Bipolar Chic

I originally had six parts to my story but I decided to combine them all into one. This is a very long page, so you’ll either want to print it out or make sure you have time set aside to read it.

Updated 5/10/09

Looking back on my childhood and teen years, I see how I had symptoms of bipolar disorder, but the symptoms weren’t that bad. For the most part, I was a quiet, introverted kid who was often depressed and anxious. I was sometimes prone to temper tantrums when provoked, where I would scream at people and throw things. I attributed this to my violent father and it seemed I was mimicking his behavior.

Things didn’t get that bad until age 18 when I moved in with an abusive boyfriend who was a drug dealer. He pushed many drugs on me, and I was often so drugged that I had no clue what was going on around me. I became physically ill for many months and was unable to work. I probably can’t say which drugs I took because I think Google would ban me. But if you really want to know, email me and I’ll tell you.

Between the ages of 18 and 19, my mental state was not good- partly due to the drug use and partly due to the verbal abuse from my boyfriend. I had trouble tuning out my own thoughts and paying attention to what people were saying. I struggled with strange obsessive thoughts like this fear that I was cross-eyed. I had that fear for years. It didn’t stop until a few years ago, and even now, the thought still returns occasionally.

Things improved for me when I left the loser boyfriend but then I found another one: my ex-husband. He wasn’t as bad as the drug dealer was but he was also verbally abusive and later became sexually abusive. He helped me come off the drugs and talked me through the withdrawals. He was against me using drugs, which was a good thing. But ultimately, he was not a good force in my life.

Over the course of the next couple of years, I had a hard time keeping a job. I was accepting low paying jobs that I didn’t like just because I needed a job. People would make me mad and I would quit. Sometimes I would call in sick a lot, because either I was really sick or I just didn’t feel like going in.

When I was 20, I was sick with bronchitis and my ex was being mean to me so I drank ant poison. I told my mother what I had done and she took me to the emergency room where the staff pumped my stomach. I never want to go through that again. They stick this tube down your nose and it hurts and makes your nose bleed. They then admitted me to the hospital, but put me in a regular room rather than the psychiatric ward. I think it’s because I showed regret in ER when I was having my stomach pumped. The next day, a psychiatrist saw me and put me on Zoloft. It seemed to help. A few months later, I went off it because I ran out of money. People at the restaurant I was working at were being mean to me one day, and I just couldn’t take it. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I cried for hours. I was walking around doing my job and crying the whole time. Later, I called the boss (she was one of the people giving me a hard time) and told her I quit.

I went through a few more jobs after that. I also started back at school again. I went to a small business college and got an associates degree in accounting. At least I managed to finish that but I don’t even use my degree now.

I got married at age 21 and that marriage began horribly. My husband was into hurting me sexually and would either ignore my protests or become angry with me for protesting. I left him two weeks later and moved back in with my parents. He came and said, “I’m sorry and I will never do it again.” Well that turned out to be a lie. At some point, I started taking antidepressants again to deal with this, but I don’t remember exactly when or what it was. Then I became pregnant. I was actually trying to get pregnant to make him happy. That is what he wanted, though he didn’t have the financial means to support a child and I was in college at the time. I told him, “We are not financially ready.” And he said, “With that attitude, you’ll never be ready.” So stupid me, I took the bait and gave him what he wanted.

I went off the antidepressants once I was pregnant to keep the baby safe. During my first trimester, I was throwing up constantly and sleeping a lot. I missed classes. I really felt horrible. I was losing weight and was afraid I would lose the baby. The smell of smoke made me throw up. My husband was not considerate enough to smoke outside when I would ask him to. He would get up and turn the fan on, which did not help. So I felt trapped in the bedroom. I remember thinking, “This is my prison.” He would yell at me for sleeping too much and not doing his laundry. So I left. Then he accused me of cheating on him and went around telling people the baby wasn’t his. No, it couldn’t be anything that he did to make me leave, now could it? The head games and accusations continued throughout my pregnancy. It was a very stressful time. I worked a few different jobs while I was pregnant. At about the 8th month, I couldn’t work anymore because I was just too big and uncomfortable. I finished my college classes one month before I had the baby.

