An open letter to anyone who thinks I should just buck up and get a job

Dear person who has never walked even a step in my shoes,

Try rolling a dice every hour and if it lands on a six, you're going to spent the next half an hour feeling that somebody hates you or that you've done something terrible.

Try taking every slightly irritating thing somebody else does and blaming it on yourself. Then multiply that feeling by ten.

Try organising your life when you don't know whether you'll be well enough to do something until half an hour before the event, knowing there's a significant chance that you won't.

Try having to persistently study your own thoughts and perceptions to check that your illness hasn't caused you to make thinking errors.

Try rushing out of a room every few days in case someone sees your eyes welling up.

Once a week, try cooking a meal without making eye contact with anyone in case they notice your pain.

Try waking up ten to twelve hours after you went to bed feeling hung-over and nauseous from the mood stabilizers you've taken the night before, every day.

Try a day or two without exercise and feel your body prickling all over and find everything in the world makes you frustrated and angry. You can't sit still, you can't focus on a conversation and whatever you're doing, you want to be doing something else.

Try dealing with a problem, such as moving house and realise that just two hours of house hunting leaves you exhausted and with a sense of despair.

Try watching your family and friends cry because they can't always make you better.

Think of something you feel insecure about and repeat it to yourself 100 times an hour.

Try doing anything else during that hour.

Try finding yourself in fits of laughter one moment and floods of tears the next.

Try a day or even a week of feeling you're cured, only to then realise that the delusion was caused by mania, then having to come to terms with having a serious illness all over again.

Try suffering from the depression that follows mania and truly believing that you will never, ever get better.

Try spending at least a dozen days a year believing that every person you care about would be better off if you were dead.

Try having people judge you and criticise you for the lifestyle your illness forces you to live.

Try not to judge.