A bit about my first hypomanic episode and education

What I feel was my first hypomanic episode happened when I was 16. It was during the summer and lasted about 2 months. During this period I slept very little. I was more active, especially compared to how I had been the previous couple of years. I was extremely positive. Constantly thinking about the future and planning on how I was going to get there. At one point I decided I was going to be a musician (I have very little musical ability) and practiced playing songs on a keyboard for sometimes hours a day. I think I also took my old violin out and started playing that as well. I was obsessed with time. Often feeling that time wasn’t making sense. Time was either going too quickly or too slowly, but it wasn’t going right. I don’t know how I appeared on the outside at this time, but inside what was going on was not normal. During that period I didn’t feel that something was going wrong. Even with the feeling of time being messed up I don’t remember feeling uneasy about it. And it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to pinpoint that period as an episode.

I’ve been spending a lot of time the past few months thinking about the past. Trying to remember clear times that I was either deeply depressed, or unusually elevated. I want to understand it more. What I’m doing with my blog, and what I’m trying to do through my school, is mainly to educate. Yes I like that it helps me, and I love when someone sends me a message to tell me that I wrote something that has helped them in some way. But a lot of what I’m trying to do is to simply educate. Everything you hear about mental disorders is usually text book, just facts. There needs to be more knowledge out there of what is really behind those facts. Trying to end stigma starts with education, the right education. You can’t fully understand exactly what someone with a mental disorder is going through. Even if you have a mental disorder yourself, you’ll never know exactly how another person with a mental disorder feels. But I think on some level, people need to understand how it is possible to feel the way these people feel.

I can’t educate everyone about these disorders. I’m only one person. I also only know what a couple disorders are like compared to all the mental disorders that are currently recognized. But I’m trying my best to get the information out there.