“Just write the damn posts, Colin.”

If I had a pound for every time I’ve got stuck in my bipolar brain and deleted the Being Bipolar series, I’d be able to retire before I ever published the first one.

The problem is that once it’s online, the context disappears.

I’m no longer a journalism student writing honestly about living with bipolar. I’m just another raging madman with a blog, quietly chiselling away at whatever career might still be ahead of me, whilst simultaneously wondering whether publicly exposing myself today might win awards tomorrow.

That is not a sentence anyone should be proud of writing.

Then again, neither is living it.

One minute I want to scream about how absurdly difficult it is to live with a mental illness in a country that expects resilience whilst making stability feel like a luxury. The next, I’m wondering whether I can afford the train fare into Central London without sacrificing part of this week’s food shop.

That’s bipolar.

Every day feels like an achievement simply because I haven’t launched myself into the Thames.

There are no frills, twinkling lights or performing monkeys in this circus. The show is almost entirely internal and performed in partnership with hell itself.

The trouble is, because I look reasonably stable, everyone assumes I just get a bit dramatic sometimes.

They either try to fix me or quietly back away.

Neither works.

The world is too bloody loud.

I am permanently one loudspeaker phone call away from a prison sentence. I resent people who glue themselves to train doors before anyone can get off. I despair at battery-powered missiles weaving through pedestrians as though pavements are qualifying laps at Silverstone.

Small talk feels like psychological warfare. It takes me six working weeks to prepare for seeing another human being and three working days to recover afterwards.

By then, life has already moved on without me.

People don’t see any of that.

They don’t see the mental arithmetic before I leave the house. Can I afford today? Is this networking opportunity worth skipping something else? Can I justify a coffee? Is walking free? Brilliant, we’re walking.

Instead, they see someone who’s grumpy.

They’re right.

I’m bitter about the years I spent standing still whilst desperately trying to understand what the hell was happening inside my own head. Maybe I’d still have made the same mistakes. Maybe I’d still have lashed out.

But medication would have changed my life.

Once you’ve started medication and therapy, though, you can’t unknow what you’ve learned.

My tolerance for pretence has evaporated.

I cannot stand people telling someone to “cheer up” before unloading every trauma they’ve ever experienced. I cannot stand hypocrisy. I cannot stand performative concern from people who’ve never had to choose between doing something nice and buying enough food for the week.

Yes, there are people worse off than me.

That doesn’t make my struggles imaginary.

I’m 33, studying journalism and trying to build a career that’s been shaped far more by what I’ve done outside the classroom than inside it. There are some incredible lecturers. There are others who seem to think reading PowerPoint slides counts as teaching before reminding everyone to ask for help, only to disappear when someone actually does.

That frustration isn’t really about university.

It’s about spending years feeling permanently behind everyone else.

I’m not writing this to play the victim.

I’m not writing it to virtue signal.

I’m certainly not pretending I’m blameless. I’ve made enough mistakes to keep several therapists in business.

I’m writing it because there are too many people falling through the cracks. Young people being groomed. People grieving. People wondering why life feels impossible whilst everyone else appears to have received an instruction manual they somehow missed.

If that means calling out people, systems and policies that make life harder than it needs to be, then that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Quite the first post.

Let’s see where this goes.