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In the many years before appropriate diagnosis and treatment I thought of myself as crazy. I set my sights low thinking that if I attempted to reach my potential professionally and socially I'd be found out -- a fraud trying to worm my way into the lives of normal people. Life -- marriage, parenting, traveling and forays into the worlds of the better-adjusted -- showed me my premise was wrong.

Look around you. Who is "normal?" Who grew up in a family that had balanced perspective and appropriate behavior? The difference between me and those people who were leading more satisfying lives is that I gave up before I tried, while they persevered. I limited what I thought I could bear because I defined my self as too ill to function in the world. This attitude leads to self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, of standing on the outside looking in through a window.

The fact that I have DI is of no greater import than the fact that I am intelligent, competent, have a college degree, managed to raise a child successfully, can be entertaining and fun -- the list goes on. Each of these is an aspect of who I am, none is the whole ball of wax. Over the years the DI aspect has been cut down to size and made to stand no taller than any other facets of who I am. So now I am all of those qualities and I have DI along with acid reflux disease, slight arthritis, and the occasional flu, all of which are unpleasant, sometimes awful, but can be lived with. It's a matter of putting things into perspective. DI can be thought of as magical, outside the realm of our control, an external force that takes us over and ruins our lives. Or, it can be thought of as a neurochemical anomaly that can be managed and lived with.

It's a matter of rethinking the paradigm. DI can be thought of as the defining characteristic of who we are, or as an illness that sometimes impinges on our level of functioning but does not preclude following our dreams. It might take a bit longer to reach goals, or even to decide upon goals, with the issues that DI presents, such as low self-esteem and a host of other self-limiting symptoms. But just as someone who uses a cane or who has a chronic illness can make adjustments and use strategies to help them achieve their goals despite their illness, so can those of us who have DI.