I think I've always known I've been a ticking time bomb. I recall second grade Sophia at a chess tournament with sweaty hands. I had five minutes until the black minute hand pushed the red flag up as it was about to fall. The same sweaty hands I tried to hide after shaking the hands of members on the 18th hole after each of my 200 loops. I've always been running from something but never quite known what. It's almost like I create obstacles in my life that I have to solve because that's where I feel safe. By all metrics I've accomplished the dreams I set out for myself when I was younger. I'm working at a 40 person company on a sleep apnea implant writing firmware. I've learned how to code and do basic electrical engineering work. I joined a frisbee team in college, and had a chaotic year-long relationship full of adventure, love, and spontaneity.
But there's always been a feeling lurking in the shadows that the shoe would eventually drop. And March 12th of 2026 it all came crashing down. It was the afternoon of my twenty-second birthday. I was on my way to the CVS MinuteClinic when my phone buzzed for the eighteenth time that day. Another birthday text.
"Hope you're having a great day."
In that moment all I wanted was to buy a few cans of neon green spray paint and write across Minneapolis and St. Paul that I was not okay. The color would cut through the limp, gray March sky that had blanketed the city for days. Not on a bathroom stall or the back of a notebook. On everything. Highway overpasses. Bus stops. Brick buildings. Anywhere people might look for half a second so that for once I wouldn't have to pretend like I was "good".
Instead, I sat on the crinkling paper of an exam table at CVS. As if the universe had decided to play all its +4 UNO cards at once, I had also gotten my period the day before.
When she finished swabbing and then pulled a small dime of wax out of my ear, she stepped back and laughed.
"Well," she said, "you're broken head to toe."
I guess I got what I asked for. Now both the CVS MinuteClinic clinician and I knew I was not having a great day.
I might as well have gotten my birthday cake and eaten it too. The cake of course being the undeniable proof that something, somewhere, was seemingly always wrong with me.
But the strange thing about losing your mind is that it doesn't begin on your twenty-second birthday. It begins years earlier, in moments that seem small at the time. Moments that only look strange in retrospect.
Like the evening I left my drying rack in the parking garage next to my car and I spent an hour tearing through my apartment like a mad woman, eventually convinced I had hallucinated the drying rack entirely.
Or the night when I, freshly turned 18, sat on a FlixBus as it pulled into Isola Nuova after a long ride from Milan, completely certain, without a single flicker of doubt, that I was going to become Silicon Valley's next budding entrepreneur.
At the time those moments felt like intuition. Now I know they were something else.
I mistook insight for destiny. I thought I would invent nanorobots and save the world by 22. Every electric feeling meant I needed to act. And sometimes I did. One day I decided to ski 100km on a 2km loop one day, taking me 7 hours, simply because I had the idea to. It was hailed as a fun accomplishment at the Athena award banquet by the MC when I was 17. In Berkeley, I hammocked in the woods on Lake Chabot at 8pm on a random evening alone. And I've sent elaborate plans for a homestead and a surfing trip to group chats on a whim. Every sleepless night meant revelation. I had to do a launch. I dreamed out every detail. Every coincidence meant I had cracked open some deeper layer of reality that other people were too dulled or too afraid to touch. As a child I was convinced everyone could hear my thoughts. I would see the door shrink and expand as I fell asleep. I was convinced my stomach pain was God spreading out the pain of childbirth across my life. And I slept paranoid for months that someone would break into our house after the kidnapping of Jayme Closs. And maybe that's why it took me decades to admit what was happening. Because to admit that something was wrong felt like betraying the very force that had been my superpower.
For years I had been building a life on top of gasoline reserves. Flights booked at midnight impulsively. Justified by my friend's car broken down on the highway at 2am, justified by seeing my family in Europe, justified to visit a friend I had just met from Twitter. Grand plans sketched out by my brain faster than my body could keep up with. Ideas so radiant they made ordinary life feel dim and intolerable by comparison. The energy was contagious. I would dance in my room at 2am, text a hundred people in a day, post a barrage of tweets on X, and book out my calendar for a week. I loved intensity because intensity made me feel alive. It made me feel special. It made me feel like I was on a yellow brick road straight to Oz. One more city. One more person. One more project. One more proof-of-concept that I was exceptional enough to outrun my own suffering.
