Episode 47: Ashley Hlebinsky

What is Bipolar II Disorder and what does it have to do with this podcast?

For the past 15 years, Ashley Hlebinsky has been immersed in the study of firearms history, technology, and culture becoming one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the subject. Hlebinsky has researched and worked in several nationally recognized firearms and weapons collections, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Firearms Collection and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Cody Firearms Museum. For the past decade, she worked for and ran the Cody Firearms Museum, one of the largest and only accredited firearms museums in the country.

Ashley has accomplished a lot during her relatively short career - achieving all of these milestones before her 30th birthday. While many have described her as the "energizer bunny" and "overly passionate," juggling multiple high stress, high level projects, that level of energy is often punctuated with behind-the-scenes exhaustion and depression.

In November 2020 she finally made sense of the opposite sides to her life. Realizing that maybe it's not "normal" to have a full time job, build a museum, run a consulting business, as well as film an entire season of a TV show at the same time, she was ultimately diagnosed with Bipolar 2 disorder. 

Find Ashley at The Gun Code, on Instagram, on Facebook, or on Twitter.