I didn’t know real relief until then. It felt good to have given whatever it was a name. It was an even bigger relief to begin to experience feelings with limits. Over time (and doctor’s appointments, and blood tests, and medication adjustments), I started to know what reasonable responses to sadness and happiness looked like again. I began to know how to take bad news in stride and how to pause and ask myself if I was acting reasonably, or why I was feeling the way I did. I began to feel like a person instead of a canvas for emotional excess. And I even began to write about it.
I was finally interesting. But when you no longer have a choice in that fact, it becomes less story fodder than something you have to deal with. In less than a year, the magic of being diagnosed had begun to wear off, and my bipolar disorder no longer felt like a story hook. It felt like a part of me I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit with anymore. So the further away I got from the diagnosis and all that had led up to it, the more I downplayed the extremes or made them punchlines I could use before anybody else could. I came to resent the head tilts and looks of surprise that go hand in hand with sharing what I’d come to see as a particularly unglamorous part of my life. If this was what interesting was, I didn’t want it anymore. I hadn’t counted on the most interesting people not being able to opt out. I didn’t want to be the woman who does everything despite her bipolar disorder. I wanted to be the woman who has many complexities, her bipolar disorder being just one of them. (You know, a person.)
After being diagnosed, I spent an afternoon desperately Googling “bipolar celebrities,” hoping I’d find a person who’d managed to thrive outside the umbrella of their diagnosis. And I remember the joy of realizing Carrie Fisher wasn’t just open about being bipolar, but spoke about it in such a candid, matter-of-fact way. I was in awe of the way her mental health was part of her story, but not the entire story. She was honest and funny and successful and smart, and she didn’t cradle her mental health like precious cargo or her only notable quality. She was Carrie — a complete and whole person. She was interesting. On her own terms.
~
I’m still trying to write and talk about my mental health in a way that’s comfortable for me. I hate being told I’m “brave,” as if I had a choice but to play the cards I was dealt. I hate that at one point I was so willing to write and to share that I overgeneralized and overassumed and wrote pieces that were downright ignorant because I believed everybody who was bipolar had felt the way I did. I’m embarrassed that for a second between the relief of being diagnosed and the dread of it being brought up at a Q&A, I thought maybe mental health could really be The Thing. Sometimes I hate that I have to acknowledge it at all.
That’s why my instinct has been to retreat, thinking that if I make the most complicated part of me invisible, I’ll never have to deal with what makes me unhappy about it. But holy shit, so many things already make me unhappy. I don’t need to wave a flag that reads “I have a mental health disorder!” (I hate flags), but I believe we should own our stories, own the way our mental health threads itself through our narratives. Even if you don’t warm up to your story right away.
Not every story has to make everybody laugh. Not every story has to make everybody feel fine. That’s what real life looks like: full of nuances and nonsense. At one point, we’ve all been in a metaphorical park, crying about not getting a text back. At others, we’ve invested in what we assumed would be a life-changing candle. We’ve all needed help.
We’ve also always been interesting, with or without a diagnosis or a tragedy. I wish I’d known I was always enough.
While in the Awful
You know when somebody starts a conversation by saying they’ve been “dealing with something” for a while and “it’s been a tough year” and “the last month especially” has been a big one, and then they don’t go into it, and you’re like, “Bitch, are you serious?” Hello and welcome to real life. In our small section of the galaxy, many of us are dealing with things that aren’t ours enough to talk about, but are still ours enough that we have to deal with them. Which is a weird thing when somebody asks, “What’s new?” and you’re like “UGHHHH,” and then you follow that with “Oh, nothing!”
But it’s fine. Everything will be fine. Or it won’t! [Manic laughter.] This is the feeling I closed 2016 and 2017 with, which kind of fit in with everybody else’s shit years. Towards the end of last year, I was texting with one of my best friends about what I was facing, and what she was facing, and she kept it simple. “Remember,” she wrote, “it’s okay to feel awful because everything is awful.” And holy shit — what a comforting thought. It is okay to feel bad because things are bad. I know we talk ourselves out of moods a lot, and I talk about turning anger into productivity, but Jesus Christ, sometimes you just have to Feel Bad.