A few months after having the baby, I got back together with my then-husband. We were only together a few months before I left again. Right before I left, I stopped breast-feeding and got on Prozac. It did help me feel better, but there was the beginning of some manic symptoms. After I left, I got a job with a trucking company. The following summer, (I think I was 23 then) my soon-to-be-ex husband threatened to kill me over child support. So I put a restraining order on him. My doctor increased my Prozac because of what I was going through. Well that sent me into hypomania. I had a fight with my mother over her taking sides with my ex-husband against me. I do believe that she provoked me. There are a few people in this world that can provoke me to anger and she is one of them. I really believe she stabbed me in the back in that whole situation.

Anyway, when I told my doctor and therapist about what happened with my mother, they diagnosed me as Bipolar II with rapid cycling (which was probably caused by the Prozac), and put me on Depakote.

So that’s how I my bipolar disorder developed. I don’t know if the Prozac brought it on, or the drugs I partook in when I was younger. Like I said, I had symptoms as a child and teen but they were mild. It could be that I’ve always had it but the drugs and/or Prozac made the disorder more severe.

Around the time of my diagnosis, I was having difficulties with my mother and ex-husband. As I previously mentioned, my ex-husband threatened to kill me because he was angry about the court ordering him to pay child support. My mother remained in contact with him during this time and would allow him into the house at any time. She didn’t think he was dangerous, and didn’t take my feelings seriously. She thought that I exaggerated and overreacted, when in fact, he actually made the threats to HER. HE told HER that he wanted to kill me. Well, she didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I’m sorry, but when someone threatens to kill your child, you do everything you can to protect that child. You don’t side with the perpetrator against the victim, and set the victim up to be further harmed or even killed. And that’s exactly what she did. Do you understand my anger towards her?

Because my ex-husband could walk in the door at any time (without knocking, might I add), I did not feel safe living at my parents’ house. So I moved in with some friends and lived in their basement for a few months.

I was also under a lot of pressure at work. I was overworked and underpaid. I had a lot of responsibility- I was doing the jobs of three different positions, yet I was being paid for the lowest position.

All this stress, the increase in Prozac and then the fight with my mother just made me snap. Looking back at what I was going through at the time, I think even a non-bipolar person would have a difficult time coping.

A few months later, I moved into my own apartment, which was really nice. I became engaged to a guy that I met through the friends I had been staying with. He turned out to be a gold digger and I broke up with him about 8 months later.

Shortly before I broke up with him, the sexual harassment started. There was a dispatcher at the trucking company where I worked who was determined to get in my pants. He was very persistent and would degrade me and call me names. There were a few times that I broke down in tears, which made me appear weak. Abusers always love to prey on the weak. My boss turned a blind eye to it and did nothing when I reported the harassment to him. Finally, I went over his head and reported the behavior to the area vice president. The VP ordered my boss to fire the guy who was harassing me.

Months went by. My boss was transferring to another department. And guess who was taking over as terminal manager – the father of the guy who had been fired. I could see things lining up, and I knew that man would fire me as soon as he took over. I remembered the sexist comments he made in the initial interview. So I quit. And sure enough, the man “cleaned house”. He fired one of my friends who had spoken negatively about the man’s son and made the comment that “the problem is now gone”. Next, the company hired another terminal manager to take his place and put the “dad” solely in charge of his other terminal. The new manager rehired the loser that harassed me. Drivers who were friends of mine protested the rehiring of this man.

Then – the area VP – the one who had initially given orders to fire the guy – visited the terminal and held a meeting with the drivers. He told the drivers that it was his decision to bring the guy back, and that there was no evidence of sexual harassment, and if anyone had a problem with it, they could talk to him. The drivers felt pretty helpless about the whole thing so that is when they called me. I really didn’t want to deal with it; I just wanted to move on with my life, but they said, “You are the only one who can do something about this.”

So I did. My ultimate goal was the permanent termination of this man and changes to the company’s policies. I filed a claim with EEOC and hired a lawyer. I really wanted to take the case to court. I didn’t care if I won or lost. I wanted to do what was right. It wasn’t about money. Apparently, it was to my lawyer. He pushed for mediation. I, being naïve and trusting the attorney’s opinion, agreed to mediation. Mediation was a joke. I got a small settlement and I had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and I had to sign an agreement that I would never apply to work for that company again. I almost laughed. That was absolutely not going to be a problem. But I didn’t get what I wanted. The company didn’t agree to permanently terminate that a**hole, and they didn’t change any of their policies. They weren’t an equal opportunity employer, and they asked questions like “sex” and “marital status” on their applications. They didn’t agree to change their interviewing techniques either. At the end of it, they acted all p***ed as if I had just taken them for a ride. Whatever.

