[Author’s Note: As part of the #BareYourMind campaign, here’s a story of my experience being bipolar. If you struggle with mental illness, I encourage you to share your stories as well. Let’s work together to de-stigmatize mental health in our society by giving it a human face.]
Continued from Part 4…
It was my wife on the other end of the cellphone. There was obvious concern in her voice as she asked me where I was, and if I was alright. Well, her concern would have been obvious to me, if I wasn’t manic.
This is where I should have come crashing down out of the fake glamour of my situation. This should have initiated the fall back to reality. But it didn’t. Thanks to my illness, I was still flying high.
The voice on the phone began to shift from worry toward frustration. I began to take notice, but I didn’t really care.
“Where are you?” she asked again.
“I had to work late, I’m in the car now.”
“Why didn’t you call me to let me know you were going to be late?”
“I got busy, and just decided to head home.” I laughed as I spoke.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” I laughed again.
I couldn’t help myself. It seemed ridiculous to me that I had to explain myself. My empathy was at zero. I knew conceptually that I should feel bad about making my wife worry. But it was like empathy was a hypothetical concept created by some quack scientist that I could easily ignore. I wasn’t going to stress out about something I could disprove with my superior intellect.
“You better get home,” she said, her anger even more apparent.
“Yes, I said I’m on my way.” My own anger was now rising up to meet hers.
“Fine, goodbye.” She hung up on me.
I stared dumbly at the phone in my hand for a stunned moment. She hung up on me?
One of the “good” things about bipolar disorder, at least in my experience, is that the fantasy bubbles one creates around oneself during mania can be fairly fragile. This proved to be the case in this instance, fortunately for me. The red-hot poker of my wife’s anger had been enough to pierce the iridescent membrane surrounding me.
The rancid miasma of unreality I’d been huffing gushed out of the hole she’d created, allowing me to regain my senses. As the bubble deflated, I sank back down to earth. Unfortunately, this also made me vulnerable to the dark twin of mania—depression—which lurked in the shadows of the realms of normality. But I couldn’t worry about that now. I had some highway driving to do in order to get back home. Since I was coherent enough to remember that avoidance of death is a good idea, I literally slapped my face a few times to pull myself together.
So off I went, the modern Narcissus, slouching toward the tombs of suburbia once again.
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Image: Pixabay
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