Unchained

The chains burned into my palms, but I refused to let go.

If I loosened my grip, I was sure I would be consumed by the monster I had been fighting for as long as I could remember.

At least, that was what I had always believed.

For years, I had held on with everything I had. I told myself the pain meant I was winning, that I could do it on my own—the shaking hands, the tightness in my chest, my unending exhaustion were proof of my strength. Letting go was never an option; my family does not surrender.

I refused to be swallowed whole. Defeated. Conquered.

Some nights, sleep never came. My thoughts flew across my mind like cars on a highway. They collided and overlapped until silence felt impossible. Ideas sparked faster than I could catch them, radiating brilliance and urgency, demanding that I act upon them. Colours seemed sharper, brighter, as if the world had been turned up to a higher level. Even laughter sounded louder. Life pulsed with an intensity that made stillness impossible—unbearable.

In those moments, I knew no fear. I mistook recklessness for courage, impulsivity for freedom. My friends would laugh in amusement and say I was wild, and I would laugh with them. I would start projects at two in the morning, convinced they were life-changing ideas. I rearranged my entire room overnight once, driven by the certainty that things needed to be transformed immediately. I even started repainting the living room. I spoke too quickly, said too much, trusted too easily. Beneath it all simmered a rage I could never fully explain—sudden, consuming, and gone almost as quickly as it arrived. Like a fire dampened by sudden rain. It felt powerful. I felt powerful.

Until I didn’t.

The crash always followed.

The same mind that once raced refused to move at all, as if I were wading through mud. Getting out of bed felt like scaling a mountain without ropes. Even the simplest tasks—brushing my teeth, answering a message, going to the shops, cooking a meal, choosing what to wear—became impossibly heavy.

Food lost its taste, and the hours blurred together. Sleep became less of a need and more of an escape, yet no amount ever seemed to quench the exhaustion. The brightness drained from the world until everything was colourless, like old black-and-white television programs.

I also became colourless.

Yet still, I tightened my grip on the chains. If I could just control it, subdue it—control myself—I could become normal. Maybe I could outrun whatever lived inside me.

By the time I sat across from my therapist one grey afternoon, my body felt metaphorically broken from the sheer effort.

She studied me quietly, her expression thoughtful but unreadable.

“What if nothing is actually wrong with you?” she asked.

I let out a scoff, not caring if it sounded rude. “That’s not what the psychiatrist said.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You spend so much time grieving what bipolar has taken from you,” she continued calmly. “Have you ever stopped to consider what it might have given you?”

The question unsettled me.

For so long, I had seen myself as nothing more than broken—and I was treated as such by several people who were supposed to love me. Family. Partners. They treated me as unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst. Something to restrain. Something to fight.

A gift had never entered the equation.

I opened my mouth to argue, ready to list every way my mind had betrayed me—the sleepless nights, the impulsive decisions, the heavy mornings where existence itself felt like too much to bear.

But the words never came.

For the first time, I didn’t have an answer.

Her question lingered long after I left her office. It followed me home and sat with me in the silence.

What had it given me?

I thought of the way ideas seemed to bloom in my mind, how creativity often arrived in unstoppable waves. I thought of my ambition, and the fact that I always got up, dusted myself off, and tried again after failure. I thought of the intensity with which I cared, the depth at which I felt things—even when it hurt.

Maybe my mind wasn’t just a battlefield.

Maybe it was a landscape.

A landscape is not meant to be fought. It is meant to be understood—to be walked through with patience, to learn where the ground is steady and where it gives way. Perhaps my mind was not something to conquer, but something to care for. Something that, with time, I could learn to navigate instead of fear.

The fight became too heavy to carry.

I drew in a slow breath, the kind meant to steady trembling hands, and loosened my grip.

I waited.

I waited for the crash, for the shame to curl around me like it always did—but it never came. Instead, there was only quiet.

The chains slipped from my hands and clattered against the ground, the sound sharper than I expected. I hadn’t realised how tense my body had been until it wasn’t anymore—how high my shoulders had risen, how shallow my breathing had become.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, my hands stopped shaking.

The monster didn’t lunge. It didn’t bare its teeth or step forward to devour me.

It simply stood there.

Waiting.

Not as an enemy, but as something that had always been a part of me—misunderstood and feared because I had never stopped long enough to see it clearly.

I began to understand then: the pain had never come from its presence, but from the relentless war I had raged against myself.

Acceptance did not arrive like a sunrise. There was no warmth, no fanfare. It was quieter. Softer.

But it was real.

My mind was not something to outrun.

Or chain.

Or silence.

It was complex, intense, and sometimes overwhelming—but undeniably me.

For so long, I believed my mind was something to battle. Something to outrun.

Now I understand it was never my enemy.

I don’t have to fight myself.

But I will always fight for myself.