I had everything

And suddenly it stopped making sense.

I had a well-paying job at a tech company in Warsaw. I had a nice apartment. I was 25, surrounded by people, building startups on the side, winning hackathons. I had just moved from Kraków on a week’s notice because someone saw my work and wanted me. I was a UX designer back when the term was still being coined.

I was untouchable. I had grabbed God by the ankles — that’s what we say in Polish when everything is going your way: Złapałem Pana Boga za nogi.

So I grabbed more. More projects. More ambition. More everything. My girlfriend wasn’t enough anymore — I could have anyone, couldn’t I? I was on top of the world.

And then it all went quiet.

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I don’t remember the exact day. I remember the feeling. Waking up and realizing that everything I had built was hollow. The apartment was nice but empty. The people around me were colleagues, not friends. I had cut ties with Kraków, with my studies, with everyone I’d known before. Maybe I never had real friends. I don’t know.

What I know is that one night, I found myself sitting on the railing of my balcony. Eleventh or twelfth floor. I can’t remember which. I was going to jump.

My sister called. I don’t know why she called at that moment. I told her what was happening. The same night, I was at a psychiatrist’s office.

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They gave me pills. I don’t remember which ones (some generic drug that flattened me completely). For weeks, maybe months, I mostly slept. My bosses — Sebastian and Bolek — let me keep my salary while I did virtually nothing. I don’t know how much they understood about what was happening to me. They must have seen something. Guys, if you ever read this: thank you. I will always be grateful.

Eventually, I got a diagnosis: bipolar disorder. The highs and lows, the mania and the crashes. Neat. Clinical. Explained. It all fit.

Except it didn’t.

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Years later, after more therapy, more reading, more honest conversations with doctors, I started to question that diagnosis. Here’s the thing about bipolar disorder: it doesn’t flatten on one side. You don’t just lose the mania and keep the depression. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. But that’s exactly what happened to me. The highs disappeared. The lows stayed.

Wrong diagnosis. What I had wasn’t bipolar. And that changed everything. The “mania” wasn’t mania. It was a trauma response in overdrive — fight mode, fawn mode, the desperate need to prove I was worth something, all running at full speed on adrenaline and dissociation.

The crash wasn’t a depressive episode. It was what happens when you run out of fuel and finally feel what was always underneath.

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My name is Stan. I’m a UX designer and developer with twenty years in tech. I’ve spent my career making interfaces intuitive, turning complicated systems into something simple and human.

A few years ago, I realized I’d been ignoring the most broken interface of all: my own mind.

This blog is my attempt to fix that: a real-time repair job on myself, notes for my future self. Not a manual — nobody gave me one. Not advice — I’m not your therapist. Just observations from debugging the mind I inherited, hoping something here might help you look at yours differently.

Welcome to User Friendly Brain.