I worked for this company for two years. The thing was that I really liked my job. I had respect from the drivers (and that’s hard being a female) because I did my job so well. I basically ran that terminal. My boss would be gone most of the day playing golf or doing God knows what, leaving me in charge of running the terminal. I dispatched the drivers, handled all the customer service, routed freight, handled OS&D, checked driver logs, handled accounts payable, scanned all the documents and entered all the information into the system. I didn’t make much money but I was hoping to move up in the company, like maybe transfer to the corporate office. After I left, I was devastated. I really wanted to stay but one person ruined it for me. All because he was determined to have sex with me. What really p***ed me off, is that he won. He got his job back and I didn’t have mine.

I went into a very deep depression after this. I took medication for a little while, but didn’t like the side effects or my doctor so I quit. I decided that I wasn’t bipolar and didn’t need medication.

I did some temp work for a few months after leaving the trucking company, but nothing really worked out. I actually walked out of my last assignment. I absolutely did not like it there. It was a small business run by a couple who fought a lot and liked to bring their employees into their disagreements. They were also very picky about petty things, like the dishes. They kept accusing me of leaving all these dishes in the sink and those dishes were not mine. They would actually say, “We didn’t have this problem until you came here.” They were really making me mad. Finally, one day I walked out because a coworker was being nasty with me about making a mistake on a customer order. The job was only paying $7.00/hour, so I didn’t feel like I was being paid enough to put up with that crap.

Overall, I just had a very negative attitude about working since the incident with the trucking company. There had been other incidents before when I was younger that made me mad, but nothing affected me as badly as this did. After this, I really didn’t want to work anymore. My thought was, “If this is the kind of crap I have to put up with just to have a job, it’s not worth it.” Right after the incident, I told my doctor I didn’t want to work anymore and she encouraged me to keep working. So I knew that I couldn’t convince the doctor that I couldn’t work to get disability.

Right now, we are at the year 2003 and I am 26 years old.

I had just quit the last assignment with the temp agency that summer. Prior to this, my ex-husband and I had been talking about getting back together. (I failed to mention that the divorce was final in 2001, right after I was diagnosed as bipolar). He was having problems with his girlfriend, who was also bipolar, and was sleeping on my couch every now and then. We had some talks, where he told me that if we got back together, I wouldn’t have to work. He said he just wanted to be with me and his son, and he would work and make enough money to support us. That is part of what prompted me to quit that job. Right before I quit, I called him and asked, “Did you mean what you said when you said I wouldn’t have to work?” He said yes. So I walked out.

Shortly after that, my son and I moved out of our apartment and into a house my husband was renting. We lived there only a few months because we were planning on moving to the coast. During this time I sold Avon and looked for work-at-home jobs online.

On Halloween, we moved into a rental house near the coast. I remember it was Halloween because all these kids kept coming to our door asking for candy and we had to turn them away because we had no candy, due to the fact we were in the middle of moving.

At this point we were both unemployed. My ex-husband did temp work for a valve repair company in the area, and had been for many years. The jobs paid very well (like $1,000 per week), but he would go for months with no work. I think there may have been one or two jobs that year, but nothing substantial.

I think in December, he started working for a trucking company. He didn’t last long, maybe a month or two. I really didn’t blame him in this instance. The dispatcher told him to do a local run and he asked, “Am I getting paid hourly or mileage?” The dispatcher replied, “Mileage”. My ex said, “Then I’m not doing it.” The dispatcher said, “Bring your truck in then.” My ex didn’t even realize he was fired until he got there. He thought he was just going to be off the rest of the day because they didn’t have anything else for him. He went in the office and the dispatcher said, “Get your sh** out of here and go home.”

He applied for other jobs but didn’t find anything else during the time we lived at this location. So he was pretty much at the mercy of the valve repair company.

After months of applying for online jobs, I managed to land a pretty good online job called “document coding”. This is basically where you enter important information from legal documents into fields to create records that go in a searchable database for the client. Most document coding companies pay a per-document or per page rate. So the faster you can type, the more money you make; however, accuracy is important. If you make too many mistakes, they’ll can you. Fortunately, that never happened to me.

