There have been many turning points in my journey of living with bipolar disorder over the last 20 years. HBS has been an integral part of the highs and the hubris, the lows and the healing, intertwined with my journey like a double helix.

I started the MBA program in 2000 as a 24-year-old recovering from my first manic episode. I was undiagnosed then, triggered by certain personal and professional life circumstances at the time. My thoughts were racing, I was losing sleep, and my family didn’t have the medical vocabulary then to understand why I was convinced that meeting future global CEOs at HBS would help me change the world—just one amongst many other grandiose plans that characterize mania. My family accompanied me to Boston to help me settle down on campus.

When they left, the depression set in. While my classmates prepared cases and exercised after class, I went to my dorm room and cried, sometimes thinking of self-harm but not acting on it. Over time, I recovered. I saw a counselor and a psychiatrist on campus, made friends and traveled with them around the world, and perhaps most important, signed up for an undergraduate creative writing class across the river. It gave me the space for self-expression that I needed. More than any number of cases, those two years taught me how to enjoy my own company, in all its varying moods. After graduating, I went back to Mumbai and worked with my family’s office furniture business for a few years.

Our 5th Reunion brought me back to campus in 2007. I was married and working in London at the time, and I recall spending most of the weekend on the dance floor. But the 10th Reunion really shook my confidence and self-esteem. By then I was back in Mumbai with two young children, struggling with my mental health and career after the family business, where I had been working, was sold. That year, I decided to migrate to a career in freelance journalism, as I had always enjoyed writing and it gave me the flexibility to work from home. I remember feeling that I didn’t belong at the reunion among classmates with more conventional (and much more successful) corporate careers.

And then in 2018, I unexpectedly found what I was looking for on campus: validation. I attended the Reflective Leader program and found a study group of alumni—especially Tom Shaffer (MBA 2005)—who were impressed with my poetry and writing. Their support during the pandemic helped me write Chemical Khichdi: How I Hacked My Mental Health—part-memoir, part-self-help book—which is changing the discourse around mental health in India. I have also been stable for nearly five years, a hard-won and cherished milestone.

Over the years, the HBS mission statement sustained my ambition to make a difference in the world, to not be defeated by my illness, and to learn how to thrive with it. Mental health is a team sport; in the MBA program, I found many allies in my classmates, especially Louise Willington, Samhita Jayanti and Hema Nealon. HBS was the crucible for my journey to date. When I felt most like a misfit, it forced me to examine my sense of identity and to interrogate my notions of purpose, meaning, success, and happiness. This self-realization makes me both peaceful and productive.

Aparna Piramal Raje is a writer, motivational speaker, educator, and mental health advocate.

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