Lizzie Simon - Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D

I can't say enough about my Lizzie. I don't know Lizzie personally. I have never met her. I have never met anyone who knows her but with that Six Degrees of Separation thing, who knows.


Anywho, I credit my dear sweet Lizzie with helping me to realize who I am and understanding more about myself than I could have ever discovered on my own. Before Lizzie, it was them and it was us. We needed to keep those mentally ill people away from us because they  might snap and come to the morning meeting with a shotgun. What that stigma did was make 'sick' kids not want to get help and parents ignore that their child was sick.

In parents defense, so little was known about bipolar back then. And bipolar masked itself in the symptoms of ADD, ADHD, anger, drinking, drugs, excessive sex, and being unruly and irritable and out of control. Many doctors treat the symptoms and not the real illness itself. And those who do understand with they're dealing with, try to medicate it away as if it's something to be cut out and thrown away rather than embraced and cultivated.


In my case, I spent a month or so in self-discovery. I knew I never fit in and just wanted to be in a place where I was understood. I went through the stages of realizing I was crazy which included, but were not limited to: denial, questioning, judging, confusion, contemplating suicide, lots of sleeping, researching, blaming, cursing, and last but not least, the driving like a lunatic stage when I just couldn't wrap my head around what was 'happening to me.' In the end, I realized I was crazy to think there was anything wrong with me to begin with.


At the end of the month, I told my family. I didn't expect any kind of warm reception like you seem in those intervention reality shows or hugs or a party or anything like that. I just wanted them to understand that I was just realizing what had always been there and I was about to go on a path of self-discovery; it was to be the time where I would get to know myself for the first time. Nice to meet ya. It was like getting to know something new about an old friend; something that made them all of the sudden feel so much more real than they had previously been.

When I revealed my not-so-secret secret, my family basically cut me off. They expressed their displeasure, to put it mildly, with me and my self-diagnosis. Maybe they needed to get some distance from me or bipolar or just to get some time to reflect. It was a lot for me to process and maybe they couldn't handle it all at once. Bipolar is genetic and to admit something was 'wrong' with me was to also admit that they had the same blood coursing, make that coarsing, through their veins.


Lizzie went on her own journey of self-discovery. She went on the road, literally, to find young bipolar people who were succeeding and in the process of interviewing others, she learned more about herself than should could have on her own. Her journey took her around the country and back home to the Lizzie who had always been there. But what she found was a better Lizzie; a Lizzie who was so much healthier and gifted and talented than the Lizzie who had set out the previous year. Below is an excerpt of her book that defines her path more clearly than I could in a library of novels.

If you have bipolar or know someone with this gift, read Lizzie's book. 

Thanks Lizzie. Take it easy.