Coding is okay. It’s not like a full-time job. You won’t ever get a steady paycheck. There will be times you will have a lot of work, and times you will have no work. Those are the scary times. Many coders choose to work for more than one company in order to insure that they have a steady workflow. But even then, there are times when none of the companies has work available.

I made anywhere from $400 a month to $1400 a month. So there were good times and bad times. Sometimes the bad times were my fault. The work was there, but I just didn’t feel like doing it. Coding is probably one of the most boring jobs there is. At this point in my life, I liked it because it enabled me to be at home instead of out in the workplace, which I so intensely detested and feared. It also allowed me more time with my son, which I didn’t get when I was working outside the home. Every day, I took about an hour to “home school” him. He was about four at the time. I taught him the alphabet and his numbers. Working from home also kept him out of daycare, which he hated about as much as I hated working outside the home. I noticed during this time, he did not get sick once- probably because he wasn’t exposed to any viruses.

My ex-husband and I agreed to be roommates only. We were living in the same house only to raise our son together. We were not to have a relationship with one another because we couldn’t get along whenever we had a relationship. We slept in separate rooms. We were allowed to date other people if we so chose. I didn’t choose that path. I don’t know if he did or not. I know he had some female friends he chatted with online and once went to a get-together and met them, but I didn’t know if anything happened. I didn’t care either.

Around January of 2004, I realized I was depressed. I got out my medications from the previous year. I definitely wasn’t taking the Depakote because of what it did to my immune system, so I tossed that bottle. But the Paxil was still in date. So I started taking it. It made me extremely lethargic. I was only awake a few hours a day. I was like, what’s the point of an antidepressant if it makes you sleep all the time? I drank a pot of coffee a day and that did nothing for me. I quit the Paxil after about a month.

In April of 2004, our landlord announced that he was selling the house and we had two weeks to get out. We had no money to put up first month’s rent and deposit on a new place, so we didn’t know what we were going to do. He then told us he had other rental properties we might be interested in. The first house he showed us was insulting – it was a dilapidated house with a caved-in roof. We practically laughed at him. Next, he showed us a house that was not in great shape but it was in better shape than the previous house. It needed some work done to it and previous tenants had already begun. This house was located about 2 hours north of where we were currently living. Since my neither me nor my ex were tied down to a job in that area, it seemed okay to move. We decided to move to this house, mostly out of desperation. We just needed a place to live.

Well living in that house was a nightmare. It began with the plumbing. The last people that lived there did not drain the pipes when they moved out, so the pipes froze and busted over the winter. The water pump had also busted. The water heater did not work. We had no stove. The electrical panel looked rigged and was probably a fire hazard. There was no electricity working in my room upstairs. Windows were broken and missing. Pieces of siding were missing. There was termite damage. The yard pretty much stayed flooded, since it rained so much in this area. The lot had not been graded and did not drain properly so there was standing water all over the yard about 9 months out of the year. The only part that stayed dry was the “driveway”, which was an elevated circle that went all the way around the house. The septic tank also didn’t work and wasn’t built correctly. It was right next to the house, and you could see it. There were two cement slabs side by side with a 4-inch gap between them. I knew it was a septic tank because I could look down through the gap and see sewage floating around. When it would rain, the septic tank would flood also. I really worried about my son getting sick. Thank God that never happened.

My ex and I made a verbal agreement with the property owner that whatever repairs we made to the house, he would apply to the rent. We agreed to a rental amount of $400 per month. In the actual lease, it said that the tenant is responsible for making repairs. I asked the landlord about that, and he said, “Don’t worry about it, I got you covered.” So like a dumb*** I went ahead and signed the lease.

We made thousands of dollars in repairs, and every month, he would call us and ask us for rent money. When I would tell him what repairs we made, he would just interrupt me and start on a diatribe about how we “can’t live for free”.

It cost $600 a month to heat that house because of the poor insulation, missing siding, and missing windows. We used an electric furnace and a kerosene heater. The kerosene heater seemed to do pretty well but kerosene was expensive then. I think it’s even higher now.

Sometime that summer we were finally able to buy a stove. Up until that point, we were using the charcoal grill outside. We had nice neighbors too, sometimes they would bring us food.

