I write mainly about politics and mental health. Mental health is always the hardest but here's an article I wrote for themighty.com

Well, depression has kicked my ass all winter but I've finally started getting help. New meds, discovered a vitamin D deficiency so I'm taking supplements and got a light therapy box (thank you baby) I was even seeing a therapist I really liked every week. She left the office and I got assigned to a new therapist but only made it to the first meeting cause hey I'm feeling pretty good and I've got shit to do so it's not worth the effort to make the trip in every week and build a rapport with the new counselor. That was a couple weeks ago. Now it's spring and I'm getting some spring in my step. I have the energy to do the things I need to get done. I'm getting excited about activism again and organizing to make sure people like me and the many people in my family with health issues are able to keep our health care. The problem is I'm getting too much energy. Now instead of ten or twelve hours sleep a night I'm getting three or four hours every other night. The sleep deprivation makes me overly emotional. Welcome to bipolar disorder. I still thought I was dealing with seasonal affective disorder when I started writing this a week ago and just now got the correct diagnosis. I'm 44 years old. you see it was hard to be sure since I've never been able to see a therapist for very since my illness makes it hard to stay at one job for . This means I went decades without health insurance. As a result I would only see somebody when my depression was bad enough to scare me but not so bad that I couldn't function, so none of them ever saw my other symptoms. Yes there are medicaid services available but before the affordable care act I never qualified because my state only made it available to people with dependent children. Even now that I do qualify navigating that bureaucracy takes a lot of effort and mental stability; more than I can usually manage during a depressive episode, and to be able to function during the good times you develop this willful amnesia because the bad times scare the holy shit out of you. I had never realized bipolar could have seasonal cycles, which was part of what kept me from being sure about it before now. My bipolar disorder manifests a lot like SAD, most people know it as seasonal depression but that was a major misnomer so they changed the term. You see we're not just depressed in the winter time, it's an additional symptom that piggybacks on major depressive disorder which is there every fucking day of your life; sometimes worse than others, especially in the fall and winter when there isn't much sunlight. For some reason my mania seems to happen more in the summer time which means I get to fight anxiety, insomnia, irritability and mood swings for the next six months or so. This part is actually more terrifying for me than when I have to fight every day to find a reason to live. It's a fight you don't always win but fortunately I haven't had any of those days in a time. My self destructive behavior is much less drastic now. You see when I'm suicidal and the only thing keeping me from ending it all is that I don't have the energy to go get the knife I'm only a danger to myself. Even when I'm in a great mood, having fun and feeling loved I still don't see harm to me or even my death as a deal, but if I harm another my self worth is completely shot and I want to either disappear into the woods or end my life so that nobody else will ever have to deal with me again.
When the manic episodes start I become irrational and upon occasion delusional. When I was under extreme stress in this state I have hurt people in ways both physical and emotional that in some cases 25 years later I'm still struggling to forgive myself for. In fact it wasn't until I was writing this that I was able to tell the people I love most about it and finally drag those demons out into the light. Throw ADD that I wasn't told about until my professor recognized it when I was 17 and dyslexia that I had to figure out for myself at twenty five (ADD hadn't been recognized when I was a kid and while my dyslexia was diagnosed in kindergarten they told my mom I would outgrow it so she never bothered to tell me) and possibly fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and my head is not the most stable place to live , but it's getting better.
This is the first time I've really written about my mental health and I guess I'm finally writing for several reasons. . Partly because I've decided that after 20 years of talking about writing it's time to just fucking write. Partly it's because I need the cathartic release of finally telling somebody, anybody what it feels like to be me but I can't do it verbally. I get too choked up and shame myself for crying so I "toughen up". I've also never told most of the people I love because I validate my existence by how much I'm able to help others and I don't want to be a burden. Mainly though I'm writing this because I know there are others out there dealing with the same thing but feeling like they're the only ones in the world who know what this feels like. My hope is that they will see this post and realize they are not alone or that maybe somebody who loves somebody like me will recognize what they're going through and help them.