The Highs, the Lows, and Everything in Between: My Life With Bipolar

11 min read mental-health, bipolar, personal

This site is mostly code: AWS experiments, architecture notes, side projects. This post is different. It’s the first thing I’ve written here that’s about me rather than about something I built.

I’ve been dealing with what my doctors diagnosed as bipolar disorder. I’ve kept most of it private for years, and the privacy cost me more than it protected me. So I’m writing it down: partly for me, partly for the people I’ve hurt along the way, and mostly for anyone reading this at 2 a.m. who recognizes themselves in it.

If you are in crisis right now, skip to the end. There are numbers there you can call or text tonight.

Where it starts: my father

My father had bipolar disorder. I grew up with it in the house. I didn’t have words for it as a kid, but I knew the weather could change without warning. Later I watched him decline, in and out of hospitals, sedated by medication, less and less himself.

Mental illness runs in my family. Bipolar disorder is one of the most heritable conditions in psychiatry: having a parent with it raises your own risk several times over. I knew that intellectually for a long time. What I didn’t expect was to catch myself doing the things I remembered him doing.

The part that feels good

Nobody warns you that the high is the part you’ll miss.

When I was up, the world was easy. I felt like I was floating through it. Problems that normally took real effort just dissolved. I needed very little sleep and didn’t feel tired. I had ideas faster than I could write them down, and every one of them felt obviously right.

My body became something to spend:

  • The gym twice a day. Morning and evening, pushing harder each time. I wore my body down and told myself it was discipline.
  • Clubs and dancing. Late nights, loud music, being out when I’d normally be home. I felt magnetic, and for a while I was.
  • A flood of new friends. I collected people fast. Conversations were electric and plans multiplied. I’ve never been more social in my life.

From the inside it doesn’t feel like an illness. It feels like finally becoming the person you were supposed to be. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous.

The part that doesn’t

The same energy has another edge.

I got aggressive with people: short-tempered, confrontational, sure I was right and irritated that others couldn’t keep up. People who loved me started to feel like obstacles.

I lied. Not grand schemes, but a steady stream of small untruths to cover where I’d been, what I’d spent, how late it was, how much I’d done. Each lie seemed justified in the moment, and each one cost me some trust that I haven’t fully earned back.

Then there’s the crash. Every high I’ve had has been followed by a low, and the lows are not sadness. Depression is an absence. The ideas stop. The energy is gone. The friends I collected so fast drifted away just as fast, partly because I stopped reaching out. I went quiet for weeks or months and fell out of touch with nearly everyone. From the outside that looks like you stopped caring. From the inside, answering a text feels like lifting a car.

The people around me

This is the hardest section to write.

My ex-wife spent years as part of a team trying to get me well, driving to appointments, tracking medications, filling out forms and absorbing the fallout. Living with someone whose personality changes with the season is exhausting, and she carried more of it than anyone should have to. Our marriage ended, for many reasons and not just this one. But I won’t pretend my illness wasn’t one of them.

My boys are the reason I kept going to appointments on days I didn’t want to. They saw the loud, over-scheduled, too-intense version of their dad, and they saw the version that couldn’t get off the couch. I think about my own childhood with my father, and I work very hard for my story to end differently for them. Kids notice everything. If you’re a parent reading this: getting treatment is not selfish. It’s one of the most important things you can do for them.

Friends came and went with my moods. I’m not proud of how many relationships I let lapse. If you’re one of them and you’re reading this: it wasn’t you.

Getting help, and how long it took

For years I treated the symptoms I could name. In early 2022 I did several months of weekly therapy for generalized anxiety and was on a low-dose SSRI (citalopram). It helped the anxiety. It didn’t touch the bigger pattern.

In the fall of 2022 I had an episode that was completely out of character for me, and I recognized it. It looked exactly like what I’d seen growing up with my father. That scared me into acting. I emailed a long list of therapists, asked specifically for someone experienced with bipolar disorder, and told them plainly: My first goal is an assessment. I need to know if I am in fact bipolar.

I was diagnosed in December 2022.

Here’s the honest version of what came next, because I think the tidy version hurts people.

Medications: trial, error, and patience

Finding treatment that works is rarely one prescription. For me it has been a long run of adjustments:

  • Citalopram (an SSRI), for anxiety, before the diagnosis.
  • Cariprazine (Vraylar), an atypical antipsychotic approved for bipolar depression. I started at 1.5 mg, and in early 2023 we moved up to 3 mg.
  • Fluoxetine (Prozac), with dose increases when the depression and anxiety came back hard.
  • Ketamine infusions, starting in late 2023, when the depression wasn’t responding. The first few gave me a real, noticeable clearing. Later ones were less effective, and one was a genuinely bad experience.
  • TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) in 2024, recommended by my psychiatrist after medication and ketamine hadn’t been enough.

None of these was a magic switch. Some helped for a while. Some had side effects I had to weigh against the benefit. Every change meant weeks of waiting to see whether it was working. The most important thing I’ve learned is that “this medication didn’t work” is information, not failure. It narrows the search. Keep going back.

