The Mask I Wore in Middle School: Early Signs of Bipolar Disorder

The average age of diagnosis for bipolar disorder is around 25. But for a lot of us, the illness starts speaking much earlier than anyone starts listening — and in adolescence, its early signs are almost perfectly camouflaged as ordinary teenage moodiness.

I was thirteen. Here is how it actually looked, from Chapter 1 of Daybreak.

It didn’t look like illness. It looked like a bad attitude.

In my new school, surrounded by a fresh set of faces and an environment that was both promising and uncertain, I began to experience episodes of behavior that were extreme, even for someone my age. Despite having no difficulty making new friends and fitting in, I had this gnawing feeling that everyone hated me and began to feel that hatred toward myself as well. At times, I would find myself so overwhelmed by these emotions that I would be left in tears.

Note the contradiction sitting inside that paragraph: I was fitting in fine, and simultaneously convinced everyone despised me. Both were true at once. That gap — between what was objectively happening and what I was certain was happening — is the part I’d want a parent to notice.

The triggers never made sense, including to me

The triggers were often illogical and elusive — a whirlwind of feelings I couldn’t quite grasp. Oscillating between irrational anger and unrelenting despair, my mood swings were frequent and unpredictable. When an offhanded comment about my makeup or a joke regarding my Boston accent would send me into a spiral, and the weight of the emotions would become too much to bear, my instinct was to seek refuge and escape.

I could not explain why a joke about my accent could level me. That inability to explain it is often read as evasion — as a kid being difficult or withholding. It wasn’t. I genuinely did not have access to a reason.

Two different people, depending on who was looking

My newly formed friendships were a testament to the duality I was beginning to experience. I was outgoing, friendly, and social, drawing people toward me, but my mother witnessed a very different side of me: withdrawn, moody, and defiant.

This is the detail I most want families to sit with. The version of me my friends knew and the version my mother knew were both real, and they did not match. If you have been told your child “seems totally fine at school,” that is not evidence that nothing is wrong. Holding the mask up in public is exhausting, and it usually comes down the moment they get home.

At that point, I was skillful at concealing these mood swings from my peers by wearing a mask that portrayed me as a typical teenager. Bubbling beneath the surface of my perfect porcelain smile were feelings of inadequacy, rage, insecurity, desperation, and confusion.

What I’d say to a parent reading this

I want to be careful here, because I am not a clinician and this is one person’s history, not a diagnostic checklist. Plenty of teenagers are moody without having bipolar disorder.

But the specific thing I’d flag is that duality — a kid who performs fine publicly and falls apart privately, whose emotional reactions are wildly out of proportion to their triggers, and who cannot explain why. That pattern is worth asking a professional about. Not diagnosing yourself, and not diagnosing your kid. Just asking.

NAMI has free family education programs specifically for this, and they’re a far better starting point than a search engine. There’s more on the getting help page.

This passage is excerpted from Chapter 1, “Middle School: The Beginning of the Mask I Wore,” of Daybreak: Finding Light After a Bipolar Storm.