• I, Kate, am a 22 year old girl who has been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
• I am enrolled in Southwest Tennessee Community College majoring in Business with a focus in Administration.
• Once I have my bachelor's in Business I plan to attend the University of Tennessee at Chatanooga to get my Bachelors degree in English.
• After that I would like to become a high school English teacher while writing books, essays, and short stories to be published. 
• Until then, I will be a struggling student. I currently live with my mom, who works at the local newspaper doing a boring office job. -UPDATE 12/14/04-I moved out. I now live by myself in an apartment in Midtown. WOOHOO! -UPDATE 03/23/06-I moved back in.
• Did I mention where I live? Oh... Well I live in Memphis, TN. I was born in Jonesboro, AR, but you can't tell anyone I am from Arkansas or I will have to kill you. I only lived there for two months before my father got transferred to Memphis. I've stayed in Memphis ever since.
• My parents divorced when I was 9.
• My dad moved to Pontotoc, MS to live with his parents until he could find a job and a place to live, which he did. He works at The Sun Herald as the Associate Editor, is married to a woman named Rita, and lives in Biloxi, MS.
• My parents are pretty screwed up, so it makes sense that I am too.
• My dad is an alcoholic who probably has Bipolar and Borderline...
• My mother is just a typical over worked single mother who is still supporting her daughter. I think she may have been sane before my birth. I also suspect she is a problem-drinker now.
• I have some awesome friends that have stuck with me through hard times. Shout outs go to Becca, Harry, Chris, Derek, and Helen. My life has been dedicated to Kurt Cobain, Christianity, and Technical Theatre in the past.

 

I guess you could say that. I was daddy's little girl until the divorce. I knew he drank and came home mad at my mother, and I knew he had hit me once, but I was still naive and sheltered. I had the perfect childhood until the divorce. After the divorce I stopped living for a couple of years. I simply woke up and did what I was supposed to do without putting up a fight. I became the walking dead. No personality, no passions, no happiness. My goal in life became protecting my mother from my father's verbal abuse that continued. My mother educated me on my father's major problems. My father physically, emotionally, and verbally abused me for months at a time when I had to visit him during the summers. Other negative factors began entering my life that aren't out of the ordinary for American teens, but at times were extreme, and always overwhelming. I began burning and cutting myself when I was thirteen. My first two suicide attempts were by overdosing on pills, and occured while I was still in middle school. I never took enough to end up in the hospital, just enough to hurt myself. The second overdose inspired me to tell my psychologist I was depressed. I got my first diagnosis that year as having "Severe, Chronic Depression." I was first put on Paxil, and then, after a horrible experience on it, switched to Prozac. I was drinking hard liquor daily and smoking cigarettes and marijuana on the weekends by the middle of my freshman year of high school. I handled high school by cutting myself when things got bad, or just ramming myself into a sexual relationship. When the depressions were too much to take, or when the Prozac left me feeling numb and in a "bubble," I would cut my finger and drain as much blood as I could, or cut my wrist and watch the blood flow down my arm. By my senior year I had a shoebox top that held my razorblades and dried blood from previous blood letting sessions. An old friend of mine died at the beginning of senior year, when I was 17... And she was 17... With some other problems becoming overwhelming such as my father's unrelenting verbal torture and my high school sweetheart thinking he had found "the one" in another girl, I went crazy. When I say I went "crazy," I don't mean it in the casual sense (which is how I usually use the term, in a sarcastic, joking sense), I mean I went completely out of my head and left all rationality behind me. After a few months of bottling everything up, I began cutting daily. I got addicted to it, to the blood, to the pain... My friends became worried and I was being pressured to tell my mother what I was doing to myself. At this point I felt so helpless and hopeless that I was going to my church seeking guidance, and they, of course, pointed me toward telling my mother. One day I refused to get out of bed on a school day and my mother asked me why. I told her I was never leaving my bed, I didn't feel like it. She panicked and told me she couldn't get me in to see my psychologist or psychiatrist soon but she was going to call my general physician and get me an appointment that day. When I got to the doctor's I showed him my left arm, hand, and wrist, which were covered in fresh, deep cuts. My doctor took a look at them and said "Did you do this?" and I nodded yes. He left the room and when he returned he told me he had told my mother and he had directed her to take me to St Francis Hospital where I would be admitted into their in-patient adolescent behaviour treatment program. I was in the hospital for 8 days and continued as an outpatient for another 9 days. That was when I was diagnosed with Bipolar. I was put on Lithium and Zoloft. For the first time I was on medications that made me feel better, so I accepted them with open arms. The mental problems didn't stop though. Since then I have continued to struggle with my addiction to alcohol. I have been prevented from making much progress in college due to depressions and relationship problems. In continuing my therapy I found out recently that I have Borderline Personality Disorder. Since that diagnosis I have turned many aspects of my life around and have been seeing a new psychologist.

That is all I meant by saying "hard times."