Work, brain fog, and leaves of absence

I’ve been a software engineer and architect for decades. My identity is wrapped up in being the person who can hold a whole system in his head. Depression takes that away first.

The brain fog is hard to explain to people who haven’t had it. You read the same paragraph five times. You open a file and forget why. A design problem you’d normally solve on a walk just doesn’t resolve. It’s like thinking through wet cement. Then you blame yourself for being slow, which feeds the depression.

I’ve had to take multiple medical leaves of absence:

  • In spring 2023, a few months after my diagnosis, while we worked on medication.
  • From late September to mid-December 2023, for severe depression.
  • Again in late 2024.

Writing the email to my team that said “I’ve been dealing with severe depression” was one of the scariest things I’ve done professionally. The response was kinder than I expected. If you’re in the U.S., know that the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave for a serious health condition, and many employers also offer short-term disability. Your psychiatrist can complete the paperwork. Taking leave is treatment. It is not quitting.

The label, and whether it’s right

I promised the honest version, so here’s the complicated part.

In late 2024 my psychiatrist and my psychologist both told me they no longer believed the bipolar diagnosis was correct. They thought much of what looked like mania in late 2022 was tangled up with grief and trauma I hadn’t dealt with, rather than a mood disorder on its own.

I’m writing this post anyway, and I kept “bipolar” in the title, for a few reasons:

  • Diagnosis in psychiatry is hard. There’s no blood test. Bipolar II in particular is often misdiagnosed as plain depression, and trauma responses can be mistaken for bipolar. Many people go years, sometimes a decade, before the label fits. If your diagnosis has changed, you are not a fraud and you are not alone.
  • The experiences were real. The sleepless highs, the gym twice a day, the clubs, the aggression, the lying, the friends gained and lost, the crashes, the fog, the leaves from work. Whatever the name, I lived it, and so did the people around me.
  • I have a family history that makes me take it seriously. I’d rather be vigilant and wrong than dismissive and wrong.

What I’ve learned is to hold the label loosely and the treatment tightly.

What I wish someone had told me

For anyone who recognizes themselves, or someone they love, in this:

Learn the signs, in yourself and in others

Mania or hypomania (lasting days, and noticeably different from your normal self):

  • Much less need for sleep without feeling tired
  • Racing thoughts; talking fast; jumping between ideas
  • Unusual confidence, or feeling invincible
  • Big spending, risky decisions, impulsive plans
  • Irritability or aggression that’s out of character
  • Doing far more than usual: work, exercise, going out, new projects

Depression (lasting two weeks or more):

  • Persistent low mood, emptiness, or numbness
  • Losing interest in things you used to love
  • Exhaustion; sleeping too much or too little
  • Trouble concentrating (“brain fog”)
  • Pulling away from people
  • Feelings of worthlessness, or thoughts of death

In bipolar I, manic episodes last at least a week or are severe enough to need hospitalization. In bipolar II, the highs are hypomanic (milder, at least four days) and the depressions are often the dominant, disabling part.

Tell your doctor about the highs, not just the lows

People almost always seek help while depressed, because that’s when it hurts. But if you’ve ever had periods of unusually high energy, little sleep and big impulses, say so, even if they felt good. Treating bipolar depression with an antidepressant alone can sometimes trigger mania, so your prescriber needs the whole picture.

Track your mood

A simple daily log of mood, sleep hours and energy (a note on your phone is enough) shows patterns you can’t see from inside a single day. It also gives your psychiatrist real data instead of “I think last month was bad?”

Protect sleep like it’s medication

Sleep disruption is one of the most reliable early warning signs, and one of the most common triggers. If you suddenly need four hours instead of eight and feel great, that’s not a productivity hack. Call your doctor.

Build a team, and let them in

A psychiatrist to manage medication, a therapist to work through the rest, and one or two people in your life who know your warning signs and have permission to tell you when they see them. I spent years trying to manage this privately. It doesn’t work.

Repair where you can

The lying and the aggression hurt real people. Illness explains behavior, but it doesn’t erase the impact. Apologizing specifically, without excuses, has mattered more to my relationships than any medication.

Be patient with treatment

It took me years and many adjustments to get here, and I’m still adjusting. If the first medication doesn’t work, or the second, that’s normal. There are more options now than ever, including newer medications, ketamine and TMS for treatment-resistant depression, and therapies that teach you to catch episodes early.

If you’re in it right now

If you’re in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

I don’t have a neat ending. I’m still in treatment, still learning my patterns, still repairing relationships. But I’m here, I’m present for my boys, and I’m done hiding this.

If this post helped you, or if you’re going through something similar and just want someone to hear it, reach out. My LinkedIn and X are on the about page. I know how heavy a message can feel, so consider this post me going first.

I’m not a medical professional. This is my experience, not medical advice. Please work with a qualified clinician on your own care.