20 and in college with no financial help from my parents. My life turned to shit when i was 12 and my parents divorced, my dad moved 2000 miles away and I became very anorexic. Of course I had body image issues as well but looking back I think I wanted to be sick and thin enough that he could see how much him moving away hurt me. I was left with an emotionally neglectful mom and two younger siblings. My mom provided food and housing and clothing etc, and I always felt safe, but she was never there emotionally. She’s like a robot. So I basically had to raise myself, force myself to get good grades so I can go to college and have a decent future. My siblings were a mess, one was getting arrested for arson and one was in and out of the hospital week after week for telling her teacher she was going to commit suicide. My family decides my siblings should live with my dad, and off they went. I was stuck with my brick wall of a mother horribly depressed. At this point the anorexia had wore off since it’s really impossible to maintain once you’re so malnourished your hair falls off in clumps and you wake up in the middle of the night with your whole body cramped up. My mother never noticed I even lost weight, and I had dropped from about 125 to 88 lbs.
Around this time I was almost kidnapped walking home twice. My hometown is known for being high in sex trafficking, so this is horrifying of course. My mother never did anything about it.
Went to highschool, got really good grades. Close friend hangs herself. She was the third person I knew to commit suicide, the other two were friends but we had lost touch years before they killed themselves. This girl was very close to me. We ran on the same track team and she sat next to me in classes and we were in the same clubs. She hung herself at a park that we ran track at. My friends and I drove to the hospital to see her body since they were keeping her on machines to save her organs for transplant (she saved 9 people!). I held her dead hand. This was 2 days after prom and she still had her prom makeup on.
The comes highschool graduation. I graduated #53 out of a 811 person class despite being horribly, horribly depressed my whole time in highschool. I was accepted to a top college in my state, which is where I am now. It’s 500 miles away from my mom and every day is a struggle as my family is too poor to help me.
Half way through my freshman year I had my first hypomanic episode. I had dated this guy for a few months and he had begun stalking me and generally being a creep, so I called that shit off. I was partying a lot. My roommate had the complete opposite sleeping schedule as me, I would go to sleep at 2 am (stable, not even hypomanic) and she would wake up at 5 am to go run. So I think this combination of new school stress, breakup, partying, and my roommate waking me up 3 hours after I would fall asleep caused this first episode. I remember deciding to cut my hair to “rid myself of the bad vibes” my ex had “given me”. So there I stood, in the dorm bathroom with half my hair chopped off, and I heard my old psychology teachers voice whisper “manic episode” in my head. So after a month or so i went to my school’s therapist office and got diagnosed.
Now here I am about a year and a half later, still cycling because I can’t go on medication as I’m on my parents insurance and they don’t know anything is “wrong” with me. I don’t reslly have a relationship with either of them. Sure HIPAA would hide my medical records from them but they’d still get the bills, and not only would that piss them off but honestly they couldn’t afford any copayments or anything.
So yah, there’s my life.