Your mental illness is not the most interesting thing about you, and it shouldn’t be. If you find yourself reaching for your disorders name when trying to define yourself you might want to take a hard look at why you’re doing that. I’ve talked about labels before, and one of my bullet points was about mental illness, but I don’t think that covered the topic fully enough.

You are a complete person, full of dreams, hopes, fears, interests, and memories. A lot of them may be tied into your mental illness. That’s fair, especially if you’re currently fighting it with everything you have. Your mental illness is a part of you, and at times it may be a really big part of you, but it’s still not the most interesting thing about you.

If you try to  make it into the most interesting part about you you end up being reduced to a label. We find it insulting when other people reduce us to such, so why don’t we get bothered when we do it to ourselves? We are more than that, we all have a lot more going for us than our mental troubles, and we all have a lot more to give the world than mental health updates and advice.

You might have taken a really rough path to get to were you are with your mental health. It might be an interesting story. Your illness might be interesting in itself. I’ve been interested by the details about bipolar disorder before, it’s not unusual. It’s not rare to want to know about a complex problem that changes peoples lives.

But no matter how interesting your illness or your path might have been, it’s still not the most interesting part of you. You have more to offer. You have opinions that don’t have anything to do with mental health. You have hobbies, and whether they benefit your mental health or not isn’t what makes you love them so much. You have plans for life that go beyond getting healthy.

You are more than a mental illness, even when you’re struggling with it. Don’t let it lie to you and tell you that it is the most important thing about you. Of course it would like you to believe that, mental illness loves being rewarded with more misery. Take care of yourself and all the really interesting parts about you that truly make you who you are.