Carrie

“That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

“When you live with depression, anxiety, or any mental illness, you spend most of your time "trying to explain" yourself over taking care of yourself.”
― Hannah Blum, The Truth About Broken: The Unfixed Version of Self-love

“It doesn’t occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behaviour, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.”
― Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“In less than a year, the magic of being diagnosed had begun to wear off, and my bipolar disorder no longer felt like a story hook. It felt like a part of me I wasn't sure I wanted to sit with anymore. So the further away I got from the diagnosis and all that had led up to it, the more I downplayed the extremes or made them punchlines I could use before anybody else could. I came to resent the head tilts and looks of surprise that go hand in hand with sharing what I'd come to see as a particularly unglamorous part of my life. If this was what interesting was, I didn't want it anymore. I hadn't counted on the most interesting people not being able to opt out. I didn't want to be the woman who does everything despite her bipolar disorder. I wanted to be the woman who has many complexities, her bipolar disorder being just one of them. (You know, a person).”
― Anne T. Donahue