Living with the crazy label

So I guess I didn't scare you off, huh? Good! Welcome back!

You know why most people keep their mental health diagnosis a secret? Stigma. Any time you admit to someone that you’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, you risk being judged and labeled by people who are misinformed and uneducated.

And there will always, ALWAYS, be the assholes who will use it to try and insult and hurt you. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been called “psycho bitch” or had comments about voices in my head and multiple personalities directed at me. 

But here’s the kicker…you know who most of those comments come from? People who have never even met me.

Yet somehow just having that one little piece of information seems to make them think they know everything about me. They assume it means I’m a bad mother. They assume its the reason why I’m single or why my relationships have ended. They assume that every issue anyone has ever had with me is my fault because I’m the crazy one.

Oddly enough, I have my shit together more than most of them do. Some of the people that have tried to use my diagnosis against me have fallen into at least one, sometimes more, of the following categories:

• Full blown alcoholics
• Active drug addicts
• Adulterers
• High school dropouts
• Unemployed
• In abusive relationships
• Are the abusers
• Borderline illiterate (which is really funny when they try to insult me with a text message or post or email that’s filled spelling and grammar errors)

And these people will say stuff like that thinking they can hurt me with it…but do they seriously think that I’m going to give a shit what they think when I don’t even know or remember their name and couldn’t pick them out of a lineup? Do they really think they can hurt me with something that I make fun of myself all the time? I named my blog after it. I have a sticker on my roller derby helmet that says Crazy Bitch and it used to be the ringtone on my phone. Being called crazy is a joke to me, not an insult. Sticks and stones and all that…

Let’s get a few things straight here, okay? Yes, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So were a lot of people –  successful people, brilliant people, famous people. And like anyone living with any type of illness, whether its diabetes or epilepsy, my illness is managed with medication on a regular basis. I am functioning at a level equal to (and in some cases, ABOVE) many non-bipolar people. 

Oh, and while we’re at it… schizophrenics are the ones that hear voices and its dissociative identity disorder that has more than one personality. I am bipolar. The only voice in my head is my own and I only have one personality, which just happens to be a fabulous one.

Morons.

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Tags: crazy bitch, stupid people

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