The oscillations got bigger. What do you do when you realize something is off? You sprint in the opposite direction in denial. The summer of 2023 was non-stop travel that culminated in 48 hours of travel home from Japan, followed by a career fair in which I signed up for orchestra, ROTC, and 20 credits. Followed by a flight to Seattle after draining my bank account and maxing out my credit card. Looking back though, I can connect the dots from my childhood. I first got prescribed antidepressants when I was 17. I lied on the intake form for the virtual doctor and said I was 18. At first it made sense. I was coming off of covid, a church scandal where the pastor of Calvary had an affair with a singer, and getting into fights with my parents. The church scandal broke my worldview. I had a dad who would get mad at me for spilling a glass of milk, who had cameras in the house, and who secretly hid an AirTag deep in the car, under the tire in the trunk, wrapped in black duct tape. I had a dad who told me to drink bleach after tie-dyeing shirts with friends in the backyard and dumping the bleach in the alley because I didn't want to put it down the drain.
So I always clung to male figures in my life who I respected. I projected onto them what I wish my dad would have been. I would watch Arrow in 6th grade in the back of the bus after I had bought my first phone from my caddying money. Because I was raised Christian, I was never allowed to watch anything other than PBS, and I only listened to 98.5 KTIS. I first discovered rap music from the kids in the back of the bus who mostly lived in North Minneapolis. I discovered the DC universe when my cousin secretly showed me one night when she was visiting from Chicago. I was hooked from the first episode I watched of The Flash. So when I encountered the character of Oliver Queen, who was strong enough to survive anything, I latched on. I was convinced for years that my soccer coach was Oliver Queen. Every time I went to soccer practice, I imagined him as Oliver Queen. This vision morphed as I got older, but each time I would find a male role model, either real or fictional, and cling on for dear life. I obsessed over YouTubers, technologists, and self-help authors.
But when the pastor had an affair with the singer, my trust in male authority shattered. The singer had an angelic voice. I vividly remember standing behind her one day when I was 10, listening to her sing the songs at Calvary. I aspired to sing like her someday in the musicals I partook in, as well as the church choir. And then when the church split in half, I lost a lot of trust in the adults in my life. I took it upon myself to try to reunite the church. I poured through the ELCA bylaws to try to help resolve the conflict and bring about peace again, but my mom said no. My mom, as much as I love her, does not like conflict. In fact most of my childhood she diffused the arguments between my dad and me. My dad would yell at me, I would go in my room and cry, and a few hours later I would receive an apology from my dad after my mom talked to him. The cycle would repeat again and again, and at some point I gave up on both of them.
It was a perfect storm. I was convinced I needed to leave home. My nervous system had relished the structure of my childhood with two hours of sports every night, excelling at school, and leading the clubs and groups I was a part of. But at 16 it started to crumble. After 10th grade, I had both aced my four AP exams and made it to junior nationals for cross country skiing. I was on top of the world. I believed I could do anything. So I channeled my energy into leaving. I would buy a van, renovate it, and move to California. Why California? Because it was the Schelling point for all the characters in the biographies I read.
One particular evening in February was the final straw with my parents. I was 16 at the time, the winter after covid, and my dad had taken my SIM card out of my phone because I refused to go to church after the scandal. I had lost faith in God and religious institutions. I didn't want to go. It was around 7 PM on a frigid Thursday night in Minnesota; the temperature hovered around -5 degrees fahrenheit. I sat outside on the patio step, wearing a t-shirt, in an act of protest against the compromise of core values I was being asked to make. At the time I was in a political philosophy class and had been part of walkouts at school for gun violence, so I felt my protest was justified. I no longer felt compelled to sit through sermons, and refused to listen to my parents lecture me on why they felt that my belief system was wrong. I always carried with me an existential curiosity. Around the age of 12 I asked my youth leader if God acted as a puppet master, with all of us humans simply playing out our scripted role. I would later confront this question again in philosophy class 9 years later.
But the cookie started to crumble. I would sit on the floor of my room sobbing. Sobbing because I no longer trusted my parents, sobbing because I no longer trusted the adults in my life, and sobbing because I both knew how little power I held, and how much strength it would take to pull myself out of the situation I was in. At the time my parents chalked it up to teenage angst. But the depression started to creep in.
I have journal entries from 2021.
"Sometime my mom makes me want to run into a wall. She was about to not let me get my Covid-19 vaccine because I wasn't being obedient and practicing 'good Christian values' also she won't let me go to Partens In Pediatrics because she thinks she knows what's right. I want to be done with this, I despise my mom talking and her opinions. I don't appreciate the Minnesota weather, I don't appreciate having my money, medical, food, and living situation managed by my parents."
