May is Mental Health Awareness Month and we invited Sonora Reyes, the author of the forthcoming teen book The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar (September 16) to share more about their reason for exploring this topic in their writing as well as the stigma around mental health.

When I first set out to write The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar, I had no idea how healing it was going to be for me. It was a difficult book to write because I spent most of my life hiding, and this book shines a big bright light on so many of my own struggles. But I realized that is exactly the point.

Growing up, I was hit pretty hard with the stigma around serious mental illness. I saw myself only as the villain in the horror movies, or the tragic ending in the dramas. With those two options at the front of my mind, I had a pretty grim outlook on what my future might look like. The only way I knew to fight what I saw as my fate was to push my symptoms too far down for anyone to see.

Even if I didn’t know my diagnosis back then, it didn’t make my illness or the stigma surrounding it any less real. I thought no one would believe anything I told them if they knew I was “crazy.”

I was convinced they’d either think of me as inherently abusive, or they’d question whether I had a strong enough grip on reality to tell the truth, regardless of whether I believed it or not. I was fully convinced that my mental illness made me un-trustworthy.

For a long time, I didn’t even believe myself about most things. I constantly told myself it was just “all in my head.” That I was just doing it for attention.

How silly is that?

Of course my mental illness is all in my head! That doesn’t make it less real. My mind is literally me! I would quite literally not exist as myself if not for my brain. So why would anything being all in my head make it any less real?

I’ve lost too many people to this illness or similar ones, and I never knew we were the same until it was too late.

If I could go back and change anything, it would be to let the people I love see my struggle. It wasn’t always my symptoms that I couldn’t handle, but the isolation. I experienced the worst of my illness in complete hiding, just like everyone I’ve lost to it. If I understood then that I wasn’t alone, the weight would have been so much easier to bear.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers—or any at all—but I do know that feeling seen can be lifesaving. I was hiding so long that I never took the time to really offer my younger self the compassion I so desperately needed. But writing The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar made me feel seen, even if I was the only one looking at the time.

So, if you’re like me, and you just want to feel a little less alone, then I hope this helps. I see you.

We’re in this together, one day at a time.