‘I had bipolar symptoms for nine confusing years’

Becca, 28, shares memories of what it was like living with undiagnosed symptoms of bipolar for almost a decade - and why getting a diagnosis has been life-changing.  

It’s 6am in Medellin. I’m at a rooftop bar staring out to a city of colours, of noise, of parakeets and the sun is just about poking itself through the thick clouds of a busy city.

I’ve been saving up for this trip for months, I’ve been working long hours in a pub, dreaming of this trip – this freedom – three months in south America before I start my masters, I want to explore, let loose and celebrate three years at uni.

Now I’m here and it’s idyllic.

But. I want to escape – I want to be a million miles away from here. I don’t know where I can go but I know it’s not here. I can’t cope, I can’t remember feeling this bad in a long time, I can’t remember feeling this incapable.

How did it get this bad? I think. How did I come miles away from home on a trip of a lifetime – and want to disappear? It makes no sense to me. It isn’t me.

Support from home

I call my sister Esther and try to explain the panic. She listens, and she talks me through breathing, counting each inhale and exhale. She tells me everything is okay and gently grounds me: ‘Notice your surroundings. What colours can you see? What can you hear? What can you smell?’

My dad comes into her room and I hear his voice. Hearing his voice makes me cry again. It makes me cry a lot because I don’t know what’s happening to me and why it’s going on again.

My best friend Anokhi is with me on this trip, and I know I’ve been difficult, and I know I am being confusing. She’s here though, she’s with me and amongst it all. I really don’t know what I would have done if she wasn’t there.

Hypomania

We are well into the second month of our trip and we are on a night bus headed to Peru. I have actually managed to get a decent sleep and survive the last few weeks in Columbia.

The bus stops for a random break, and I look out of my window and I see this huge lake and these mountains and my brain flips – it actually flips.  

OH MY GOD LIFE IS SO BEAUTIFUL

I CAN BREATHE I can actually breathe I am okay and I am alive

My confidence is here again.

The radio station has changed.  

Fast forward two years later back home

I finally got diagnosed with bipolar type 2 aged 23. Two years after my trip to South America.

Now, looking back, I can name what I experienced — those symptoms of mental illness. The low moods, the high mood known as hypomania. I cannot tell you the amount of times I punished myself for feeling that way. I must be so ungrateful, pathetic, I must deserve to be feeling this bad.

Now I know I was suffering from a mental illness and life makes much more sense.

I know how best to treat my condition and that it’s not my fault that I struggled so much when others didn’t. I now use the Bipolar UK Mood Tracker app to track my mood and sleep, and to maintain balance where I can.

A quote from my journal on that trip in May 2019: ‘So frustrating because when I’m good, I’m chilling, I wanna do stuff, I wanna talk, I love people, it makes me feel good, it makes me feel alive.

‘When I’m low, it’s like the most unbearable, scary, fragile place and I cannot remember what it’s like to feel good or feel relaxed or anything’. 

Afterthought

I still think about that rooftop in Medellín – the colours, the parakeets, the way the city buzzed beneath me. Even in the chaos, there were glimmers of something steady: survival, connection, the will to understand what was happening to me.