The neighbors told us about the shenanigans this landlord had been pulling. They said that about 20 families had lived at that house for the past 15 years, and that each had done “rent-to-own” with this guy. Each had put $5,000 down and then their rent was supposed to go towards the principal. If they got behind on rent, he’d kick them out but he’d keep their $5,000, and then move someone else in and start over.

It turns out this shyster had offered us a rent-to-own deal but we didn’t go for it. When he said $5,000, we balked. I thought, “If I had $5,000, I’d get a real loan, not a rent-to-own deal!” What he was asking for was a down payment. You make a down payment when you actually purchase a home, you don’t make a down payment to rent-to-own. When you rent-to-own, some of the money you pay goes towards the down payment so you don’t have to make one when you buy! ARRGGGHHHH!

In August both my ex and I got outside jobs. Up until that point I had been coding, which wasn’t working out too well since I didn’t have high-speed internet. So basically we were broke until we got jobs. He started working for the water treatment plant for our local county and I got a temporary job with a national plumbing and electrical supply company in the corporate office.

We are now at January 2005.

I was working for a temporary agency at the corporate office at a national plumbing and electrical supply company. My job was pretty good, but it didn’t pay much since it was through a temp agency. It was under $10.00 per hour. I had a 45-minute drive one way. I also had to transport my son to and from daycare every day so that added about 20 minutes to the drive. My hours were from 7:30am to 4:30pm. I had to get up at 5:00 every morning just to get my son and myself ready, get him to the babysitter, and get to work on time. I also had to pay the daycare expense. I don‘t remember how much that was, but I don‘t think it was much because it was basically an after-school program. I had him in the Headstart program, where he spent most of the day. He really did well in Headstart; I think it’s a great program and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Prior to January, we’d been having a problem with the water heater not working and the landlord kept telling us to flush it. So we kept flushing it and it still didn’t work. Finally, my ex pulled the heater out, looked at it, and found that the bottom had rusted completely to the point where it was leaking. So, we had to invest in another water heater among other things. Up until that point, I took a shower once a week because I couldn’t stand cold showers. I also gave my son a bath once a week and I felt terrible doing that because he was so uncomfortable with the cold water.

Just when things started getting comfortable, the water pump busted in January. The pump house was neither insulated nor completed. It was basically half a pump house. It did not completely enclose the pump. It was just some cinderblocks that someone put around the pump half-hazardly and a loose metal lid. Since we did not have the money for a new water pump that month, as we were paying the high costs of heating this poorly insulated house, we basically went without water for a month. We bought those 5-gallon jugs of water at Lowes and used those for drinking and toilet flushing. We took showers at our neighbor’s house, but I only opted to take one once a week because I didn’t want to take advantage of them. At the end of the month, when my ex got his paycheck from the county (he got paid once per month), we bought a pump. We did not pay rent that month. When my landlord asked me for the rent and I explained to him that the water pump busted and we had to buy a new one, he told me we should’ve insulated it. Oh, I was hot, because it was HIS JOB TO MAKE SURE THE HOUSE WAS FIT TO LIVE IN! Can you tell I’m still angry about this?

At the end of January, I quit my job. The company hired me at a lower rate than the temp agency was paying me. Instead of saying something, I just quit. At that point, in my life, my social anxieties were so bad that I had trouble speaking up in any situation. I had trouble speaking period. I was afraid of people, which is another reason I think I quit that job. I do wish I would’ve spoken up, because later the manager told me in an email he would’ve made an adjustment had I said something. It was a very good place to work; they treated their employees fairly and gave plenty of opportunity for advancement. I had friends and I was good at my job. Never once did I see a hint of sexual harassment or discrimination.

I went back to coding. I didn’t make a lot of money doing that, but I was determined to stay at home. The next few months at the “gross house”, as we call it were uncomfortable, but I had just sort of resigned myself to “this is how life is.” We tried to find another place to rent but there weren’t many rental properties where we lived (it was a rural area), and most of the ones that existed wanted to do a credit check. I may have mentioned before my ex had very bad credit (a bankruptcy, judgments, etc.) and wouldn’t pass a credit check. So we had to find someone willing to rent to us without a running a credit check, like a private owner, not a rental company. We did find this cross-eyed bat in a town east of us who ran a trailer park. This lady was a nutcase. She kept asking me if we had spoken before. I told her, “On the phone…” She thought her dumpy trailers were freaking palaces and wanted $800/month for them. Then she decided to do this little interview, “If I were to call your landlord and ask him about you what would you say?” I’m like, what is this a freaking job interview? I should be asking you the questions; I’m the one paying the money here! Needless to say, we didn’t rent from that weirdo.

