Never feel like you fit in. Get caught trying to slash your wrists during 6th grade. Get taken to a shrink, who suggests meds, and then never see them again. Spend the next five years sleeping twenty hours a day and trying to pretend everything is ok while constantly feeling disconnected from yourself and the world around you. Talk yourself out of killing yourself everyday. Fight with your parents everyday. Get put on medications only to be taken off of them as soon as your mother can convince herself you are ok.

Never be ok.

Turn 16. Get your license. Stay away from your house as much as humanly possible. Become an RPGer. Do anything to feel like you will fit in. Have a lot of awkward, drunken sex with strangers because that is what you thought you were supposed to do. Take a lot of scalding hot showers because you feel dirty.

Turn 17. Attend 17 funerals in eight months, starting with your grandfather. Graduate high school early, move out of your parents' house. Live without electricity for two weeks because the mere thought of calling the electric company gives you a panic attack and makes you want to die.

Turn 18. Start college, because you are supposed to. Have no idea who you are or how to function as an adult. Start attending the gay club circuit in a city 2 hours away. Decide to move 1,500 miles away, to a city you don't know anybody except for the friend you are moving with. Move to Chicago and start learning about yourself.

Turn 19. Find a large lump in your right breast. Go four months thinking you have cancer before you have a lumpectomy and find out that it is not. Shave your head. Leave a bad living situation to live on your own. Start therapy. Start meds. Start working with children.

Figure out what you want to do with your life. Get a diagnosis of Bipolar II and Asperger's. Figure out how to cope. Start school again. For the first time that you remember, wake up and want to be alive more often than not. Have the strength to leave a mentally abusive friendship. Find a place where you feel normal for the first time. Graduate school.

Have sex for the first time without feeling like a dirty whore. Actually be able to picture yourself in a real relationship.

Be open about shit. Get told that you define yourself through your mental disorders. Tell them that you are more than your disorders, but your disorders are part of you and help to make you who you are. That you like who you are and you are proud of yourself.

I was planning on doing a post of my own – would you mind if I link to your article in it?

I suspected that I had OCD as soon as I read about it. When my mom saw me reading a book about it, she told me that my aunt, cousin and grandfather have it, but I didn't say anything. My cousin had just been instatustionalized and diagnosied with bipolar disorder and I was afraid that if I admited to being "crazy" I might end up institionalized too. I continued to suspect I had OCD during high school, but I was back on my ADHD medicine and I had a deep disgust with myself for needing chemical assistance. I convienced myself that OCD wasn't that bad if I learned to use it to ballance my OCD. Then, around 18 I discovered that OCD also explains what I call my "bad thaught." I still didn't want any medical help, because that would mean discussing it with my mom and I could tell she feared OCD. I went through my first two years of college without much trouble, until the semester I went abroad. Overall it was a fun trip, but more than once, I had to fight my bad thoughts when schedules changed.