up for lost time.

Today I turned 24 years old (this is the point where half of my readers are like, WHAT, since I don’t think I’ve posted my age publicly until now – you’re welcome).

I know a lot of people who don’t make a huge deal out of their birthdays. They see it as just another day of the year. They don’t go out of their way to tell anyone. They stay in, enjoy a glass of wine, watch a movie, and fall asleep with the television on.

More power to them – really, whatever floats your boat – but I am definitely not one of those people.

I savor all the well wishes, the cards, the hugs, the birthday cake emojis. I buy myself a cake and a present; one year, I even sent myself a couple of e-cards (at the bottom it read “Love, You” – yes, I realize how weird this sounds) so I would have something fun to wake up to.

I stalk my Facebook wall, starting right at midnight, and revel in the outpouring of love and affirmation. I loudly tell waitstaff at restaurants that it’s my birthday with the hopes that they’ll sing a song.

But contrary to what it seems, I’m not actually a brat.

In fact, I didn’t always behave this way on my birthday. My birthdays used to be quiet. When I was no longer a kid and I was expected to organize my own party, they largely slid by, mostly unnoticed.

In my mind, celebrating the day I was born didn’t seem like a huge priority. In a way, you could say that I’m making up for lost time.

The thing about being a teenager in the throes of mental illness is that it was difficult, if not impossible, to motivate me to care about the fact that I was a year older.

To me, it was just a reminder that I had spent yet another year struggling without making any progress. You could say it was a new year, and you could even put it on a card and wrap it in a “happy occasion” bow, but to me, it felt insignificant.

The years all blended together underneath this dark cloud of bipolar and anxiety and they were rendered meaningless in the fog.

My birthdays as a teen went something like this:

  1. Resenting how damn cold Michigan is in late November. Resenting not having an earlier birthday so I could at least enjoy some sunshine on what was supposed to be “my day.” Sometimes this also meant staring angrily out the window at the snow on the ground.
  2. Wondering if any of my friends would remember (mind you, this was before Facebook was so popular). Being amazed when a few actually did.
  3. Eating carrot cake with my family (my mother makes a carrot cake that is out of this world, so I requested it every year).
  4. Going to bed and imagining a parallel universe where I actually did something important on my birthday.

Truthfully, I think that when you’re in survival mode, the idea of celebrating the fact that you exist seems so asinine when you spend more days than not wishing you didn’t exist.

When my mental health started to rebound, though – therapy, meds, rinse, repeat – I started to feel differently about birthdays.

The first birthday I can remember feeling distinctly different about was my 20th birthday. I remember thinking about how, when I was younger and deeply depressed, I had never imagined myself getting any older than 18. Turning that corner and getting into my twenties felt like a huge accomplishment.

It was a revelation. It was like unlocking a bonus level or discovering a sequel when you thought the book series had ended. I felt like I had cheated death – like I was living when I wasn’t really supposed to be.

Looking at that number as it shifted from 19 to 20, I had this sense that my being alive was a tremendous accomplishment; my birthday stood as a reminder of the resilience it took to keep living, to keep fighting, to stay.

That year, I actually did celebrate for the first time in a long time. Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, radical faerie extraordinaire, had a show in Ann Arbor. I went with a new friend of mine – a new friend I would eventually start dating a couple months later. It was a magical evening.

I realized that night something that had never really occurred to me before: I had a future.

And if that future involved radical transgender performance artists and some cute queer who buys me coffee on my birthday, I suspected that my future might not be so bad (spoiler alert: the cute queer who bought me coffee that night was also the cute queer who I married three years later).

Life didn’t stop at 18. And if I could live to be 20, maybe I could live to be 25, or 30, or… wow, is there really life after 30? They tell you life is short and that you should never assume you have more time, but the thought that I could live another decade, another two decades, even more – that thought shook me to my core.

Finally reaching my twenties made me feel like I had a whole new lease on life – and that’s when my obsession with birthdays really began.

I’m a big believer in making a huge fuss out of your birthday, but it’s not because I’m self-absorbed (okay, I may be a little self-absorbed – I am a blogger, after all).

It’s because I love any and every excuse to celebrate the fact that we’re still here. When somebody says “Happy Birthday” to me, what this translates to in my mind is, “Hey, kid, you made it. You’re alive.”

Still being here – which, when I was younger, was never something I imagined – is a big fucking deal. There were times when I thought I wouldn’t make it another day, let alone another five, ten years.

This year is the most important year yet. I am 24, and my first major depressive episode happened when I was 14. I look back at where I was ten years ago – ten years, can you believe that? – and I’m amazed.

Ten years ago, I didn’t think I would make it through geometry class, let alone grow up to be an actual adult (another spoiler alert: taxes are terrible, paying rent is painful, but being an adult is, all in all, the best thing ever and totally worth the wait).

Ten years later, I did make it through geometry. And not only that, but I survived many depressive episodes (and manic ones, too). I graduated from high school – hell, I graduated from college. I came out as transgender. I moved across the country to California, I got married, I started my career as a writer-

Hold up, y’all, as a writer. Which is its own bucket of “what the actual fuck” because when I was 14, I refused to show my writing to anyone because I was embarrassed and afraid that I wasn’t good enough.

Can you imagine what teenage Sam would have to say about all this?

Birthdays, for me, are the one day of the year where I have an undeniable excuse to celebrate everything that I’ve overcome to reach this stage in my life.

And, yes, while I believe that we should dabble in self-love and affirmation every day of the year, there’s something magical about getting older that makes those affirmations feel so much more meaningful.

Ten years ago I never imagined that this was my future. Hell, what future, I never imagined a future! I didn’t know that, on the other side of all of that pain, there were was something worth waiting for.

I realize that birthday cake emojis or balloons are not remarkable in themselves. I know that to most people, cards and parties and waiters singing songs are all superficial things to care about.

But they all remind me of perhaps the most tremendous thing I’ve learned in my 24 years on this planet: You just never know.

Every single time I claimed to know what the future had in store, I was wrong. 

And never in my life have I been so happy, so glad to be wrong. It’s a kind of “wrong” that’s worth celebrating.

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