A lot of us are Feeling Bad right now. And that’s because there’s a lot to feel bad about. There’s the big picture badness (climate change! tyrants in power! death by dysentery!), but then there’s the personal badness that lurks in the shadows and threatens to change everything. You start to forget when your problems were like “Oh, I don’t know if my crush likes me back.” You truly cannot believe that any problem that could be solved with a single, simple conversation ever consumed you. You wish you’d known it was so easy then. You didn’t know awful, and now you do. And you don’t know when it’s going to end.
Your patience is gone. And you resent people who aren’t dealing with things of the same magnitude, and you don’t know how to show empathy for things that are decidedly less dire. If somebody tells you how lucky they are that they’ve never really had any hard times or experienced straight-up fucking garbage, you . . . um, hate them? Like, how dare you not know what it’s like to be swallowed by something appalling. How dare you experience joy without the footnote of “But outside of this brief, blessed reprieve, the Bad Thing is still happening.” How dare you?
While in the awful, it is fine and acceptable to be like, “I cannot go to that party tonight because, honestly, I just don’t want to be around that many people right now.” It is fine and acceptable to cocoon and to admit that no, right now, you do not have the emotional bandwidth to deal with anything but The Thing. It is fine and acceptable to be choosy about who you can be around and talk to and commiserate with. All of it is fine and acceptable. Sometimes you get to be taken out of the moment, you get to be distracted for a second — and that’s fine. As much as we talk about joy and gratitude and staying positive, we also need to talk about the value in being and feeling the opposite: you still have to go to work and eat your meals and be alive, but you are also allowed to exist in a realm where You Are Fucking Dealing With Something, So Fuck Off, Please and Thank You.
That realm can look like a lot of things. There’s nothing wrong with anger, with sadness, with quiet. When I’m dealing with something massive, I don’t revel in those feelings or exist there in that realm for attention or out of self-pity. I tend to push it down as much as I can, and I don’t wear it on my sleeve. (Which is ironic, isn’t it? I remember wearing the smallest shit on my sleeve in hopes that someone would think it made me interesting. Now, I’m just Erin Brockovich, yelling at everybody with purpose and feeling fine with it, thank you.) But I still feel it. And fuck, man — it’s fine to feel it. Are things awful? Then it’s okay to feel awful. Sometimes you can’t think your way out of an emotional and mental abyss. That isn’t weakness, it’s simply being human and feeling things. Busy yourself with a rerun of your comfort watch and remind yourself that you’re not being dramatic; sometimes things are just Not Good.
But they won’t stay Not Good forever. Everything ends. And I mean that in a good way. Inevitably, the awfulness ends. And you will remember it happened, but the sting will lessen. And you will know you got through it, and you will get through the next wave of awful too. And when that happens, it’s okay to feel awful again. And anyone who tries to talk you out of it can fuck off. Or tell me, and I
will tell them to fuck off. Because while in the awful, telling people off is my favorite thing. I’ve got you.
That Guy™
Dating in general is terrible, but it’s the worst as a teen. All things are heightened: you feel all the feels, you emote beyond your control, and all you want is to be wanted in the way Ryan Phillippe wanted Reese Witherspoon in Cruel Intentions.
I personally blame Leonardo DiCaprio. After watching Titanic no less than 11 times every day for 13 months, I’d become completely enamored and had to do something with the passion I felt for Leo. I transferred it onto a classmate named Liam, who, by the age of 13, had already burned down a townhouse.
