"One Day I Thought Everything Was Fine. The Next, It Was Gone."

Julie Gale wasn't looking for a turning point.

She was thirty-four, a few days removed from her brother's thirtieth birthday party in a house full of laughter and family. That was when her husband of twelve years sat her down and told her he wanted a divorce.

He'd fallen in love with someone else. Someone thirteen years younger. It was already decided. He was already leaving.

"It happened so fast," Julie says now. "One day, I thought everything was fine. The next, it was gone."

The Life That Came Before

For twelve years, Julie had built her identity around that marriage. She and her husband had moved six times across Alberta as his banking career required it — Calgary to Edmonton, then Peace River, Innisfail, Brooks, Lethbridge. Each time, Julie packed up a household, left behind jobs and friendships, and started over somewhere new. She raised their two children through all of it.

"We made friends all over Alberta," she used to say, and she meant it with real gratitude.

What she didn't know was that the constant upheaval, the distance from her own family, and her husband's quiet restlessness were creating a fracture no one could see from the outside. By the time he asked for a divorce, the marriage had already been unraveling for a while. Julie simply hadn't been let in on it.

The Double Loss No One Talks About

The betrayal was one blow. What came next was another, harder to name.
Julie's twelve-year-old son chose to live with his father. She never fully learned why. Her nine-year-old daughter stayed with her, and together the two of them tried to build something steady out of what was left.

It's in the months that followed; underwater, as she describes it, functioning but grief-heavy, that Julie first encountered something she had no name for yet: soaring energy that gave way, without warning, to exhaustion, agitation, confusion.

It would eventually be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. At the time, she just knew the world had tilted in a way she couldn't control.

Rebuilding With No Safety Net

Julie had been a stay-at-home mother for years. She had no recent work experience, a nine-year-old depending on her, and a mental health diagnosis she was only beginning to understand.

She applied for a job anyway, at an organization that helped people with mental illness find work. In the interview, she made a choice that would shape the rest of her life: she told the truth about her diagnosis.

"You're hired," the interviewer told her. "Who better to help others than someone who understands?"

That job became more than income. It became proof that her diagnosis didn't have to be something she hid to be employable, trusted, or valued.

What Julie Wants People to Understand

Divorce doesn't cause bipolar disorder. But for Julie, it was the moment the illness first made itself known, during one of the most destabilizing periods a person can go through. That timing matters, because it's a pattern many people living with bipolar disorder recognize: the first episode arriving not out of nowhere, but during a period of real, ordinary human devastation.

Her Catholic faith made the divorce even harder to reconcile at first. It was a support group at her church that helped her stop carrying it as shame.

"We became very close," she says of raising her daughter through those years. "She saw me struggle, but she also saw me fight through it."

This Is Where Her Story Begins — Not Where It Ends

The breakdown of Julie's marriage and the diagnosis that followed could easily have been the whole story. Instead, it was chapter one of a much longer one — including a frightening episode in Mexico, a breakthrough treatment after decades of searching, devastating family losses, and a courageous restart at 71.

Living With Bipolar: My Journey to Balance is Julie Gale's account of everything that came after that ordinary evening in Calgary — told with unflinching honesty, for anyone who has ever had their life tilt in a direction they never chose.