My Embracing Bipolar blog was created in 2026 as part of my 20 Years Embracing Bipolar project. Reflecting on two decades of being open with my mental illness, I realized that I have not done enough to share how I cope with day-to-day challenges. In my professional and personal lives, I use conflict resolution tools to respond to mental illness stigma and discrimination. But exposure to prejudices hurts me and it can even trigger the emotional dysregulation symptoms that have led me to be hospitalized five times due to my disabling bipolar disorder. As my work has evolved, and my skills have expanded, I have been flooded with more and more painful situations in my daily life. It takes a lot of work and support to get through them.
This Embracing Bipolar blog aims to raise awareness of those challenges and share tools to help others. First and foremost, it is a therapeutic support to me, by allowing me a way to focus on the tough feelings I might otherwise disassociate from and repress. Here in Embracing Bipolar, I will face them and work through them. In my life, one of the greatest things I have done for my self-care is learn ways to be open and communicate about what I am going through. It has also been great to help others by sharing resources along the way.
In many ways, I have gotten stuck in my own head, upset, and frozen from moving forward because I have felt overwhelmed, helpless, or hopeless in the face of a world that can be harsh to folks disabled by mental health conditions like mine. I have many saved records and unfinished projects on my computer or in piles in my office, where I had gotten stuck and could not move forward because I had feelings about that work that I was not ready to face. Embracing Bipolar will hopefully become a place where I can finally tackle that work, and share the journey about why it was so hard and how I got through it.
Thank you for reading.