The Girl Before the Diagnosis, ( My Story Part One)

I didn't always have the diagnosis  "Bipolar II".

In fact, I didn't even know what Bipolar II meant when the doctor looked into my eyes and said "This is what I think you have."

I remember being angry after my diagnosis because I consider myself a fairly informed person and none of my reading had prepared me for my first bipolar episode.

My parents always had Reader's Digest, Prevention and other magazines laying around the house and so I'd read.  And read.  And read.  And yet, if I DID read about bipolar, about mania and hypomania, I sure didn't remember it.  Depression, yes, but not the other end of the spectrum.

But honestly, even if I had read about Bipolar, I would have thought, "Oh!  Wow.  Sure glad that's not me.  Poor girl."  And I would have put the article behind me and just moved on to the next thing.

So who was the girl before the diagnosis?

She was a mother and a wife, and before that, she was a little girl who thought her life was the cat's meow.

I do remember thinking that I had it made when I was a kid because I grew up on a farm.  I loved all of it. . . hours and hours of time spent outdoors with horses and cows; rides in the tractor or pick-up with my dad;  swimming in the irrigation canals and eating really well because my mom cooked from scratch everyday and we gardened and raised our own meat.  

But my life was a little lonely . . .

This is because my dad had two passions:  farming and church.  And those were the only things I really knew, and the church was very small.  ( I went to school at the little church school which was also very small, about eight children!)

Every Sunday as a child I went to church and always I heard the same message "God loves you!   He wants you in heaven, but you can't get there on your own.  You need Jesus.  He paid the price for you to go to heaven.  But it's a gift and you must reach out and take the gift.  Admit that you can't get to heaven on your own, that you aren't good enough and ask Jesus to take away your sins and live in your heart."

Seemed like a pretty good deal to me, especially as God is love and all powerful and would never leave me.  So around the age of six or seven I prayed a variation of that prayer.

My life got a little less lonely when I entered the public school system at age fourteen.  

I knew from all my days at church that I was supposed to be telling other people about God and inviting them to church but I had a hard time with that concept because our church tended to be a bit embarrassing and sometimes people in my church would say rude things about other kinds of churches and so I was very quiet about God at school. 

But when I was sixteen a new pastor came to our church, a kinder, gentler man and he brought a kinder, gentler spirit to our church.  I began to think that maybe church people were okay.  This pastor got us teenagers off to Bible camp and around other Christian kids.  And I fell in love with the "Son of a Preacher Man."  I was eighteen and he and I left for Bible College together.