During my childhood my mom refused to vaccinate me. I had flown by myself to California right when I turned 15 because I didn't require a parent chaperone to do so. In Tahoe with my cousin, I was first exposed to the idea of why herd immunity and vaccination was important. I came back from that trip determined to be vaccinated. It was in these schisms that I slowly developed a quiet rage. Whether it was the rainbow background on my Apple Watch that my mom confronted me about because she thought it meant I was gay. It was in the prayers that there was something wrong with me and the arguments where I was labeled as irresponsible and disrespectful. As an only child it was always two on one, which never helped.
So I started antidepressants. But when my mom found out, she stopped them and found a Christian therapist for me instead. One day after expressing frustration around my ambitions the Christian therapist told me that I would have more time in heaven to accomplish my dreams. After that session I was done.
I poured myself into my escape plan. Once I realized that you needed an adult to co-sign a car purchase, I threw myself into getting into Harvard for cross country skiing. I read essays from the Harvard lawsuit, I watched all the YouTube videos I could find, and I wrote a research proposal to evaluate ferritin levels and endurance fatigue in female athletes. I applied for grants, started a chess club, and helped re-write the student council charter and get Eid added to our district calendar. As I pursued all these goals, sometimes frantically and sometimes with more intention than I could execute, I stumbled across the concept of Ikigai, which is to build your life at the intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. I knew I needed to build my skills in leadership and gain the education needed to understand the physical and molecular world. I identified my main passions: worldwide equity in unalienable rights, biology, and understanding human consciousness. But it wasn't enough. After months of back and forth with Chris City and a visit to Harvard to meet the team and coach, I was deferred. This sent me into a two week depression where I couldn't get out of bed, and I had no motivation to study. I withdrew from my PSEO classes, and started planning a new escape.
But even at this time, the signs of mania started to emerge.
"So it is currently 5:26 AM today and I didn't want to do a voice memo because I think writing it down is more effective because I never look back and listen to my voice memos. Right now I'm going to the gym and I have so much energy. I don't know why I have so much energy and I had a crazy dream last night. I was doing basically like parkour in super high train tunnels, like think Arcola High, but they were through the city so they're kind of dug underground and they were abandoned train tunnels. I need to go west, yeah. And I was doing parkour with all the soccer girls, which is really strange because they would never do anything I feel like that put their lives in danger, so it's a little bit scary actually. And then somehow my parents found out where we were and they were coming to find me. And the location is on 94, so it was 94 east. I'm somewhere like in Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, which is really interesting that I had an exact location. And what else, oh yeah, and then I had a dream that night or something that P, or sorry M, was doing the same thing with her friend but there was doing it like a little bit scarier, and yeah that was my dream."
That is one of the cruelest things about bipolar. In the beginning it does not feel like destruction. It feels like revelation.
It feels like finally becoming yourself.
And when you are eighteen, or seventeen, or even sixteen, how are you supposed to know the difference between vision and illness? Between giftedness and instability? Between faith and delusion? Especially when the very same force that is destabilizing you is also making you feel more alive, more creative, more driven, and more certain than you ever have before?
And somewhere along the journey I started to confuse suffering with significance.
If I was in pain, it meant I cared.
If I was obsessive, it meant I was serious.
If I was sleep-deprived, it meant I was high energy.
If I was devastated, it meant I had given my best.
If I was spinning out, it meant I was capable of pushing beyond most people.
I understand most clearly now. I did not just want freedom. I wanted transcendence. I wanted to blast so far beyond the confines of my childhood, my family, Minnesota, religion, fear, and the terrifying smallness of being a girl with no power. I wanted no one to ever be able to put me back in the box I came from.
California symbolized that for me. So did Harvard. So did Berkeley. So did cross country skiing, startups, coding, hackathons, boys with grand visions, group chats full of plans, flights booked recklessly, and every city that made me feel like I was in motion.
Motion became my god.
If I was moving, I did not have to feel trapped.
If I was striving, I did not have to feel powerless.
If I was dreaming, I did not have to grieve.
But my biology caught up with me. I can see it looking backwards. The antidepressants at 17 pushed my bipolar brain into a spin. The spin made my nervous system more sensitive. The high of traveling Europe alone, moving to California, meeting new people, being wrapped up in the bubble of AI, meeting friends my age, and entering the social circle I so desperately craved in high school felt like a never ending Tootsie Roll. And then it came crashing down in March of 2023.