Liam was complicated. He had ADD, took too much Ritalin on purpose, and at one point threw his desk across our classroom because why wouldn’t he? But Liam was also tall and cute and had Leonardo DiCaprio’s 1997 haircut, so by eighth grade I was understandably in love — which posed a problem. Burgeoning criminal record be damned, he was “dating” my best friend, Erica. Erica, knowing about my crush, had asked my permission before accepting his offer of boyfriendhood, and I had granted it. But it didn’t stop me. One night over the phone, Liam told me he liked me anyway, and I lived for our secret conversations, peppered by me playing Now That’s What I Call Music! on repeat in the background and asking if he liked the song “Crush.” As far as I was concerned, Liam and I were very low-key in love, and I assumed (correctly) that we might even dance at eighth-grade grad. Nonthreatening boys and their kind, gentle demeanors could suck it. Liam with Leo’s hair was my prize.
But phone calls and mumbled compliments at graduation are about as far as it got. From what I remember, Liam skipped out on grad early and left Erica in his dust, and soon after a three-hour phone call nearly got me grounded a few days later, he and I stopped talking.
Liam, to 13-year-old me, was a victory. I had “lured” him via my willingness to listen to him tell me about his problems while I titillated him with the details of the 3-D puzzle I was building as we spoke. Thus, he had ultimately proven to me that I was someone actually worth crushing over. The fact that he liked me (in secret) meant I’d won a very particular challenge. I was ready to date the shit out of every boy in high school.
~
I met Chad in the ninth grade and had absolutely no reason to like him. He wasn’t funny, kind, or even interesting. He didn’t look like Leonardo DiCaprio, and he seemed to care only about skateboarding, egging houses, and listening to punk music. He was loud, crass, and beloved amongst the hockey boys. But one of my friends had grown up with him, so we talked sometimes. And then at some point, something flipped: he decided to hate me, and I decided to hate him back. Of course, it wasn’t a low-key, productive, adult type of hate: we’d go out of our way to be terrible, yelling at each other in the cafeteria, or I’d hit him with my school bag. We waged war over ICQ, at the McDonald’s by my house, and in any shared public space. Chad was my enemy. Especially after he egged my house (and me), which he would do more than a few times while we were in high school. I hated him.
One night later that year, sitting at the park with my friend Lindsay, we started talking about how much I hated him, and she insisted that I actually liked him. I protested, suddenly nervous, thankful for the dark because I was definitely blushing. Because Chad would be a Real Challenge. Whether or not I truly liked Chad didn’t really matter: I wanted him to like me, and that felt like the same thing. And if Liam had taught me anything, it was that I could win over someone who had burned down a house. So a guy who actively took pride in treating me terribly? I was up for the challenge. I could be a good enough woman to change for. I could prove I was worthy of someone realizing I deserved respect and kindness and, one day, if I worked hard enough, love.
And so began the longest six years of my life and the lives of those who cared about me. Because the thing is, Chad always outwardly hated me. He made fun of me, encouraged his friends to do the same, and egged my house (again) on my 17th birthday. But when Chad was alone, he was different. On ICQ, he told me he liked me, but because I wasn’t cool amongst his group of apathetic skater friends at our Catholic high school (or enough of a mean girl to make me a challenge in my own right), he told me I couldn’t tell anyone. And then, after his admission of like, he would inevitably end up trying to date one of my friends and, in one special instance, invite me over on the condition that I bring her too.
But I was convinced I could change him: the perfect ICQ message or my new skate shoes would make him realize how good he could have it by dating me. Which would sometimes pay off. Sometimes, he’d tell me how pretty he thought I was over IM, and on good days he’d add me to his visible list, so I could always see when he was online. One night, he came over and we played cards. One afternoon, I went over to his house and we made out. Eventually, he’d want to be my boyfriend, right?
Because I certainly didn’t have any real ones. In moments of telling myself I was over Chad — when he’d be cruel and dismissive for weeks on end, no glimmer of a maybe — I’d move on to a new guy who actually did like me . . . only to drop the guy in question as soon as Chad said “hi” in my general direction. I’d make out with whomever, casually rendezvous with a friend of his (who also requested I not tell anybody about us because he’d also be embarrassed if anybody found out), and make it very clear to anyone listening how much I hated Chad and wanted him to die. Which was a pretty easy story to sell: if we drank enough around each other, I’d end up yelling at him as he loudly made fun of me, and if we hung out in a group, he’d make sure to let everybody around us know how cool and skater I was not.
