I Couldn't Manage My Bipolar Until I Got Sober
For years, I tried to put my bipolar disorder in one box and my relationship with alcohol in another.
Bipolar was my mental illness. Alcohol was how I coped with my life. I didn't understand them as connected, and I certainly didn't think of myself as someone with an addiction.
Looking back, I see it very differently.
For me, alcohol was always a symptom of my bipolar disorder.
It was a way to self-medicate something I didn't have a name for yet. It helped me manage emotions I didn't know how to regulate. When I was depressed, I could use it to numb what I was feeling. When I was high, it could fuel the intensity. And sometimes, I simply wanted to escape an uncomfortable reality.
The goal was pretty simple:
Numb the lows. Fuel the highs. Escape reality.
And the most dangerous part was that, for a very long time, I didn't realize I had a problem.
I recently talked about this exact intersection on NBC Channel 8 News — why, for me, addiction and Bipolar I could never be treated as two separate issues.
👉 Watch: Mental Illness and Addiction on Bloom TV
Alcohol worked. Until it didn't.
My relationship with alcohol started when I was a teenager, years before anyone would say the words Bipolar I to me.
And from the beginning, alcohol was never something I used just for fun or to be social. I quickly discovered that it could change how I felt.
It could take me out of my own head. It could quiet something I didn't know how to quiet myself. It could make me feel like I belonged when I had spent so much of my life feeling like I was standing on the outside of a window looking in.
Later, other drugs entered the picture too. By college, there was cocaine, hallucinogens, and pretty much anything I could get my hands on.
And here's where bipolar disorder can become incredibly complicated.
At the same time I was engaging in increasingly risky behavior, I was succeeding.
I was a straight-A student. I graduated with honors. Later, I earned an MBA. I climbed the corporate ladder. I became a Global Director of Sales for Hilton. I flew around the world. I was a top performer.
So why would I think I had a problem?
From the outside, I didn't necessarily look like someone whose life was unraveling.
I looked unstoppable.
And that success became evidence I could use against myself.
See? I'm fine.
I have a great job.
I'm successful.
I'm functioning.
Alcohol isn't a problem.
Except functioning and healthy are not the same thing.
I was using alcohol to cope with the problem, while alcohol was making it harder for me to see the problem.
This might be the hardest part for me to explain about addiction.
I never treated my drinking as a problem because I never realized I had one.
I could always point to something else.
It was the relationship.
It was the breakup.
It was the depression.
It was stress.
It was work.
It was whatever chaotic thing was unfolding in my life at the time.
There was always an explanation for why I was drinking, and alcohol was so woven into how I managed my emotions that I couldn't see it as something separate.
That's the mindfuck of it.
I was using alcohol to cope with the problem while alcohol was simultaneously making it harder for me to see the problem.
And that went on from 1999 to 2021.
This is a huge part of why I wrote Tainted Love.
When I went back through those years to write the book, I could finally see something I couldn't see while I was living it: the relationships, addiction, impulsivity, manic highs, depressive crashes, and choices I made weren't a collection of unrelated disasters.
They were all part of the same story.
Tainted Love gave me a way to look at that story honestly, without using Bipolar I or addiction to excuse my choices, but also without drowning in shame over them.
My diagnosis gave me context for my choices. It didn't erase my responsibility for them.
Then I was diagnosed with Bipolar I.
In 2015, after approximately 15 years of depressive lows and increasingly extreme highs, I was hospitalized and finally diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder.
For the first time, someone looked at the whole timeline of my life instead of treating each depression, behavior or symptom as an isolated event.
Suddenly, the individual pieces made sense because someone had finally looked at the whole picture.
But here's something I think is incredibly important:
Getting diagnosed didn't mean I immediately understood what I needed to do with that diagnosis.
I had a name for what was happening.
I had medication.
I had doctors.
And I continued drinking for another six years.
I still hadn't connected the two.
I also talked with NBC Channel 8 News about what living with Bipolar I actually looks like for me today — including why I no longer define stability as being symptom-free.
👉 Watch: Living With Bipolar Disorder on Bloom TV
I couldn't put my addiction in one box and my Bipolar I in another.
It wasn't until 2021 that I finally understood something that seems incredibly obvious to me now:
I was never going to understand how to manage my bipolar disorder while continuing to use alcohol as one of my primary coping mechanisms.
I couldn't figure out what my brain was doing when alcohol was constantly changing the picture.
Was I depressed because I was entering a depressive episode, or was alcohol contributing to what I was feeling?
Was I simply having a great day, or was I becoming manic?
Was my sleep changing because of bipolar disorder, alcohol, stress, or some combination of all three?
Was my medication working?
Was I being completely honest with my psychiatrist?
What was actually me, what was bipolar disorder and what was alcohol?
There was so much noise that I couldn't hear myself.
So on May 16, 2021, six years after my Bipolar I diagnosis, I got sober.
And sobriety gave me something I had arguably never had before.
Clarity.
Sobriety didn't cure my Bipolar I.
I want to be really fucking clear about this because I don't like neat little recovery stories.
Getting sober did not cure my bipolar disorder.
Nothing can.
Sobriety didn't mean I stopped experiencing symptoms. It didn't mean I never became manic again. It didn't mean I never became depressed again.
In fact, in 2024, I experienced one of the worst depressions of my life.
It lasted approximately eight months.
And I was sober.
I was taking my medication. I was in therapy. I was doing neurofeedback. I was actively engaged in my mental health and doing pretty much everything I thought I was "supposed" to be doing.
And I still got sick.
For a long time, I believed recovery was this elusive Emerald City I could eventually reach if I just did everything correctly.
Take the medication. Go to therapy. Get sober. Learn the skills. Check all the boxes.
