Cleolinda everywhere

Yeah, I really do. I was very luckily not in high school when I was first diagnosed--I have a feeling it wouldn't have been received so well then. But I made some very good, close friends in college very quickly, and the diagnosis came near the end of my freshman year, I think, so they knew me well enough to be very supportive and not judgmental at all. They're still my closest friends today, ten years later, in fact. And while my mother's struggled to understand exactly what it's like, it was a huge eye-opener for her--in a good way--because it suddenly explained a lot about my father, my sister and me: the chemical imbalance runs in his family, and it suddenly lifted a huge amount of guilt off her, I think. You know, we weren't having problems because she'd failed us in some way; we were having problems because of a chemical, biological quirk. So we've tried to frame the whole thing that way, as a valid, chronic medical problem on par with, say, her arthritis or my uncle's diabetes, and that's made it so much easier to live with.