Elis de Guerre

I first went on disability when I lived in Rochester, New York.

Raise your hand if you feel like you want to make new friends as an adult, but have no idea how anymore. Oh, good. It’s not just me.

I am 27 years old, 10 months into my marriage, and have been separated from my husband for two weeks. Consider this a letter from the trenches of impending divorce.

In the past four months, I’ve undergone a veritable dating hurricane. I ran out on my 10-month-old marriage in August. I texted my decision and departure to my closest friends, live-tweeted my flight from upstate New York to the New Hampshire seacoast, and have written extensively and publicly about separation, my estranged husband, and the terrors of emotional pain ever since.

Over the course of 12 years, I’ve had relationships with eight men: lived with three, planned for marriage three times, and followed through with marriage once. But it has only been within the past six months that I have started dating with intention.

I am nine months into marriage and already have regrets. I do not regret my choice of partner, or our choice to get married, but do regret who I was prior to marriage and what I did (or didn’t do) when I was single.

Many people are aware of bipolar disorder. Most know it’s a mental illness that swings the brain between depression and mania. Most understand depression to be debilitating, a condition that combines sadness, despair, exhaustion, and lack of motivation. But most people don’t understand mania (which is experienced primarily by people with bipolar I) or hypomania (which those with bipolar II tend to encounter more than full-blown mania) — at least not fully.

What I objected to was the genderization of feminism, the idea that women's rights have to be specifically prioritized. If the overall end goal is equality, why bring gender into the equation?

The Kinsey Scale test labeled me a 2, or, "predominately heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual," one notch above "equally heterosexual and homosexual."

I never wanted children. When other little girls were playing with dolls, I played with stuffed animals. Even when I played house, my home was filled with plush puppies.