Giant-impact hypothesis

Let me tell you a story.

I've written about some core insecurities related to bipolar disorder. People can be deceitful. They can say they like something about your personality or appearance and not mean that. Yes, yes, we have all been chatted up before, maybe all of that even has worked once upon a 10:45 PM on a Saturday. The puzzle for me is when people are, as I aspire to be, totally sincere about the personality and intellect I radiate. They are telling the truth, they are being face-up and acting in good faith.

It's just a fucking disaster that they are doing this.

Since I was diagnosed in fifteen, the majority of my life has fallen into "partial remission" territory. That was parts of high school, it was also what my current psychiatrist wrote when I moved to Portland three years ago. How this presents and exists as a somatic experience varies a lot - the insomnia, the restlessness, the sexual impulsivity, the financial impulsivity, the social impulsivity. There is a yawning chasm between whatever might be called baseline, and me at my most unwell, in which my brain exhausts itself connecting them like a telephone switchboard lady. For most of my life, these two parts remain in constant contact.

Often though, this relation is recognized by me alone, the unassailed master of my own illness. It would be unfair for people, especially new-ish people, to have any idea that they are walking into a off-kilter experience. If you've never been to sea, the first gale is going to be a bit of a tough balancing act.

So people meet me, and there is often no good result of this. They don't like how I'm presenting in that point and time, and they disengage. Or they do like it, they like it a lot. They find me captivating, probably in an elevated state. It's just, their interest me is more sustainable than my mood episodes. People want more of the outrageous personality, the force of nature, the person up for doing wild shit at 4am in the morning. I pretty rapidly get exhausted, I know myself well enough that this is not a new me, it is not a golden age. This will hurt me, and it will hurt other people. They do not deserve that.

I am in the grand spectrum of bipolar individuals, very treatment receptive. I will take my meds, get refills, tell my psychiatrist about side effects or things that don't seem to be working. I'm also very stubborn on all of this- I left a very nice social engagement at 3am because I did not have the subset of meds I need to sleep, and keep hypomania away. Even my worst manic episode, a months-long moan of agony in 2012, I still took everything as prescribed each morning and evening.

I can't convince myself, even at my most off-kilter, that I don't need the treatment, that I'm cured. I know I'm not fixed. I have accepted this as a lifetime, chronic condition. Oh how dark, you don't believe in hope? I do, I read the literature, the drug trials. I believe that a sustained cure for bipolar disorder will exist in my lifetime. But I have not lied to myself that it exists now, and that it is better to embrace my mania, ride it out, enjoy the creative rush. I've written thirty two daily essays in a row, poems, a bunch of a zine, short story outlines in the past month. That wasn't manic energy, I'm done by 4pm most days. I can do that because the medication works, not because I threw it in the trash.

My point I'm meandering to is that this social pressure, this desire to be what others want when elevated, is exceedingly dangerous. I am a people-pleaser, I want people to like me, to say nice things about me. Were it not for some fundamental things I believe, ossified in the confines of my chest, someone who flirts with hypomanic me could tempt me to abandon treatment. For many people who walk the road I do, people are crashing into a plowed field and starting from scratch. That scares me. I want to be close to other people, I want to be closer than I am right now. I want to stop being strangers with annotations with most of the people in my life. I also know the closer someone is, the more my disorder affects them, and the more they could make my disorder worse.

It's tough because these dynamics are not usually with bad-faith, manipulative personalities. People are capable of bad intentions, of course. But it's hard to tell someone being fun and warm and loving that actually, this is hurting me, what you are saying about me. Please stop saying you like this.

If you self-disclose up front, people get spooked. If you self-disclose at this point, they don't take it seriously. What's left, isolation, a safety blanket cinched ever tighter?

The albatross is the most romantic bird because it flings itself off of cliffs so that it might soar.

At some point to find love I must leave the fortress I have painstakingly constructed.

Artemis