Felicity Haylock thought she was dying.
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She's taken a break from writing her honours thesis and was out with some friends when her anxiety spiked and all she could think about was that she needed to get home and back to work.
She couldn't breathe and passed out. She woke up on her floor the next morning.
Realising something was wrong, her mum flew her back to Dubbo. She met with a doctor who told her she was burnt out and needed to take six to 12 months off to relax and recharge.
It was June 2006. By October, Ms Haylock was manic.
"I was so heightened. I was waking up at 5am in the morning and doing 21ks, I was jumping off the Tamworth Street bridge because it sounded fun, I maxed out a $10,000 credit card in one day, I was having reckless sex," Ms Haylock said.
"Everything sounded fun and there was no ability to see danger."
Ms Haylock, who was 23-years-old, and her mum went to see another doctor. She was asked to leave the room while the doctor explained to her mum she had bipolar and was in the middle of a manic episode.
Rather than having her admitted to Bloomfield Hospital in Orange, Ms Haylock's mum took two weeks off to care for her.
Ms Haylock would sneak out of the window in the dead of night and run 20 to 30 kilometres. Everything she thought of seemed like a good idea.
"I feel great. I can do anything. It's like this mania comes over. It's a heightened sense of self and it's very euphoric. It's the best you'll ever feel. When you're manic it's like the anything you put your mind to you can achieve," she said.
"I have the best ideas and I action them all and finish none. And I can do it all because I back myself 100 per cent, I'm super human."
The doctor's diagnosis was the first time Ms Haylock had even heard the word 'bipolar'. It was so new to her she had to keep asking her mum to repeat what she had been diagnosed with.
But while the mania made her feel super human. After it came the crash.
Ms Haylock was so depressed she became almost catatonic for 12 months.
"My depression plays with this idea of being catatonic. When you're in a catatonic state you don't talk, you don't move. Nothing is really happening. It got so scary my doctor asked me to get a brain scan because he thought I might have something... I was not saying a word for months and months. I couldn't remember something as simple as a pin on my phone, couldn't remember my address," she said.
"A minute ago I was tutoring at UNSW and then I was so stupid I couldn't even remember my address."
It took Ms Haylock six years to get well.
She's open about her experience and her bipolar diagnosis. And now she's hoping to help the wider community understand more about mental illness.
On June 28, Ms Haylock is hosting Real Resilience, an event she hopes will raise awareness, while also informing the community on the best ways to support someone with a mental illness.
As well as Ms Haylock sharing her own experience, there will also be two psychologists speaking: Tanya Forster and Jill Hely.
"There's a lot we can do as a community to help suffering," Ms Haylock said.
"I think that community aspect is really undervalued because we don't openly talk about mental illness.... I don't think there's an unwillingness to help someone it's just that we don't think about it because we're embarrassed or self-conscious or we're not sure about the repercussions of voicing it."
But she believes better equipping members of the public to help those in need can help fill the shortfall from a lack of mental health services in the central west.
Ultimately, Ms Haylock said if just one person leaves the event feeling as though there's help out there for them, she will consider the event a success.
Thanks to a great medical team, monthly anti-psychotic injections and her family, Ms Haylock is able to manage the bipolar.
But every day is a tightrope.
"Typically bipolar lives in depression and then every now and again it'll escalate to mania. I live my life on the verge of mania - I talk a lot, I have a lot of ideas, I'm bubbly, I'm impulsive," Ms Haylock said.
"I have to ask myself, is this happiness or is this the start of a manic episode?"
She hopes her open and frank discussions will help people understand mental illness.
Tickets to Real Resilience are available here.