correctly medicated and clinically still hot

sometimes there is a magic pill

My partner kept saying I was beautiful. Like… casually. Repeatedly. Relentlessly.
Not in the “you’re hot” way, but in that over-the-sink, watching-me-chop-garlic, voice-so-soft-it-could-split-me-open way.

At first, I laughed, we are in love after all; they should probably think that. But when I did the mental tally of the sweet nothings whispered while I paid our bills or put the car in park, something wasn’t adding up.

Finally, I asked: “What’s going on with you?”
They paused. Like someone who’d been wandering an art gallery so immersed in the beauty, they hadn’t noticed the hours pass.
Then they just… smiled.

“I think your medication’s working,” they said. “You’re smiling more. You haven’t smiled this much in… I don’t know how long. And you’re so beautiful when you smile.”

That’s when I knew that the meds didn’t take my sparkle.
They helped me feel it.

For so long, I was terrified that healing meant dimming. That if I softened the chaos, I’d lose the magic.

I thought the bursts of brilliance at 3 a.m. — the ones that poured out of me like prophecy — were the reward for my suffering. I thought if I got too balanced, I’d become boring. Forgettable. Beige.

I’ve read enough books, seen enough movies, sat through enough indie gigs to know what we do with women like me: We romanticise them. We call them wild, electric, free. We let them pull their chests open and bleed out onto the pages. Then we turn their breakdowns into Instagram captions and their trauma into trend cycles.

I told myself that the ups and downs, the dread, the volatility, the ache I could never quite name, were the toll I paid to be interesting.
To be “deep”.
To be me.

Because there’s a myth we force-feed artists. And a worse one we force-feed women.

We tell them that there is a light at the end of the suffering, if you earn it, if you stay with it, if you grin and bear it. That your pain is your power. That madness is mysterious. That chaos is captivating, even beautiful. And in a way, I see a type of truth in this, but it isn’t true for everyone. I see how there is nuance to this conversation and how these experiences might work out just fine for some people. But for some, it’s clever marketing of a mental health crisis.

It doesn’t work out for all people. In fact, Self-Help for people who really just need help puts a band-aid over a gaping wound. It turns our heads away from the classic Other-People-Help we might really need. It has us carrying things far too heavy for our arms and craving to be praised for it.

Worse, it makes us think that we are nothing and will never amount to anything without this struggle. It so cleverly pulls the wool over our eyes until we believe that the discomfort of doing something “new” and “out of your comfort zone” is in the same league as mental illness.

The tortured artist archetype has teeth. It sinks in early, especially if you were the feely one, the loud one, the wild one, especially if you were praised for your passion but punished for your intensity.

It teaches you that you can be broken, or you can be brilliant, but never both.
It tells you the highs are where the genius lives.
It breathes down your neck and whispers threats of creative dry spells, convincing you that if you lose your manic edge, your poetry will dry up, if you medicate your mind, your soul will fall asleep.

I swallowed that story whole.
And it almost killed me.

Of course, I tried the spiritual route first. You know the one.

Cacao ceremonies. Nervous system bootcamps. Breathwork sessions where the facilitators get off on the tears of their participants. I once sat in a room where someone told me that SSRIs “block the higher self” and everyone nodded.

There’s a toxic sweetness to these communities, like overprocessed sugar grains that kill you in excess from the inside out. They talk about regulation as if it’s a permanent and preventable state of mind. They worship softness and feminity as long as it fits the description in their workbook, but don’t know what to do with grief that screams even when the throat gives out.

No one tells you how lonely it is to be the too-intense one in spaces that idolise “soft feminine flow.”
No one mentions how easily these scripts for honouring your cycle are horror stories in the wrong hands.
No one tells you how easy it is to mistake trauma responses and manic episodes for spiritual downloads.

No one tells you that some of us aren’t just moody, intuitive babes; we’re unmedicated, undiagnosed, and clinging to breathwork like a flotation device.

When I finally got a diagnosis that fit like a glove, I felt relief.
Real relief. The kind that fills your lungs before you even realise you've been holding your breath.

The pieces started clicking.
The impulsive hypersexuality I thought was empowerment.
The spending sprees that felt like freedom until the debt rolled in, the ease in which a coach could convince me to purchase their overpriced hours like it would cure me.
The way everything felt like destiny in the highs, and like death in the lows.

I wasn’t “too much.” I was just unregulated, and I was exhausted from trying to carry my whole personality on a mood disorder’s back.

I wasn’t the only one.
And every time I found one of these voices, something softened inside me.
I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t making it up. I was part of a lineage of women who had been misread, misdiagnosed, misloved and were still standing.

Accepting help, starting treatment, the thought of medication, had me shaking in my boots. I went back and forth, avoiding this path for years. I thought I could heal myself out of it. I thought that everyone struggled in the same way. I thought that medication would reach inside me and snuff me out.

But something wild happened when I gave myself over to treatment:
I didn’t disappear. I didn’t flatten. I didn’t become a shell.

I came alive.

Not in the candle-burning, stay-up-all-night kind of way.
But in a way that felt like a soft breath. Like quiet joy. Like being able to call someone back.

Now, I don’t write despite my stability. I write from it.

I don’t need to be spiraling to be interesting.
I don’t need to be on the edge to be poetic.
I don’t need to suffer to make something beautiful.

It’s so much easier to create from my heart when I can function as a human first.

If you’ve ever feared that healing would kill your art. I see you.
If you’ve ever worried that being okay means being boring. I hear you.
If you’ve clung to your suffering like it was your only language. I’ve been you.

But the sparkle doesn’t live in the suffering. It lives in you.
And you, steady, still, luminous you — deserve to stay.
You deserve to live.