More Than Your Illness

If you could give one piece of advice to readers, what would it be? 

You are not your illness, and being healthy may be scary, but it is so worth it. You deserve to be healthy, you deserve to try. - Sabrina Lang

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Hi, my name is Sabrina Lang, I am the founder of RISEAbove, the former Youth Governor of Arkansas, and a person with Bipolar disorder. Growing up, I was known by everyone to be the sweetest kid but for some reason I would get a temper for about 2 months randomly. No one thought that it was a mental health issue, my parents would blame it on the way I watched disney characters talk to their parents. As I grew up , I would go through periods of extreme accomplishment, being able to do so much without sleeping, before going into a hibernation-like depressive state. I believed that this was normal, that I was just storing energy to keep going, while my parents just thought I was depressed.

During my junior year, I was in one of my hypomanic swings, or a high accomplishment swing where I am less in control of myself, causing me to “try to fix my depressive episode by being involved heavily in my community”. A lot of time, in my bipolar at least, there was extreme guilt for not being able to continuously perform at the level that I was able to while manic or hypomanic. I would apply to work for the YMCA, with my background during my hypomanic stage ( being a member of my school’s behavioral committee, president of the national honor society, multisport athlete, and an honors student, while helping on many hometown campaigns) I was a top contender. I was scared, could I really do this knowing that who I am is the switch between high and low (again not knowing I had bipolar disorder). I would tell Derek Summerville, head of the Y’s Youth and Government about my activities and why I cared about civil duties. I grew up in a military family, my dad being a war veteran from the 1st Gulf War, so voting and being active in the community was a given moral for me. I was surprisingly chosen for the Youth Governor, in charge of choosing other voices to represent Arkansas from the hundreds of submissions, and later attending the Youth Governor’s Conference where I would talk to Senators Hoeven, Boozman, and Cotton about food insecurity and, my own goal, access to mental health services within Arkansas, especially for teens and military personnel. Boozman would vote yes on the bill presented that day lobbying for mental health help for war veterans, something that has continued to help American heroes. I got to speak for all 700K youth in Arkansas and I am still blessed to be able to say I had, even though I may not have been the most perfect person to do so. I continued my advocacy with the YMCA and in my community until I got to college, at the University of Mississippi.

Before I came to college, I lost 3 of my best friends in a car wreck in Wyoming, after they were visiting a college, Jackson Hole Bible College. This developed into a worse depressive spiral where I began to use alcohol to hide from my depression, in turn making it worse. I almost failed out freshman year, luckily, the honors college professor I swore hated me, sent a note to UMatter. UMatter is a mental health group on campus that will help you as you begin getting healthy talk to your professors. I would then be referred to counselling for my “grief” before being sent to a psychiatrist for “severe depression”. It, then, took 5 different antidepressants and a year to find that I was not just depressed. I was Bipolar 2. Finding out, for me, felt like grieving who I could’ve been. Those hypomanic stages feel like they are who you actually are, that it’s the depression that is holding you back, but it’s both. When you start your meds, you become human again, almost missing who you were hypomanic. This experience, living as almost 2 people, with everyone loving who you are hypomanic, even though that isn't you either, got me to start RISEAbove.

RISEAbove is a mental health resource for people here in Oxford at the moment. I am trying to expand it to other colleges and universities. I, as you read, struggled for so long knowing I needed help and if I didn’t have someone show me where help was, I’d never have found it. That’s why RISEAbove is important to me. I, like anyone who needs this, am not perfect and there’s so many years of healing left to do, so I made a website to show you that you don't have to figure out healing all alone. You can rise above your illness, depression/anxiety/ED/Bipolar none of it defines you.