Do Not Fake It 'til You Make It

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplas

I sat in my doctor’s office a few days ago and admitted I’ve been lying to him for years. We’ve been working on my bipolar disorder - medicine, therapy, lifestyle - to make me function well, live healthy, and thrive. I was one of his success stories. But the disease’s impact on me was worse. Much, much worse than I was letting on.

I am in the midst of the most difficult episode I’ve faced in decades. Oh, the illness and its impact has always been there, and life has always been a challenge, but right now things are unbearable, inexplicable, and seemingly endless. I’m out of work, I’m avoiding my family for fear of my impact on them (although my wife, for all her suffering, remains my biggest supporter and best friend and my daughter shows me nothing but honest love), and I have those moments where the only thing that makes sense is to be gone.

I met with a friend I‘ve known for years. Somebody I’ve shared everything with. He knew how highly I thought of my doctor. He knew how I valued the one-sided friendship that is therapy. He knew I wanted to impress my doctor as we matched wits on topics that had nothing to do with bipolar disorder. My friend knew my doctor came to my wedding. And my friend knew that he and I that morning were meeting on FaceTime because I was afraid to leave the house, get on a bus, and visit a coffee shop.

He told me it was time to tell my doctor the truth. Which I did. Which was more difficult than I thought it would be. Which led to changes in my treatment regimen. Which in the messed-up mind of mixed-episode mania leads to an essay on DEI. Stay with me, please. This isn’t as scatter-brained as it sounds.

Crucial to my mental health is meditation. My doctor says it’s as important as any drug he’s prescribed, and sitting on a chair, attention focused on my breath, not chasing thoughts, just letting things be as they are and not judging myself – just being – has been life-changing and life-affirming. While sitting meditating I can be who I am, not who I’m supposed to be, not who someone else expects, not a complete liar about how my disability impacts my life. Which, of course, I lie about every minute I’m not meditating.

I am different. I have a severe mental illness. To succeed I must hide that, until I can’t, and it all comes apart. Then everyone turns away and I’m left to put it all together and for what? For there’s no job to go back to and if I let a word of this slip no new job either. We live in a world in which it is absolutely OK to be prejudiced against those with mental illness and so easy to cover-up those prejudices by trucking out some trumped-up reason for not hiring or promoting someone once their mental illness is uncovered.

What does this have to do with DEI? Everything, because just like black men with a swagger, Hispanic women as loud as their clothes, and the gay couple embracing when their child scores the winning field goal, I cannot be myself and expect to excel or even just be accepted. I must adopt some persona that invalidates me to myself as I sit and meditate and fully experience who I really am.

With mental illness, especially when depressed, we’re often told to fake it ‘til you make it. Act positive. Cover up the pain. Get out of bed and find some energy and smile until it passes. On days when you’re merely sad this may work, but not with severe depression. It makes it worse. It re-emphasizes your inability to be who society demands you to be. Oh, you can pull it off for a long time, but it’s going to catch up with you and then what? Meditation offers the space to see and experience that. The chance to breathe. No it won’t make you honest and it won’t enable you to be who you really are, except while meditating. You have to take what you learn on the cushion off the cushion and act on it. Your life begins when you risk being yourself. Your life depends on it.

It’s a trope of Hollywood that the sexy outsider emerges as the hero, the independent loner who saves the day, the one we all want to be. Because we don’t. We just want to conform There’s the danger, because we want everyone else to conform as well and our concept of the individual becomes one big lie. There’s a mold into which we must form ourselves. Any variable difference? Well let’s keep that a secret.

I’m under no delusion that the USA is becoming fascist. It’s not. But I do know that when the Nazis fenced in their camps and, on the left, Stalin began his pogroms, the psychiatric patients were the first to be rounded up. So I have skin in this game. This game that begins with a reasonable claim that DEI programs may be injurious to an insecure majority, and risks ending with difference itself, the fuel of a developing culture, becoming undesirable and set up to be extinguished. I know. I played the game. I buried my difference to fit in and achieve. And look at what happened. Just as if I was open from the beginning it turns out that I’m scary, untouchable, and not at all able to do it anymore after all. Just as if I’d never faked it ‘til I made it in the first place.

Meditation tells us a lot about the language we use and how it shapes ourselves. I like to sit quietly and as thoughts arise, label them, and set them down. There may be a judgment, or a fantasy, or a regret. I take what comes and release it, avoid starting a conversation with myself about what comes up, and the self-awareness and self-improvement are profound. But sometimes meditating on specific words works, too. So try something as you embrace the error of faking it until you make it. Release all that, and become comfortable in your mediation with who you truly are. Dare to contemplate a few words. Bring up diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Forget the dictionary. Just feel what each word does to your body. Your shoulders. Your breath. What do they mean to you, and why are they so powerful? In a world where they take on such visceral meaning, especially when used together, what does that say about your ability to truly be who you are in this world? To feel how you truly feel about the words and about how you may be different from others?

And me? Possibly most revelatory about yourself in these instructions will be how you think I feel about DEI. Because I’ve taken no stand on it here. What you’re thinking about my position says more about you than it does about me. The same happens with mental illness. I have bipolar disorder. People have preconceptions about what that means. Why should I act in a certain way to change that. Others already know what they feel about it. I hope this realization of truth gives all of you with disabilities, especially those of you with mental illness, the inspiration to be yourselves. The inspiration to stop faking. Right now I am inspired to do so myself. No, my prospects are not necessarily any better than they were when I faked it, they may never be, but my life certainly is.

Do not fake it ‘til you make it. Be who you are. This episode is horrible. I am not.

If you’d like to learn more about meditation and mental illness please buy my book Practicing Mental Illness here. Thank you.