"Do you have a clue how badly I wanted to rip R's name tag off, cut the end off, burn it into mine? Do you know how much I wanted to make an anonymous blog and start a gossip page at warp for the memes? How much I wanted to throw a party on the last night of warp and get everyone dancing? Can you try to comprehend the desire I had to build a cloud chamber, code the Stroop test, set up an orienteering course, go on treadmill runs, run a stable marriage pairing social experiment, make a music video with GPT-3 generated lyrics for warp, make a watch with a touch screen user interface with four additional physical buttons to time-track, play capture the flag with secret social rules, and get all the way through linear algebra and coding? Instead I woke up every morning with a voice yelling at me that I didn't have the motivation to get up, that I was thinking too hard, that I already got enough sleep so I should get up, but that I felt stressed out... I mean, who was I anyways, compared to these cool people? They all had things to talk about, and nothing that I'd done in the past could come to mind. And these social interactions, I didn't want to mess them up, and it seemed like other people had conversation flow so easily, and me, well I probably wasn't optimizing the conversations like I should. And someone told me to talk to R, so I did. But the words couldn't come, and I felt myself spiraling, like I've never had this much trouble socializing before, and instead I was wondering if I was presenting myself with coherent thoughts, and I slowly felt the doors to access my creative ideas closing, and I wanted to crawl in a hole and cry. And then I felt rage, slowly creeping up through my chest, and I've never felt this feeling before. I was around so many cool people, and I felt the most isolated, misunderstood, and debilitated that I've ever felt in my life. It feels like life decided to throw me in the headlights, and I froze. I couldn't escape the loop of meta-thoughts. The next day would come around and I'd wake up and realize that the next day would come around and I would wake up and I would think about the next day coming around and my lack of ability to wake up, and by this point I felt like I spent too much mental energy thinking about this, so I would think about my list of tasks for the day, and I 1) had a meeting at 12 I needed to edit a video for, and 2) I had a job I was supposed to be doing, and 3) should I go back to California or stay in Texas? 'Oh shoot, I'm going to miss class if I don't start working on the video now, because it'll probably take me an hour to edit it, but I probably also need 10 minutes to jump out of bed, put on clothes, and run there, so I only have 50 minutes. But hey, 50 minutes is better than nothing, but my computer is back in big ELC so I'd need to get up and put my clothes on now and edit the video there.' And then I stop to think for a second and realize how anxious I feel. 'Maybe I need a break,' I think. Rob, Alex, and I didn't meet last week, and I'm still at warp, so surely they'll understand if I don't edit the video today... I guess I'll sleep for thirty more minutes... and the loop reruns. For eight more days, until I realize that if I keep this up I might break, and I throw in the towel. So now I'm left in defeat, and it feels like it's just me and my anxious thoughts, wallowing in this pool of depression."
And the oscillations got bigger from there until I reached a breaking point. I planned my dream spring break trip. Camping on Angel Island, sleeping in a Model Y in Marin, and a trip down the coast to Big Sur to attend Easter mass with my aunt. But when I was on Angel Island for my delayed birthday celebration with myself, I felt the numbness that signals the start of a depressive episode. It flipped so quickly. That morning I had been dancing in South Park, confidently walking down the SF streets to get to Target, excitedly telling my coworkers about my camping plans during standup. But on the ferry as I felt my demeanor shift, I knew that something was off. I subconsciously realized my worst fear; this was my dream vacation, with no stressors, and somehow the floor dropped beneath me with no warning. If this could happen in California, it could happen anywhere. I panicked. I camped on Angel Island, sat at one of the most beautiful beaches in the Bay looking out at the city and felt nothing. I tried to calm my nervous system by laying on the beach and letting the waves lap in and out, but the moment I started hiking back up to the campsite, the feeling came back. In the afternoon, when I was back in San Francisco, I hid in the nap room at the office. I didn't want to move and I craved darkness. I knew something was horribly wrong. I called my mom and my cousin and eventually booked a flight home for the next morning. And so here I am. Back in Minnesota after I swore I'd stay here indefinitely two months ago. One manic episode later. And now fully surrendering to the bipolar. I've seen the pattern too many times now, seen how horrible the depression is, and how chaotic and destructive the manias are. I now know that however much I try to outrun it, it will always come back to me unless I stabilize. So I sit on the couch, I sleep a lot, I play chess, and I write. In the hope that over the next couple of months I can figure this out.
