I’m Tommy. Bipolar type one, I’m told. I actually have something to say, something to share.

The thing no one talks about in mental health, bipolar type one specifically, is how seductive and sweet the upswing feels. It’s deeply more than just “good” to me. It feels like the limits of the brain have been cut loose, severed, done away with. Suddenly all those moments and ideas and thoughts and connections you miss in life are lit in a bright shining light that removes your blind spots.

The world now finds you incomparable, generous, hilarious, productive, creative, talkative. Not the slightest bit a drag. The opposite, in fact. You write 30 pages a day and believe it’s better writing than usual. In a cruel twist of irony, you’re often actually right. You become more compassionate. Your very bones hum with the awareness of how everything and everyone is connected. You see your own suffering as equal to the suffering of others, and you like feeling that closeness.

The inevitable check

Then one day the check arrives. Time to pay up for your wild trip. Time to cough up the debt owed for the fun and indescribable rewards you were just given. But it’s sour and it hurts deeply as you find yourself pleading, I’ve never been or felt more alive than just now. Over time, you become conditioned to fear “bad,” maybe even to mistrust anything in life that is worth living.

You start to ask yourself, when others ask if you’re stable, if what they really mean is permanently half dead. Because yes, bipolar disorder really feels like a drug. The greatest, irreproducible, freely available kind of drug. Free because it’s given to you by your own miswired brain.

The illusion of insight

Bipolar disorder differs from, say, major depression. There’s no trick, no ruse, no disguise there. What you see is what you get. But this bipolar thing, the way it tricks you into believing, truly believing, that your “grandiose” thoughts are actually “insights.” It convinces you it’s passion, not sleepless nights. That your deep compassionate ways are love, not reckless attachment.

I’m tired though. I’m tired of being lied to. Tired of knowing I’m the one doing the lying. Tired of choosing to believe maybe I’m supposed to be this bubbling, kind, dreaming, smarter, funnier, more confident thing. I’m tired of sabotaging myself and opting to believe I’m better, who I’m meant to be, when I’m in the throes of this disorder.

Grieving the highs

I am not dumb. On a cerebral, reason-based level, I know there’s a middle ground. I even know that “stable” doesn’t necessarily mean zombie-like or forever half dead. Maybe it just means, well, stable. Not flat. Not a life made only of peak to trough to peak again. I know this.

And yet I still feel gullible when I believe I’m a better man, the very best version of myself even, when I take a free hit of the best drug ever. Lately that belief feels like it’s diminishing.

It’s becoming more obviously a lie, and yet it kind of sucks to say, “No thanks, I’m good. I’m going to be like everyone else,” and wave goodbye to the version of myself that makes me feel best and truest to who I think I can be.

I know all this.

But in the end, I’m learning it’s a very different thing to know something and to want it. Without wanting the thing I know, I’m never going to be able to have it.

It hurts to think I’ll never write as well again. I’ll never bond with another person so deeply or feel that level of compassion again. I won’t fully experience passion or see connections or think outside the box the same way. I’ll have to reattach my blinders, say farewell to what I once believed was my potential.

I’ll just be a cow, chewing cud, sleeping at night, moseying around during the day, mooing like the rest of the cows. I could cry at the sadness I feel when I imagine being “normal,” talking “normal.”

Tommy Saborido is a family physician.