My dad is a quiet person. He’d rather stay home and watch documentaries than go out. He’s the type to just read in the corner while everyone else socialized. He appears to be entirely content with this simple and quiet lifestyle. Although once in a while, you will see a different spark in his eye, and a clear shift in his disposition.
All of a sudden he’s out and about, talking to everyone, and making grandiose plans. He boasts of his genius, and suddenly he’s Shakespeare, writing witty new poetry as his brain works to supply lyrical words in overdrive. He would be argumentative, pushing for what he wants and not listening to anyone. He would have have tactical plans for any small predicament, and he insists that he knows exactly what he’s doing.
It would be an anxious and difficult time for the family as we can’t control him. We can’t exactly stop him from talking grandiose plans with other people and spending his own money. The complicated part was that people didn’t really understand that his current state isn’t exactly his ‘normal’, he wouldn’t be as blatant or as risky otherwise. All we could do was slightly reason with him and wait to catch him when he inevitably came crashing down.
As much as my dad was a bit hard to understand, the notion of mental illness was not foreign to me. In fact, at some point within all this, I was suffering with my own brand of mental illness in the form of depression. In my case, I dropped out of medical school and I wasn’t working, so I felt I had good reason to unreasonably think that I had nothing to live for. I was moody, irritable, and aggressive. It’s a good thing that I was soon able to find work to get me out of that downward spiral.
In the first few weeks, I guess it was kind of odd that I was so enthusiastic with entry level work. What others may not understand though was that I was finally learning and doing something after a long time of feeling utterly worthless. I was no longer just cooped up in bed wallowing in despair. What I did not know, however, was that my energetic disposition towards work wasn’t that I was becoming cured out of depression, but that I was producing enough endorphins to bring me into hypomania.
I was honestly oblivious to this. All I knew is that the more I got out of my depressed state, the more I became well-liked. I didn’t focus anymore on just work, I was now socializing and being very witty while I was at it. I had excellent timing when it came to jokes and conversation that it was fun just talking to people. I was fast absorbing knowledge and I was quickly growing more eloquent with work speak. I was also becoming more recognized in the workplace, and that felt really good.
There were weird quirks in the way I acted though. I became irrationally paranoid that the boss was spying on me everywhere. I was impatient and argumentative when it came to getting things done. I talked fast and moved fast. I didn’t like sitting still for too long, I got up from my computer to get water way too often. I liked doing nothing by walking back and forth while snapping my fingers, basking in the glorious thoughts of the witty and productive things I’ve done. I also went and talked to strangers like it was the most natural thing in the world. I mean, why couldn’t I talk to strangers?
While others didn’t really question my sudden bloom into this extremely hyper social butterfly, my family was growing more concerned. They questioned and brought up every single quirky thing I did, and I would defensively get mad at them. Why can’t they be more supportive that I am finally happy and so full of life? But of course, it was because they knew for a fact that it was only a matter of time before my bubble burst.
The longer I was in this heightened state, the more the workplace felt like a battlefield that I had to conquer. I was becoming more needlessly tactical when dealing with people. I can act demure, confident, stupid, or smart depending on who I was interacting with and what I wanted to achieve. I think I was even quoting the Art of War at some point.
The whole place was like my on social psychology experiment. It’s hard to explain, but my heightened state made me hyper aware of my surroundings and acutely aware of people’s emotions. I could easily pick up cues and quickly act upon them. I was seeing patterns in how my colleagues responded to particular stimuli and so I was able to loosely predict what someone was about to do next based on what I knew about them. This might sound delusional, but that’s how I saw it then. Whatever the case, I felt like some tactical genius moving people with ‘puppet strings’.
I have a naturally strong personality that got intensified with mania, and so I did thrive in that high pressure work environment for some time, but gradually it began eroding the very essence of my well-being. My mind did not let me rest and my body literally won’t let me sit still. The only time my mind and body wasn’t moving was when I was asleep, and due to my hyperactivity, I didn’t even sleep for very long.
All of this happened just in the span of a few months, but it felt way longer and stretched out as my brain kept overanalyzing everything. At one point my whole world came down to strategizing on how I could get back at my evil boss! I brought work and politics with me even at home, and so the conflicts and disharmony never stopped. And unbeknownst to everyone, I was reaching my maximum limit.
You see, the thing with mental illness is that I seem all well and good on the outside, but on the inside I was shattered. I was seriously beyond spent that I couldn’t even type a sentence, I was so scared. I had to fake being on top of things to get through work while simply staring at conversations on the screen. I wanted to stay, but I didn’t feel like I had any other choice but to recover by separating myself from the work place that started all this chaos. Everyone was so confused when I quit because I looked so determined at work, but no matter, I needed to do it for myself.
And so there I was, back home once again in my lonesome bed, all that wit and energy stripped out of me. You know what they say, what comes up must come down, oh how true this saying is to someone with Bipolar Disorder.
Though it was then that my dad knocked on my door and sat on my bed, and this time I was calm enough to finally listen. He said that through me, more than ever, he was able to understand himself.
And actually, I understood him.
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