Category: Bipolar Disorder
-
California Burns. I Copy and Paste.
As California burns, I pause, having finished copying and pasting my blog posts into Scrivener. Next step is to rewrite multiple overview posts about my mental health journey from age eighteen to now. See book outline as my mental health history, chronological posts worth sharing organized by year and month, with appendix of US mental…
-
Coping with Illness
For the past few weeks (three?), my son and I (and my husband, but he’s taking care of us) have been sick with gastroenteritis. I haven’t been able to keep up with my usual writing, or with sharing mental health resources on social media. To cope with the many emails piling up, I’m deleting most of…
-
Worn Out
Exhausted Overwhelmed Not thinking clearly Not able to complete sentences Not able to answer direct questions Fumbling with language With spoken language With what I hear With what I read So sleepy Feared falling asleep Driving to doctor’s office Door locked Looked at calendar Over an hour early Went back to parked car Overlooking hill…
-
Finished Scrivener Tutorial!
October 2015, I last modified the import of my blog into Scrivener thinking I’d massage my writing into a book. The next month, my mother had a stroke. Never got back to the book or to figuring out Scrivener. Just finished the tutorial. Enrolled in National Association of Memoir Writers‘ online memoir writing course and…
-
Please Support Me #NAMIWalks #JoinTheMovement
Please support me as I raise money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). NAMI Orange County has been instrumental in my mental health recovery. Help Me Support NAMI NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer course introduced me to the concept of mental health recovery and gave me HOPE. As a NAMI Provider Education presenter and In…
-
I do not whisper. I ROAR.
Motherhood transformed me. My identity changed. Now it changes again. I have constantly reinvented myself over my lifetime. As a pre-med biochemistry major at UCLA, I was miserable and suicidal. Then I studied part-time at a community college, biding time to find my direction. Finding a niche as a legal studies major at UC Berkeley, I tried to…
-
Barely Fiction: Kate.1
Her true and legal name is Kitt Kathleen O’Malley. She loves her name and is grateful her parents came up with it — a great stage name if there ever was one. Her first name is typically a nickname for Katherine or Kathleen, so her name is redundant. She had thought that Katherine meant catharsis,…
-
Review: Birth of a New Brain #PostPartumBipolar
Dyane Harwood thrilled me when she sent me an advance copy of her memoir, Birth of a New Brain: Healing from Postpartum Bipolar Disorder. (I pre-ordered it and was anxiously awaiting it’s October 2017 release.) Her memoir fills a much-needed niche in sharing the experience of bipolar disorder, peripartum onset (beginning during pregnancy or within…
-
Hypomania, Praise, and Self-Talk
Photo thanks to Gustavo Espíndola The praise came. Kitt loved to please. The more praise she received, the better she felt. The more she achieved, the higher she soared, until she couldn’t. Her body couldn’t keep up. She broke down, couldn’t get out of bed, and beat herself up for falling, for failing. Talking to…
-
Bipolar & Dementia
I fear dementia. Both of my parents have dementia and live in a memory care community. They love one another and seem happy where they are now, but it took a while to make that happen. They wanted to maintain their independence. Understandable. I fear dementia. Though I hope by avoiding alcohol and taking my…