When I started long-distance running during a graduate research summer in London, it wasn’t for my physical health. Instead, it was about showing my family that I could survive on my own.

Living with bipolar disorder meant that I had spent years controlling every possible circumstance of my life – never living more than a half hour from home or my Toronto psychiatrist – just to ensure that I would make it through my 20s. My family tried to talk me out of the scholarship, knowing that the massive change in routine (and even the amount of sunlight I was exposed to) could trigger my worst manic episodes yet. My fiance, who had proposed only a few weeks before I received the acceptance letter, quietly urged me to take a chance on myself and, by extension, us. I knew the stakes were high as I boarded to plane to Heathrow, but I was tired of just surviving. I wanted to set the kind of goals that had seemed possible before my diagnosis, before I was constantly reminded of the limitations of my tumultuous brain.

I arrived at Goldsmiths College in London armed with a carry-on suitcase that contained my wardrobe for the entire summer and the determination to pen a hard-hitting memoir about mental illness while pretending I was completely over it. London-based poet and author Blake Morrison – who I immediately told everyone back home was played by Colin Firth in the movie of his life – took me under his wing and helped me confront the fact that every time I tried to write about my hospitalisation back home, I couldn’t seem to find the words to describe how my life had fallen apart. Lost in more ways than one, I carried his memoir on the Tube with me and read it in between frantic calls with my parents and my therapist, in which I maintained that I was healthy. So healthy, in fact, that I had taken up running.

“I was tired of just surviving, so I started running – and found acceptance for my bipolar disorder as a result”