ON BEING BIPOLAR
AT AGE EIGHTEEN, I WAS DIAGNOSED BIPOLAR II. Less than a decade later, sometime in my mid-to-late twenties, I participated in a study that sought to glean insights from “high-functioning” bipolar people—presumably to figure out why we were high-functioning, and if we had anything to share that could help others become high-functioning, too.
The study took place in a little room in a low-slung building that seemed like it was built in the seventies. (This feels true of many of the buildings where psychological studies take place.) A grad student, maybe a bit younger than me, administered the study. She was cleaner-cut, normal-seeming, slim. We could have had a friend or two in common; we could have ended up on the same coed dodgeball team. At the beginning of the interview, she consulted with an older man before we entered the room. And then she proceeded to ask me questions about my diagnosis and mental health history. When she got to the part of the survey about hallucinations, she seemed apologetic, ready to skip it—bipolar people can but don’t always experience hallucinations and/or psychosis, and it’s less common with bipolar II than bipolar I.
“Oh,” I said, “we will need to go through those.” After I answered: yes, I’d experienced visual hallucinations while ill, and yes, I’d experienced auditory hallucinations while ill, she excused herself and went to consult, a second time, with the older psychologist. When she came back, I could tell that I had gone from being one type of person, in her perception, to another type of person. The wrong type of person. The type of person we place in a separate category in order to quarantine whatever it is that makes them abnormal and a bit frightening. (I’m using the word “abnormal” here colloquially—but also because abnormal psychology is the branch that studies mental disorders, of which I have several.)
During the period of time when I was hallucinating, I was also living in circumstances that the woman who was interviewing me probably would have found appalling. In the winter, my then-partner and I wore toques and hoodies to bed because it was too cold not to. At the very end of my bachelor’s degree, which coincided with the peak of one of his drinking binges, I woke up to write my final exam and had to step over him, as he was passed out on the floor and surrounded by broken glass, to get to the coffee maker. I was taking lithium. I saw birds in the corners of our rooms—one owl, in particular, recurred. I heard a low, echoing voice. I knew these were hallucinations, and I lived with them just I like I lived with my boyfriend’s alcoholism and the broken glass on the floor. Many years later, now that I am stable and my life is stable, I can sometimes still be picked out by normal people, ones who can sense that I’ve experienced periods of poverty and illness. Other times, I can pass for the type of person who has never experienced these things—and then, if they come up, they come as a shock. I’m not sure what’s better or worse.
WHEN THE MEDIA TALKS ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS, the conversation is usually framed around reducing stigma—#LetsTalk about mental health—and around the costs to employers, as half a million workers are out sick with mental health issues weekly, translating into a $50 billion hit to the economy. Focusing on stigma cleanly removes the personal economic costs of mental illness from the conversation; focusing on costs to employers frames the illness in terms of productivity, what one owes one’s employer.
For sixty percent of people diagnosed bipolar, what one owes one’s employer is a moot point, because sixty percent of people diagnosed bipolar are unemployed. Stephen Fry’s 2006 documentary, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, is mostly filtered through his personal experience as he seeks to get to the root of the causes and effects of his bipolar disorder—and as he struggles to decide if he’ll take medication for it. But he also speaks to other people, including a doctor who works half time, a young woman who can’t work at all, and celebrities for whom work is presented as less of an economic problem and more of a creative expression or outlet. Fry works. Fry works almost compulsively, almost as if he is a shark who will die if he ever stops moving. I might do this, too, even if I weren’t currently the main earner for my very moderately middle-class household, which includes my partner and my toddler and my tabby cat (and an uncountable number of what I at first thought were wolf spiders but are actually “giant house spiders”). I live with a feeling of constant stress that began in childhood, stress that if I don’t work at or near max capacity, I will lose the roof over my head. In childhood, I had no control, no way of stemming the tide of calls from collection agencies, calls from the bank. The first thing I did when I made real money of my own was not to save for a Game Boy or new comic books; it was to buy the food I wanted to eat.
When I spun out at eighteen, I was between my first and second years of university, and had come home to Hamilton instead of staying in Guelph. My parents had split up in my first semester after the daylighting of an affair between my mom and my best friend’s father, and the composition of my family and my best friend’s family had shifted into a temporary, liminal space—as if we had been suspended before we could move forward. My mother and my best friend’s father were renting a small house by the highway in Winona, just south of Hamilton, on Lake Ontario. My dad and my brother were still in our childhood home, where I went; that house was a stone’s throw from my best friend’s house, and that summer we all, except for the two in Winona, had regular barbecues in our backyard. Through a buddy of hers from the bar, my mother got me a job at a Hamilton Parks & Rec location near her house. Ten-hour days at the beginning of the season progressing to twelve-hour days later on. Mowing lawns, clearing firepits, picking up garbage, directing parking traffic during events. I had a second part-time job at the video rental store I’d worked at near the end of high school, so I was working anywhere from ten to sixteen hours a day when I went off the rails.
While everyone around me—my dad, my brother, my best friend, her family—seemed to have been slowly processing the affair and its aftermath, I felt like I’d returned from the freedom of university life to the direct, unrelenting pressures of life with my mother. Whatever progress I’d made at school evaporated; my mother wanted me to stay over at her place after work to avoid the drive home, and if I relented, she’d get progressively drunker as she complained about how shitty my dad was. We’d never talked about the affair, which had started when I was living at home and working at my best friend’s father’s store, and which I’d attempted to confront my mother about in high school. We’d never talked about her drinking. I was angry and resentful, but my anger was a chiminea to my mother’s forest fire. One night, when I yelled at her that I couldn’t take it anymore, she yelled back. I’ve blanked out what, exactly, she said, but I remember later thinking that it was as if she’d used the years she’d been my parent solely to hone the sharpest and most painful insults. I also remember later cautioning myself, based on what she’d said, that I couldn’t trust her, that I’d have to give up thinking of her as a mother, my mother. I ran out of her house and down the lane, the sound of highway traffic audible beyond the noise barrier. I heard my mother’s door open; I heard her car start. I looked around. I could jump into a drainage ditch or sprint to the end of the road and hide behind a concrete barrier. I went for the barrier. I could hear my mom driving around, which terrified me because she was drunk. I called my dad, who came and picked me up. I never stayed at my mother’s house in Winona again.
I tried to maintain the pace of my life for a few weeks after that. The confluence of my jobs already meant that I wasn’t always getting as much sleep as I needed. I started sleeping even less. I went to a party in the west end of Hamilton, got drunk, and had no way to get home. The buses had stopped running. Instead of taking a cab, I made an overnight elevenkilometre trek home along the rail trail that connects Hamilton and Dundas, arriving just as the sun was coming up and my dad was leaving for work. I got into a fender-bender on the highway driving home one day, and then I got into another accident while picking up my co-worker; the other car’s hubcap went rolling across the road, like in the movies, all noise suspended except for the sound of metal spinning and then falling on concrete like a top. I drank and smoked and cheated on my boyfriend with someone I’d had a crush on in high school; I promised that boy the world. On the phone with my boyfriend, I felt as though I’d promised away too many worlds. I could no longer keep anything together. When I realized that my mother was not a mother like other people had, I began to cycle between grief and self-recrimination, wondering why I was not lovable,