Soul read

Let me tell you a story.

As we age from adolescence into the temporal soup of not-yet middle age , we become experts. Our limbic system and amygdala construct a gauntlet not all that different from the Ninja Warrior game show. We run it over and over, during sudden sounds and combative dreams. We develop elaborate cover stories- our worst experiences and darkest nights of the soul typed up for Our Eyes Only. We talk to therapists and disclose little carefully choreographed bite-sized points of our pain. It appears we are being forthcoming and vulnerable, but that's merely performance.

We have an elaborate clockwork setup to deflect and mislead the people in our lives who look but not see, hear but not listen. There is some kind of safety in this fortification we have constructed.

Then we inevitably run into someone who instantly, effortlessly sees through all of our bullshit.

I have had several people like that since my diagnosis with bipolar disorder (twenty years in May '25). Often the ability to do a "soul read" comes from being unfamiliar with the long process of constructing my castle walls, my web of espionage. Over a period of years, building elaborate defenses can be seen as part of regular growth. It may even be passed off as what is going on in therapy. Andy Dufresne emptying dirt out of his pockets in the prison yard was certainly better as an idea that getting a shovel and wheelbarrow to dig out his tunnel. Without the context of time, new people see just the disjointed, unconvincing totality.

Because no matter how much I will try, there are threads people may pull. It is fairly easy to bullshit a lot of people about how severe a hypomanic episode is (I recently read Keezy Young's Sunflowers which is a very good comic about bipolar disorder). If someone has bipolar disorder, they are almost entirely immune to this. Bipolar people may have nuanced ideas of what constitutes wellness and losing the fucking plot, but they can hear my desperation. My desire that I would give anything, anything, to get off this carnival ride.

People who see through our bullshit are often incredibly rude about it, but they also tell us a lot about how we are doing, and how we are pretending. It is in the parlance I have adopted, a radical act of kindness to point out that what you have invested so much in is not doing what you think it is doing. What we do with the information is up to us.

We can keep building, or we can confront that the walls cannot stay up forever. I spent a long time bullshitting in therapy, talking about the weather, saying I was fine, my bipolar was not deeply scary and taking over ever facet of my life. One day, after my friend M had leaned into how unreasonable my expectations were for other people while I did none myself. Then I entered my 'real shit' phase of therapy.

Let's talk about suicide, let's talk about trauma, let's talk about the bottomless void that I drop into for weeks or months at a time. Let's talk about how I don't believe I'll ever find work or accomplish anything useful.

Sometimes we need someone to tell us the truth, even if the truth is what we most fear and are unprepared to receive.

Artemis