For any of you guys out there struggling with a diagnosed mental illness, please, please, please – I urge you to seek assistance in lieu of profession treatment.

Even if you think you’re beyond help, or if you think your symptoms are far too
mild to warrant treatment, I hope you’ll take the following to heart:

Getting treatment for my bipolar has changed my life – and my perspective toward the world – for the better.

No longer am I lingering in the past, unwilling to engage in life because I’m frightened, or lonely, or driving myself up the wall with ideas of inferiority.

I’ve enrolled in college again (I dropped out / was kicked out from the University of West GA in early 2012, due to severe depression) and I’ve rediscovered my passion for music. I’m also working on a few writing projects, although I must admit that I won’t be going at them with the same driving force I exhibited last year.

Although my writing is important to me, I know that – without that thread of true genius, which I’ve not been given – I’ve not found a reason to throw myself perilously close to the brink of severe depression again. I’ll certainly be writing, but at the same time I’ve given myself reasonable goals instead of thrusting forward with the sole, unblinking aim of being exactly like my writer role-models (similar to whom I don’t need to be).

I think that when I took the risk of greatly decreasing my workload in terms of making words appear on the screen, I’ve actually been able to find a unique place in my mind, where dwell more complex and beautiful compositions than I thought possible.

For so long I’d deprived myself of a full appreciation for life, and I did so not through my own will and determination, but through a chemical change in my brain.

I took the initiative to battle with my own mind, and I didn’t win – not quite – but I’ve got the damned thing pinned down.

I’m not saying that accepting my bipolar was easy – because it wasn’t. There were tears; there was revolt; there were protestations and screaming and wanting to drown myself in a bottle of liquor.

But what I’m trying to tell you is this: fight.

I know it seems impossible, but I promise you that you will have the strength to fight, no matter what anyone else says to the contrary. I’m not telling you that you need to cure yourself, because I know you can’t. No-one can cure their own mental illness, no matter how mild.

But you can fight – you can fight against this billion-horse-power force that’s battling against you, battling for your life and your relationships and your very will to struggle on.

I know that you’re strong, so take up your anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, or whatever other pills they’ve got you on, and let them help you to experience your life in full.