Finally feeling brave (Part 2 of 3)

I also did some  drawings to represent what has happened. I'm very bad at drawing, and indeed all forms of visual representation. I also don't have a perfect memory, so it's not to scale. My first diagram represents the first 32 years of my life. On the x axis, we have time, and on the y axis we have mood. Again, we have some greyness and question marks over the first few years, followed by three dips representing bad patches at 5, 7 and 9 years old. The little zigzag represents the normal ups and downs of childhood, and soon after that, you can see what are supposed to be my annual difficulties, all the way through my teens and 20s. Towards the end of this diagram, the lows become lower and closer together. I was officially diagnosed at 20, and more fully later on. The last bad patch on this diagram lasted ten months, and was due to a large amount of stress and having a very unsettled baby. Her first few months were difficult, but she is fine now. From 32 onwards, I was much more stable, despite becoming increasingly scared of seeing people socially, going to work and leaving the house. Despite my fear, I never stopped doing the things that I actually needed to do, so I've been lucky enough to remain in circulation, so to speak. I still don't socialise much at all.
   
You might be wondering about the green dots all over the page. These have been scattered at random, but are supposed to represent good, bad and indifferent individual days. Life being as complex as it is, things have rarely been all bad or all good. There can be good days mixed in with the bad, and vice versa. The red line shows the trends and demarcates the general patterns of illness. I wanted to show that there's always good, bad and middling in the mix, whatever I have been through. Maybe the same is true for you. I sometimes resented being told this, but there is positivity out there and we sometimes need to actively look for it.  
   
Please note that although there have been some great days, weeks, months and events in my life, at no point has my mood truly crossed into mania. People ask me from time to time if I'm bipolar, and it's not something I take lightly at all. I am not, and to claim that I am would be an insult to my friends who really are. When I explain that I have a bit of a mercurial personality, an artistic temperament and never, ever switch my brain off, sometimes people take that as further evidence for having bipolar illness, but I actually don't. I constantly channel my mind into puzzles, learning, creating, volunteering and all kinds of other projects, simply because letting it stay still is a recipe for disaster. I've found that sitting around thinking about things too much is generally not good for me.