My Mind Is a Prison, and I Run a Six-Figure Business From Inside It
On bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, and showing up for a high-functioning life.
Sometimes I wish I could just unzip my brain and let you stand inside it for a minute—just long enough for you to see how loud it gets in here. I run a six-figure business. I manage a team of clinicians. I’m writing a book. But the reality is, I do all of this while living inside a mind that terrifies me.
A mind shaped by cyclothymic disorder—a mild form of bipolar—that can swing from wild conviction to bone-deep despair in a single afternoon. A mind that hums with passive suicidal thoughts more often than I’d like to admit. Sometimes it feels like a prison I’m forced to decorate, day after day, just to keep showing up for the life I’ve built outside its walls.
Most people are familiar with their “inner narrator,” or that steady voice in their head narrating what they’re doing, what they’re feeling, and what might come next. I, on the other hand, don’t really have one. Or at least, not in the way you might think.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to dissociate from it. I’ve learned to push the voice so far into the background so that I could function without getting swallowed by the noise. And I got good at it. So good that now, I live in this constant hum of disconnection, like I’m floating just outside my own brain, living life on autopilot because being fully inside my mind feels dangerous.
But sometimes that voice creeps back in—uninvited, loud, and far too sure of itself. It tells me stories I don’t want to hear: I’m all alone and I am definitely falling apart. Sometimes it carries a hum of something darker, like suicidal thoughts that feel like background noise, until suddenly they don’t. The conviction behind these stories makes me question what’s real, which then leads me to believe I’m not actually safe with myself.
This is when the prison door slams shut all over again. No matter how much I’ve built—the business, the team, the book, the life—it doesn’t matter if my mind decides to lock me in. None of that joy or light exists within these walls.
Here’s the part that confuses me: I don’t just survive inside this mind… I’ve built a life so full that it often overflows.
I’ve traveled the world. Seven continents, to be exact. I’ve seen more places than I can count, and I’ve found myself in various corners of this earth that some people only ever dream of seeing. I learned to speak a second language. I’ve lived on three continents. I’ve sat with strangers who became friends, and friends who became family. I’ve felt more moments of wonder than I ever thought possible.
I spend hours outside, finding parts of the world that remind me I’m still here—alive, curious, awake. I fell in love with the outdoors in my 20s and built an entire lifestyle around adventure and immersive travel. I’ve picked up hobbies just to see what they felt like: tennis, candle-making, storytelling events in the city that remind me how much I love listening to people share the innermost parts of themselves.
I’ve checked off items on my bucket list in the double digits and I’ve added 20 more. I made a home in places I never thought I’d belong. And through it all, I kept showing up—not because my mind always lets me, but because I’ve learned to do it with the prison door cracked open *just* enough to slip out sometimes.
It’s strange to hold a life that looks so alive in one hand and a mind that wants to convince me it’s not worth staying for in the other.
Most days, I feel like I’m living in the tension between those two truths: the part of me that builds, dreams, explores, loves deeply, and the part of me that’s quietly whispering, none of this matters.
People see the plane tickets, the hikes, the team I lead, the words I write; but they don’t see the mornings I lie in bed bargaining with myself to keep going. They don’t see the hours I lose to the hum of the thoughts that insist I’m better off gone.
And yet, here I am. Running a business, writing a book, and holding the line between what’s real and what’s just the echo of an illness that doesn’t get to have the final say, because life is worth living, even when it’s not.