Six years is a very long time to ride the wave of this dynamic — especially since Chad and I only ever made out that one time in 2003. But emotions don’t make any sense, especially when your worth is hung on the advances, or lack thereof, of a young man who gets off on treating you poorly. I wasn’t in control of my feelings, but I was certain I could win this terrible challenge. I stuck around, I kept trying — it would all work out and we’d have a real story to tell the kids. (Like about the time he answered “Do I ever?” when I asked why he hadn’t shown up like he’d said he would.) Even after he’d tell me he liked me, but not as much as he liked my best friend, who he then made out with on my bed (which I was also on at the time). Even after he made me buy him hair dye and apply it, and then tried jerking off while I was behind him, my dye-covered gloved hands in his hair. Even after he’d describe me in the most unflattering of ways to anyone who would listen, or after we’d scream across a party at each other, me jealous and angry and hurt that he wouldn’t acknowledge me with respect in public, and him entitled and mean and unhappy.
But the thing I didn’t realize was, I had laid the groundwork for a bigger pattern that threatened to define the rest of my life. For years, I kept my feelings about any decent man at bay. Close friends would know if I liked a guy, and I would swear them to secrecy lest that guy find out and discover that I wasn’t cool enough, or hot enough, or whatever enough, and only want to flirt with me on the internet. And meanwhile, I began moving full steam ahead into the next tier of challenges: full-on unavailability. Believing I’d “failed” at “making” Chad like me, I threw myself into a series of regrettable situations: men with girlfriends, men who had to be “rescued,” men with drinking problems, men who were straight-up shitheads.
“No offense,” my friend Ashley said to me one summer, “but you really do have the worst taste in guys.” I joked about being Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally. I was the friend who made hilariously poor choices and whose announcement of a crush was met with “Oh, Anne, no . . .” I liked guys who needed lengthy disclaimers. I was the friend who called crying after begging a guy I worked with to leave his girlfriend (like he said he would) as we stood in the darkened mall parking lot. He didn’t. None of them did.
And as my twenties wound down, I realized that even though it felt like my ego couldn’t handle more f
ailure, I still had to try. And that I hadn’t been, really. As desperate and sad as I’d been, I’d been choosing the easy route: the most emotionally unavailable, the worst behaved, the men most in need of rescuing would never ask me for true vulnerability. They would never actually love me, never see my actual self, never see me as anything but a supporting character in their own shitty narrative. They were the heroes, and I was a plot point (if that). I mean, at no point would they ever even ask me about my day.
And through talking to friends and to my therapist and thinking on my own, I began to realize that I may hate emotions, and I may hate being vulnerable, but I would hate a lifetime of that bullshit even more.
It’s strange the way your first relationships — or situationships — can fuck with you just enough to linger for years. Our relationships with these stories can be even more toxic and damaging than the people who inspired them. Because some idiot made you feel worthless, theirs is the legacy you’ve chosen to let define you, to gauge your merit by. Every guy morphs into that guy, and every “challenge” is another chance to fix past failures — as if the validation of another person would ever be enough. And it takes years for you to realize that you will never be happy until you let this go.
You can’t force self-worth, and you can’t rush emotional recovery, and you can’t hurry through breaking patterns you’ve kept in place to keep you safe.
I still keep my dating cards close to my chest, but now it’s because I don’t like people knowing too much about that part of my life. But I’m not afraid anymore to tell everyone that I used to like a guy named Chad, or about our toxicity parading as flirtation and feelings. One time back in high school, I was mad at him and said that I’d write about him one day. “I’ll make you famous and no one will even know who you are!” I typed dramatically on ICQ. He laughed.
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