Identity is a weird thing. For the last 19 years my identity has included living with bipolar disorder. Two weeks ago I found out that this was a misdiagnosis. I am now slowly running into each and every ingrained thought pattern that doesn’t work anymore.

One thing I have discovered is that I am just a little weird. I say this partly because my psych test results kept remarking that the difference between several test results occur in less than 5% of the population. It told me this multiple times in different sections. My brain just isn’t wired the way one could expect and, while that makes a lot of sense, this difference doesn’t equal neurodivergence or mental illness. Yeah, I’m just strange.

I never really worried how much I pathologized my behavior until I didn’t have the diagnosis attached to it anymore. Anything I felt or experienced I somehow tied back to being bipolar. Now when I have an emotion, I find myself thinking this is the expression of my mental illness. And then I realize, that’s not even possible because there is no more mental illness.

In a weird way, this behavior makes sense though. When I was a child, my emotions were always inconvenient. No one wanted to deal with me when I was anything other than pleasant, and sometimes not even then. I always felt ashamed when I felt bad or needed understanding or couldn’t pretend to be doing great. I remember writing a letter to my mother to tell her I needed to go to the doctor to be evaluated for what would be my second episode of major depression and apologizing to her for being such a burden.

If all my emotions were bad anyway, it’s not such a stretch to think all my emotions are reckless examples of severe mental illness. I’m just realizing now that not only am I capable of a whole slew of emotions and emotional expressions without it tipping into mental illness, but also that my emotions are not an inherent problem.

For years I had to breakdown my fear of thought crime. Because I had a religious upbringing I believed that if I thought certain things (lust, violence, literally anything that wasn’t worshiping god, etc.) that I was committing a grievous sin. I had to learn that it was okay to sit with whatever intrusive thought I had and just think, “That’s a thought. I don’t have to act on it or even give it that much consideration. Literally no one will even know I ever thought it if I don’t tell them.”

Now I’m finding myself doing the same self-talk about emotions. Instead of telling myself that this emotion is just me experiencing my mental illness, I tell myself this is just an average, everyday emotion and isn’t cause for concern. The idea that I no longer have to hyper monitor myself for signs of an episode is still very strange.

If you would have ever asked me what in the world I would be doing with my life at the age of 40, I would have never, ever guessed this. But as I always like to think, if the multiverse is real, there are probably far more versions of me that are dead than those that are thriving. I got this lucky, so I can keep going.