But until that happens, I am learning a different kind of courage.
Not the courage of booking the flight, or making the grand plan, or throwing myself headfirst into another city, another person, another dream. I know that kind of courage well. It has carried me across oceans and into rooms I once only fantasized about. It has given me stories, friends, wonder, and moments so electric I thought my chest might split open from gratitude and split open from agony. But it has also burned me. Again and again.
So now I am trying to learn the courage of staying.
Staying in one place long enough to let my nervous system unclench. Staying alive through the flatness, through the grief, through the humiliation of admitting that I cannot outwit my own biology. Staying with the ordinary rhythms of a life that does not announce itself as spectacular. Waking up. Taking the meds. Eating breakfast. Texting a friend back. Organizing laundry. Letting a day be just a day instead of a referendum on whether my life matters.
This is much harder for me than boarding a plane to Europe alone at eighteen. Harder than filing for a restraining order. Harder than pitching a crazy idea, rallying people around it, and willing something into existence through sheer force of hope. Because the hardest thing for me has never been movement. It has been stillness. It has been accepting that peace is not empty just because it is quiet.
For so long I thought the point of life was to be effervescent. To squeeze every possible flavor out of existence. To become someone so alive, so accomplished, so extraordinary that no one could ever reduce me to the frightened girl crying on the floor of her childhood bedroom. I thought if I just kept going, kept building, kept loving intensely enough, kept chasing beauty hard enough, I could outrun the darkness that kept stalking me.
But bipolar has humbled me in a way nothing else could.
It has forced me to confront the reality that there is no finish line where I become immune to myself. No city where I magically stop crashing. No relationship that can love me out of my own nervous system. No amount of achievement that makes me exempt from the simple, repetitive labor of caring for a sick brain.
But if I stop trying to turn every feeling into a prophecy, every coincidence into a sign, every high into a calling, then maybe I can finally begin to live inside my life instead of constantly lunging beyond it. Maybe I can stop worshipping the edge. Maybe I can stop confusing suffering with depth. Maybe I can stop measuring my worth by how much I can endure.
I do not mean small in a sad way. I mean small like a candle protected from the wind. I think that is what I am after now. Not transcendence. Not escape. Not some magnificent proof that all my chaos was secretly genius. Just enough stability to hear my own thoughts without them turning into a stampede. Enough peace to enjoy the people I love without making them responsible for saving me. Enough discipline to choose the long game over the thrilling one.
Because I am starting to understand that healing is not glamorous. It is not cinematic. It does not look like standing on a cliff with the wind in your hair as the soundtrack swells. It looks like turning down invitations. Canceling plans. Withdrawing from classes. It is in going to bed on time. Eating healthy food. Choosing to stay alive.
I do not know what happens next. I do not know how many months it will take before I trust my mind again. I do not know whether the future version of me will live in California or Minnesota or somewhere I cannot yet imagine. I do not know which dreams were mine and which belonged to the illness. I do not know how to separate the girl from the fire completely.
Still here after all the flights, all the crashes, all the nights of terror, all the mornings of dread, all the false starts and grand plans and humiliating collapses. Still here after trying to construct a self out of movement. Still here after seeing, over and over, how quickly a beautiful thing can tip into something dangerous.
Still here.
And for now, that has to be enough.
Maybe one day I will look back on this chapter with clean lines and perfect language and be able to explain exactly what happened. Maybe I will be able to pin it down neatly: the childhood, the church, the escape velocity, the first antidepressants, the first clear mania, the first devastating crash, the final surrender. But I am writing this from inside it, while the paint is still wet, while the clock is still ticking but this time with the intention of defusing the bomb instead of loading it with gasoline.
But I want to make it clear that this isn't me giving up or wasting my potential. If anything, it's fueled me my whole life thus far as a superpower in some ways, and now I recognize it. Which means I'm able to tame it. I've got my eyes on a combined MD and PhD program at the University of Minnesota. I still want to help people. That's always been the goal. I still want to build nanorobots. I still want to understand the brain and help all people with a mood disorder. It's what I've dedicated my life to. And now, once I can calm the storm, I'll be able to continue on that quest. And in the meantime, I'm letting the storm pass, and working towards my steady state.