I read Kanye's recent Wall Street Journal ad with a pit in my stomach — the familiar kind. The one that comes from recognizing yourself in someone you wish you didn’t.
I felt sympathy. I felt anger. I felt grief for the people he has hurt, and a quiet, shameful fear about what his very public unraveling says about people like me — people who live with bipolar disorder but don’t have the luxury of billions and an audience willing to time and time again confuse severe illness for genius. Trying to feel empathy while also holding accountability is a weird balance; what can you not excuse, but explain through this disorder? Unfortunately when someone with this diagnosis causes harm — especially on a global stage — it doesn’t just stain them. It stains the diagnosis itself.
Every time Kanye spirals publicly, I feel a weird sense of embarassment deeper than second-hand; I recognise I know how quickly people collapse his behavior into a single word: bipolar.
As if the disorder itself is loud, cruel, antisemitic, misogynistic, or dangerous.
It isn’t.
But stigma doesn’t care about the nuances it only cares about what it explicitly sees.
And public outbursts like his — no matter how the illness underneath — reinforce the worst stereotypes: that we are unstable, unpredictable, untrustworthy. That our emotions are liabilities. That we are always one episode away from destruction.
That shame sticks. Even when you do everything “right.”
I take my meds, I know my triggers, I try to be responsible with a brain that sometimes feels like it’s working against me.
I feel very nervous of how I will be perceived by those who know this about me. I wonder if stability is something only I manage through lots of effort and if I will ever be "normal". Will I be taking medication until my last breath?
That last question haunts me the most.
Not because medication is bad — it isn’t. Medication has saved my life and changed me for the better, but because permanence feels heavy. Like a quiet admission that this isn’t a phase, or something I’ll outgrow, or a chapter that resolves neatly.
It’s just me.
Here’s the line I refuse to cross: mental illness does not absolve harm.
I can recognize Kanye’s pain and acknowledge that he has caused real damage — to individuals, to communities, to the public understanding of bipolar disorder itself. These truths are not mutually exclusive.
When we excuse everything, we reinforce the idea that people with bipolar disorder are incapable of accountability. When we demonize everything, we reinforce the idea that we are beyond empathy.
Neither is true.
What scares me most isn’t becoming Kanye. It’s being mistaken for him.
It’s knowing that no matter how carefully I live, how quietly I manage my illness, how much responsibility I take, someone else’s very public collapse can still rewrite the narrative about what people like me are capable of.
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