I wanted to transform my negative experience into something positive. I wanted to offer myself as a scientific case study correlating mood disorders and creativity. I wanted to give other sufferer-warriors company, as Kay Redfield Jamison and William Styron had done for me in their memoirs, An Unquiet Mind and Darkness Visible. I wanted to give specific tools I’d learned and made up, like the cognitive behavioral therapy exercise I’d found helpful and a lesson on how to swallow your pills in one gulp. I needed that for my own psyche, but I also wanted to offer my story up to whoever might find something useful in it. I’d never felt so much pressure on myself to get a story right. I wanted to make sense of that overwhelming tangled mess, and I turned to my art to shape my experience into a graphic novel. Desperate, I succumbed, and set out into the dark, tangled forest of meds, blood draws, side effects, and big learning curves.Īfter a years-long arc of frustrations and triumphs, recorded in stacks of sketchbooks and journals, I found a tentative stability that became increasingly reliable. When I fell into a crushing depression a few months later, I realized that no matter what happened to my art (my passion, my livelihood, my identity), my survival depended on stability. Acutely manic, powerfully overconfident, and terrified that medication or even stability would kill my creativity, I refused to take meds.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder shortly before my 30th birthday.

Ellen forney books