Black Women With Bipolar Disorder Are Invisible

May is mental health awareness month

May 11, 2026

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Hey y’all,

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and in honor of that, I’m bringing back a story from the archives that we haven’t seen spoken about often within our community.

As Black women, we tend to get labeled as strong, continuously capable, resilient, and “magical.” We don’t feel pain, and we don’t suffer. At least, that’s what they want to believe about us. But we are soft, we hurt, we yearn, we have bads, just like everyone else. It is only recently in the past decade that we collectively began learning how to speak up amongst one another without shame about our mental health, and in this week’s essay, Janell Brower speaks up about the turmoil in dealing with bipolar disorder as a Black woman.

Take care,

Anayo Awuzie
EIC of Carefree Mag

I Love Me, I Love Me Not

by Janell Brower

As a child, I would walk into every room with this teetering feeling in my heart. I’d say it all the time, “I feel like I’m rocking back and forth in my mind, teetering between sanity and insanity.” I didn’t know why. Often, my thoughts revolved around one main belief—something was inherently wrong with me.

This was the cracked lens I saw everything through.

Over time, I became a people-pleaser, thinking that fixing the needs of others would satisfy my own. Yet, my efforts simply made me even more unstable, splitting my mind between several opinions that constantly changed. And the opinions about me were many. Without my choosing, I seemed to be one person showing up as multiple versions of myself, none of which ever quite fit into any space. I was caught between too many intersections, which felt like living between two different worlds at the same time.

I always found it interesting how both worlds could carry on together unnoticed by most. How you believe you look strange to outside observers while being completely scared to look others in the eye. How you hope for a bright future in a world that only shapes futures for people who are ‘light’ enough to succeed in the world.

In predominantly white institutions, I was too Black. In Black and brown spaces, I was too dark-skinned and quiet. To men, I wasn’t pretty enough or skinny enough to be a desirable woman. To women, I wasn’t feminine enough to be straight. I was always too much or not enough to be accepted and loved.

Yet still, I didn’t stop trying to love. Though my heart felt as fragile as picking petals off a flower, I believed finding real love was the key to finding stability—to finding safety.

Several years down the line, I discovered there was another thing I was too much of—too mentally unstable. At the age of 24, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, which also meant that I spent the prior 23 years of my life completely unaware of this fact. It turned out the teeter I felt in my heart was truly found in my mind, introducing an entirely new level of instability.

Questions like, ‘Am I uncontrollable?’ spiraled in my mind. I wondered if my teeter was ever going to fade. Before, it was simply tied to my inability to fit into crowds or wear the right clothing. Things that, though aggravatingly unnecessary at times, could be changed. But this? This is ingrained. This mental illness is a chemical imbalance that I can’t simply remove with a pair of heels or a touch of makeup. This tied my instability to a disease I would have for the rest of my life.

This tied my cracked lens forever to my eyes.

However, my new diagnosis did bring pockets of relief. The last 23 years have been difficult. But they weren’t this way because I lacked anything externally. To the outside eye, I was a straight-A student full of potential. I would passionately play the guitar on Sunday mornings and fill people with sweet sensations of love and joy. I was the friend who stayed up late on the phone, shouldering the cries of recent heartbreaks we all saw from a mile away. I cooked and cleaned and never complained, always understood, and never refrained. From the outside, the last 23 years weren’t hard at all. They showed too many reasons why I should’ve been grateful.

Yet, underneath that gratitude I should’ve had, I was cracking under a pressure I couldn’t withstand.

If you had an eye to look inside, you’d see there was a different drive behind my kindness. You’d see how every desire to wipe away my tears came with the desperation to be seen by you. You’d see how each perfect grade was the bar set in place to determine my value. If you were allowed to come over to my house, maybe you’d see something that took me years to realize—my mother was also bipolar. And, while she may have chosen to hide her diagnosis to avoid the scrutinizing eyes of others, her choice partially trapped me in a world that only saw their stares.

How could I avoid them? I was raised in a household where things were only seen in black and white. Upon walking outside, my eyes saw the world through the same hue. I paid attention to the slight changes in body language, for I knew they indicated the possibility of anger or disappointment. I made sure to give more of myself than any other person gave, for I wanted to push against the fear of people withdrawing themselves at any given moment. I deliberately loved people who triggered me, even if I had to rationalize their instability as something they couldn’t help. As something they were only doing because they loved me.

From the inside, the last 23 years were hard for me. That lens was crystal clear. After I was diagnosed, I found relief from years of carrying things I thought were my fault. They weren’t.

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