I was born with the plan already written.
Firstborn son in a strict, high-discipline house. Private school, required sports, straight A's, a University of California degree, marry the high-school sweetheart, take over my father's electrical contracting business. I never questioned it. I performed it.
My childhood was a highlight reel of emergency rooms. A severed finger at four. Broken arms, a broken back, a shattered kneecap, three spinal surgeries before I was done. Doctors would later say it was almost certainly bipolar disorder showing up early as zero impulse control and a freakish pain threshold. Back then the adults called it "all boy," handed me the next helmet, and sent me back out.
By twenty-two, every box was checked. Degree. House, gutted and rebuilt with my own hands. Fiancée. Wedding four months out. A career waiting for me whenever I wanted it.
Then, on a Memorial Day weekend at the Colorado River, my spine gave out. I couldn't move my legs. A week in the hospital, and I walked out with a prescription for a month of whatever I wanted.
Here is what nobody tells you about a scripted life. When you get to the end of the script and you are still empty, you have nothing left to reach for. I stood in a kitchen I had just finished and thought: this is the peak? This is it? So I did the only thing that made the dread go quiet. I took the pills I already had.
The fall took years, and it had help. A pain clinic that shipped narcotics to my door. A doctor who, after I had detoxed cold turkey and told him "no more," talked me into a fentanyl patch anyway. That was the day I became an addict. I lived the fentanyl story years before the rest of the country had heard the word.
It took two interventions, a flight to a rehab in the frozen mountains of Pennsylvania, and total surrender to stop. Sober, I lost the rest anyway. My father gave me an ultimatum about my marriage; I quit the family business on the spot. Divorce. Bankruptcy. A beach trailer in San Diego. I lost my kids for long stretches. I was starting from zero.
And only then, in the rubble, did anyone find the root of it. Bipolar I with psychosis. Generalized anxiety with panic disorder. And, much later, on September 2, 2026, a formal diagnosis of ADD and ADHD that had been there the whole time. The wild behavior, the risk, the intensity, the twelve open tabs in my head: it all had a name. Three names, actually. The meds for one stirred up another, and the coping skills I learned in one room didn't hold up in the next.
I rebuilt. I talked my way into a software startup at the bottom rung and turned it into a twelve-year career at LinkedIn. I met Kristen, who bathed me and fed me after a spinal fusion one month into dating, and who saw the ugliest version of me before she knew my favorite color.
Then I fell again. A relapse after the surgery. A hand broken in a fit of panic and rage. An involuntary psychiatric hold in January 2015. A year of programs, admissions, and promises I couldn't keep. In 2017 Kristen finally drew her line and put me out. I was homeless again, no safety net this time, and I had to decide: give up out here, or live.
I chose to live.
Not for a judge or a boss. For my life. I got on the right medication and I took it every day. I got off the narcotics. I made sleep non-negotiable. I built a routine and I did not deviate from it, for years. In 2018 I stood in front of Kristen and asked her to marry me a second time. She said yes.
I want to be honest with you about the part that came after, because it is the part most recovery stories skip. From 2018 to 2025 I was stable. Meds, psychiatrist, routine, best shape of my life, high-performing career. On paper, a success. And I was completely empty. My two biological children had cut me off without a conversation. I had rebuilt myself to be their father, and now I was a man standing in a rebuilt house with no one to live in it. There were times I did not want to be here anymore. I say that plainly because if you have felt it, I want you to know that someone who felt it is still here, and glad to be.
What changed was not one thing. It was a question from my wife on a couch in Hawaii, a childhood memory I had blocked out for thirty-three years, and, in my life, God. On a night in September 2025 my mind went quiet for the first time in decades, the way noise-cancelling headphones click on. That is my story, not a requirement for yours. Rebuilt Minds welcomes everyone, whatever you believe. The tools I used to survive came from a lot of rooms: hospital programs, a psychiatrist who finally got the medication right, two words tattooed on my arm, and, more than anything, other people who had been where I was.
That is the point of all this. The people who helped me stay were not, mostly, the ones with credentials. They were the ones who could say "me too" and mean it. Hurt people know hurt people. A room full of them, once a week, is the most powerful thing I have found.
I should have been dead many times over. I'm not. I'm rebuilt, not repaired. If you are in the middle of it, there is a room for you.
Darrin Abell
Darrin Abell spent more than twenty years in enterprise technology. He lives in the Yuma area, and he lives with all three conditions Rebuilt Minds is built around: bipolar disorder, anxiety and panic, and ADHD. He has written about surviving them in his memoir, Memoir of a Maniac.
Read his personal story at m8n1ac.com