Suicide, bipolar II, and the event that woke me up in 1998

Eventually I felt good enough to move away from my parents again and started a low stress job in Phoenix, AZ. It’s the only job I have had for a full year. I became a loner and drank alcohol and watched movies every night. I didn’t feel like anyone cared that I existed. I felt alienated from my family. So one dark lonely night I toyed with the idea of suicide with the thought that it would take days for someone to find my body because in my mind no one cared about me. Soon after this, I met another boyfriend. He saved me from myself because someone finally cared. He was Navajo and he told me of some interesting spiritual experiences he had with the medicine men and also of the scary experiences he had with an alcoholic father. This boyfriend had a really significant impact on me in that we were together long enough for me to see that I needed to make some real changes in my life. More anti-depressant experimentation and therapy weren’t helping. I was now being diagnosed as bipolar II. I read more self-help books and they weren’t helping. After a year and a half I found myself pregnant, on some level I wanted to have a baby, but when I knew that I would be totally on my own to raise a child because he wasn’t interested in being a father that’s when I decided to have an abortion. The abortion in August of 98 was the big turning point for me. It was the message that said I had let my life get so bad that it had come to this. It was my rock bottom.