✨ STABLE ✨
Except bipolar disorder doesn't work that way.
Sobriety didn't eliminate my illness.
It removed something that had been constantly masking, amplifying or complicating it.
And that distinction changed everything for me.
Sobriety gave me clarity.
Without alcohol constantly changing or masking what I was feeling, I could finally start recognizing my moods and symptoms honestly.
I could engage honestly with my psychiatrist. I could comply with my medication treatment. I could start noticing my patterns. I could recognize changes in my sleep, energy, thinking, behavior and emotions.
And instead of automatically reaching for alcohol when something became uncomfortable, I had to learn other ways to cope.
That meant learning emotional regulation.
It meant learning nervous system regulation.
It meant therapy.
It meant medication.
It meant understanding my triggers.
It meant learning when to push myself and when to stop fucking pushing.
It meant asking for help.
It meant learning how to actually sit inside an uncomfortable emotion instead of immediately trying to escape it.
Sobriety didn't fix my mental health.
It gave me enough clarity to actually learn how to manage it.
Recovery required me to look at the whole person.
One of the biggest lessons of my Bipolar I diagnosis came from the psychiatrist who finally diagnosed me.
The individual pieces of my life never made sense until someone looked at the whole picture.
I've realized the same thing is true of recovery.
For years, I tried to address pieces individually.
Depression? Treat the depression.
Mania? Stop the mania.
Drinking? Stop drinking.
Anxiety? Manage the anxiety.
But eventually I realized that I couldn't put my addiction in one box and my Bipolar I in another.
For me, real recovery required looking at the whole picture.
That's ultimately where my Six Pillars of Bipolar Stability came from:
Medication. Therapy. Sobriety. Lifestyle. Emotional regulation. Nervous system regulation.
👉 Listen to I'm Bipolar. Now What? Podcast Episode #129.
They aren't six independent boxes I check every morning.
They're interconnected.
When my sleep changes, my mood can change. When my mood changes, my ability to regulate my emotions can change. When I'm emotionally dysregulated, my nervous system can become overwhelmed. And when one pillar starts wobbling, I may need to lean harder on another.
I spent a lot of my life trying to fix one piece of myself at a time.
Today, I understand that you can't heal the whole person by treating only half the problem.
ASK LOUISE: Did getting sober fix your mental health?
No.
And I think this is incredibly important to talk about.
Getting sober didn't cure my Bipolar I. My eight-month depression in 2024 is pretty definitive evidence of that.
What sobriety did was remove something that had been masking, amplifying and complicating what was already happening inside my brain.
That gave me clarity.
And clarity gave me choices.
Today, when I notice my mood changing, I can ask: What do I need?
Do I need to talk to my psychiatrist? Do I need a medication adjustment? More therapy? Less work? More sleep? Movement? Connection? Do I need to clear my fucking calendar and simply get through today?
That's a completely different way of living than automatically trying to change how I feel.
And for me, that is recovery.
Not never struggling again.
Knowing what to do when I do.
THE BIPOLAR MYTH: If you're functioning, you can't have a serious problem.
This one kept me stuck for years.
I was successful.
I had degrees.
I had a career.
I could perform at an incredibly high level.
I could walk into a meeting and absolutely crush it while privately moving between extremes I didn't understand.
So I used my success as evidence that everything else must be okay.
I did the same thing with alcohol.
If I really had a drinking problem, surely my life would look worse than this.
But addiction doesn't have a dress code.
Neither does bipolar disorder.
Sometimes my biggest warning signs were happening during periods when everyone around me thought I was doing incredibly well.
And sometimes my ability to keep functioning was exactly what allowed me to avoid looking at what was happening underneath.
What are you trying to change?
One of the most important things sobriety forced me to understand was that alcohol wasn't really the point.
What alcohol did for me was the point.
It changed how I felt.
It numbed something.
It fueled something.
It helped me escape something.
So removing alcohol meant I eventually had to get curious about the thing underneath it.
And I think that question applies far beyond addiction.
We all have ways of changing the channel when we don't like what's playing inside our heads.
Maybe it's alcohol. Maybe it's work. Relationships. Achievement. Food. Shopping. Sex. Social media. Constant productivity. Becoming the next version of ourselves.
Instead of immediately asking, How do I stop doing this?, I've become much more interested in asking:
What is this doing for me?
What feeling am I trying to change?
What am I trying to numb?
What am I trying to fuel?
What am I trying to escape?
Because for most of my life, I asked myself a very different question:
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Recovery has slowly taught me to ask something else.
What do I need?
👉 Here are some resources I used when I first got sober
JOURNAL PROMPT
Where in my life am I trying to numb, hide, mask, escape, or forget—and what might I actually be trying to regulate underneath it?
Want to go deeper? Tomorrow on I’m Bipolar. Now What? I’m talking about the connection between my addiction and bipolar disorder, why being highly functioning kept me from recognizing I had a problem, and the one thing sobriety gave me that changed how I manage my disorder: clarity.
🎧 I Couldn’t Manage My Bipolar Until I Got Sober drops tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.
Have a question for a future newsletter?
Ask me anything about living with bipolar disorder. I read every single email myself, and only I will see your question; if it's selected, I'll answer it anonymously.
While I can't guarantee I'll be able to answer every question, I'll do my best to get to as many as I can over time.
Thank you for trusting me with your question.
Learn more about my memoir: TAINTED LOVE
This newsletter reflects my personal experience living with Bipolar I disorder and addiction. It is intended for education and peer support and is not medical advice or a substitute for individualized care from a qualified healthcare professional. Alcohol and other substances can interact with medications, and suddenly stopping alcohol can be medically dangerous for someone who is physically dependent. If you're concerned about your alcohol or substance use, mental health, or medications, please speak with a qualified healthcare professional.