So we decided to just stay in the gross house. Until… the landlord showed up in April with a lawyer and a family of 13 telling us he is selling the house to this family and we have two weeks to get out. I remember when the kids started to get out of the van, I tried counting and couldn’t. Later their mother told me that there were 11 of them. She also said she was still breastfeeding her two-year-old, and needed a bedroom to do it in. OKAY.

That day, my landlord told me he was selling the property to this family and we had two weeks to move out. I guess he brought his lawyer because he was afraid my ex-husband would beat him up. My ex was gone that day; I think at work.

The whole thing was a shock to me. I wanted to leave, but I wanted time to leave. Two weeks didn’t seem like enough time to find a new place to live, and we had no money for first month’s rent and deposit. I was also upset at my landlord for doing this to us – AGAIN. I mean, we were a family, we had a child, and to put us out like that was just wrong.

But we got lucky! It turned out that my ex’s boss knew an older couple who owned a trailer in another part of the county. We looked at the trailer, spoke with the couple, and signed the lease just a few days later. Within a week, we had moved into the trailer.

We also had the old house condemned so that shady landlord couldn’t continue to rent it out. We were afraid he was doing a rent-to-own deal with this new family, and that they would be taken advantage of. Also, the neighbors were not happy about a family of 13 living in a house where the septic tank did not work properly.

As it turned out, the family really did buy the property. Since they couldn’t live in the house, they parked their RV in the yard and lived in it (all 13 of them)! They tore down the house and built a new one.

The trailer we lived in was old but it had been remodeled (albeit, improperly). It felt like a paradise compared to what we lived in before. There was no ordeal anymore just to cook dinner or take a shower. I was very grateful for what I had.

That summer I did some temp work for the county in the Parks and Recreation department. I helped plan the county fair. I liked the job, but I took it too seriously and got upset about things that I thought needed to be done differently. Had I been on medication, I probably could’ve handled it better. After the fair, Parks and Rec had me come in about once a week and stuff envelopes. I was also coding at home. I really got sick of stuffing envelopes, so I decided to quit and just focus on my work at home. My train of thought was, “I did not get a college degree to stuff envelopes.”

That year my son started kindergarten. My daily routine was this: Up at 7am, got my son ready for school and on the bus, then took a 2-mile walk, then coded till 2pm if the work was available, and then I’d clean. My son got home from school around 3:30. I usually didn’t make it to the shower until four or five. I figured I’d do the exercising and the cleaning first because there was no point in taking a shower in the morning, then getting all sweaty later. It seemed better to get sweaty first and then wash it off later. Well, often, my ex would come home, find me showering, and be mad at me showering in the middle of the day. Sometimes I would nap in the late afternoons and that would make him mad too. I don’t understand what the problem was, because I got everything done.

Anyway, after my shower or nap, I would cook dinner. And it was always the same thing: RED MEAT. My ex would not eat chicken or fish. So it was steak or hamburger. I have learned every possible way to cook hamburger. I would say we lived on hamburger for at least a year. I hate hamburger. I only eat it on occasion, in a meatloaf or something. Besides, it’s bad for you.

Because I didn’t like my ex, I slept on the couch most nights and became addicted to the computer. I was always finding new things to do online. I was a member of message forums, yahoo groups, and I would chat. I would research information. I was very much into new-age type stuff and was always looking up information on that. It consumed most of time. I did manage to take care of my responsibilities, however. Like I said above, I got my son ready for school in the morning, I cleaned the house, and made dinner. Oh, and I also did most of the mowing and yard work! What I feel guilty about is that I emotionally neglected my son during this time. In order to shut out my ex, I shut everyone out.

This is something I struggle with, even today. I’m a natural introvert, and it’s my inclination to withdraw from others, even my family. I still, at times, get caught up in the computer and ignore my family. I don’t think this has anything to do with my disorder, because if it did, it would stop when I was on medication. I do this whether or not I’m on medication.

My father does this as well and perhaps it is either a learned or inherited trait from him.

That ends the chapter of my life up to the year 2006. I will begin 2007 in the new “Part II” of My Story. That’s where changes really begin to take place, leading me to where I am now.