On Staying Visible

I love to adorn myself with jewelery. I like big chunky pieces, not flashy things but a lot of tribal jewelery and pieces from India. I like to wear my fat smokey quartz ring, some Baliwood earrings, my thick wrist cuff, and most importantly my fabulous wedding rings. I'm totally into it, and the more the merrier.
But it hasn't always been that way. For the past two years, I rarely wore a single piece of jewelery. My whole collection sat in the beautiful box in my bedroom, shut up tightly. I would remember my college days all decked out in beads, all the while unable to even entertain the thought of wearing a necklace let alone my dozens of personally made bracelets. There was something holding me back from being myself: a desire to be invisible.
Invisible. Wanting to disappear. I didn't want to go outside and be seen, didn't want any neighbor to know I existed. I was barely able to leave the house most times, and refused to be out in daylight. So the jewelery disappeared. I thought if I wore something pretty, someone might see me, and that was exactly what I didn't want. This extended to my clothes, my hair, my face, and my hygiene. I was purposefully making myself unattractive in order to remain under the radar of the people I saw each day. I wanted desperately to not exist, so I took myself to a place where I actually felt already dead.
Today, I am slightly flamboyant. How did I turn it all around? I surrounded myself with people who also suffered from mental illness. I made friends in the hospital, and joined a hospital program where I got support from others struggling with Bipolar, Anxiety, Depression, Suicidality, and Voices. Just by getting to know them, by forming a community, I learned from my new friends, and from my treatment team, about how to feel validated as a person with mental illness. I began my own questioning - my own investigation into truth. I discovered my own unique truth through my own experiences of what was liberating for me. I learned to think about how it would be possible that I would DESERVE a pleasant experience.
We all have painful experiences that seem unmanageable, and result in avoidance of emotions. When we become invisible, our emotions die. All we have to do to break this cycle is stop trying to escape emotions and start trying to attend to pleasant emotions. Put simply, be curious about what's happening on this inside!
I've come a long way since this phase of my life, but I can't count out the idea it might return again. Being Bipolar is about flexibility. We want to respond to daily change with understanding from the heart - knowing that there is no one way it "should" be. I think maybe living with Bipolar is easier if we can learn to embrace opposites, to be able to hold the contradictions in our life with love in our hearts. Kindness is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance, so be kind to Bipolar self, adorn yourself and announce your presence to the world.