The hypomanic mind isn’t like a single life happening all at once, it’s like every life happening all at once in a tiny, tinny, echoing room. Hypomania is like having ball-bearings bouncing around inside my skull faster and harder and fast and hard and faster and harder. Hitting each other, making divots on the inside of my skull, becoming interior decorators. Fragmented, distracted thoughts. Sentence fragments. Problem grammar.  No capital letters. No punctuation.

I am one of the people who hate to see their doctor. If it were up to me, I would never go. (OK, it is up to me, but it doesn't feel like it.) It's not that I have a bad doctor, or a mean doctor, it's just that nothing good ever happens there; so why would I go?

Adventures in Bipolar Diagnosis continued from part one... Lamictal was indeed a miracle for me. It allowed me to finish my bachelor’s degree, get a job in my field, and even become a skydiver. In retrospect, it was an amazing time to be me, to be in remission. Everything was good, until it wasn’t. I felt myself slipping about two years into the Lamictal treatment. For no known reason, the medication simply stopped working. This is a common problem with psychotropic meds and something else no one likes to mention.

In late 1998, I knew that something was wrong with me. My life was going well; I was in university, on my way to a computer science degree, in the co-op program and had completed an eight-month job in Calgary. I had been contented and grateful since leaving my mother’s house and moving to a new town. I was more happy than I had been in years. But little by little, I found myself increasingly sad and life became peppered with bouts of meaningless, spontaneously crying. I was unreasonably moved by the foretold unfolding of TV plots and commercials. In November 1998, I found myself in a pitch-black room, unable to get out of bed for an entire day. I was in the south of Spain, a ten minute walk from white sandy beaches and half-naked women. That was the moment I truly realized I was broken: I was in heaven and yet crushed with sadness.

This week I did an interview for the HealthyPlace Mental Health TV show. We discussed what it is to have bipolar disorder, the impact, what works and what doesn't.

Here I am. Writing. In public. About being crazy. Here I am. Being crazy. In public. Under scrutiny. I’ve been writing about being bipolar for seven years now, in a very closed, anonymous environment. People didn’t know my name, or see my face. By design. Anonymity has a way of allowing the truth to flourish.

Hi, I'm Natasha Tracy, a 30-something writer living on an island in the Pacific Northwest and the author of the Bipolar Burble. I have leaped from planes, helicopters, and cliffs trusting nothing but nylon and canvas to save my life. I have worked for many tech companies including the biggest boy on the block. I have visited twelve different countries, have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and I think a law should be passed preventing Apple from naming anything else beginning with the letter "i." And I have bipolar disorder.

Hi, I'm Natasha Tracy, a 30-something writer living on an island in the Pacific Northwest and the author of the Bipolar Burble. I have leapt from planes, helicopters and cliffs trusting nothing but nylon and canvas to save my life. I have worked for many tech companies including the biggest boy on the block. I have visited twelve different countries, have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and I think a law should be passed preventing Apple from naming anything else beginning with the letter "i." And I have bipolar disorder.