The Weather Inside Me

My mind has a weather.

Some days: sun.
Some days: storm.
All days: mine.

What does it mean in the real world?

That I am bipolar.

Wow. Even writing that sentence feels like turning on a light I used to keep dimmed, as I’m still figuring out what that means for the writer, the woman, and the multiple versions of me that show up on any given day.

Being bipolar doesn’t make me less.
It doesn’t make me more.
It just means I experience life with… different temperatures.

On sunny days

I feel creative, focused, alive.
Ideas arrive fast, conversations make sense, and I believe — with suspicious confidence — that I might be the best writer in the world. (If only hypomania came with a quality control department.)
Because the truth is: most things I write during these phases are not masterpieces.

They are just… normal.

But hypomania whispers, “You’re brilliant.”
And, for a moment, I believe it.

On stormy days

Everything feels heavier.
Writing is a mountain.
Existing is a negotiation.
And the same brain that said I was brilliant two days ago now tells me I’m a fraud, a failure, and possibly allergic to purpose.

Depression doesn’t shout.
It mutes.
It erases color.
It makes me want to delete everything — drafts, projects, dreams, and occasionally my entire Google Drive.
It convinces me that nothing I do is good enough and that trying again is a lost cause.

And then there is the weather in between

The place where I try to live most days.
Not too high.
Not too low.
Just enough clarity to trust my work and enough humility to edit it.

It’s the version of me that says: “You are not the storm. You are not the sun. You are the sky that holds both.”

Somewhere between the brilliance I think I have and the failure I fear I am, there is something else: balance.
The space where I meet myself without illusion and without despair.
The version of me that feels the most like home.

What bipolarity doesn’t do

It doesn’t take away my value.
It doesn’t erase my intelligence, my kindness, my humor.
It doesn’t make me unstable in everything — only in the places where my chemistry gets louder than my logic.
It doesn’t stop me from loving, from mothering, from laughing, from writing books that feel like pieces of my heart.

What bipolarity does do

It shapes me.
It teaches me.
It forces me to listen to myself with honesty.
It makes me pay attention to my own weather so I don’t get lost in it.
And strangely — beautifully — it makes me a better writer. I don’t mean a romanticized, tortured-artist version.
I mean a writer who knows how to watch emotions from the inside without drowning in them.
A writer whose creativity comes from truth, not delusion.
A writer who has learned to wait for the storm to pass before editing the pages.

I am bipolar.
Not broken.
Not fragile.
Just human — with weather. *

Some days I feel like a masterpiece.
Some days like a draft.
Both are versions of me.
And both deserve space.