The All Consuming Terror of Mental Illness

Photo by Michael Aleo on Unsplash

I lost another job. I’d been at it for over a year. I was a sales lead at a large retailer and the company had a major reorganization, eliminated my position, and I was gone. Now I’m 60, unemployed, and rattled by a simmering mixed episode of mania and depression that leaves me frustrated, furious, fractured, worse yet, falling backward on my insistence that I am not defined by bipolar disorder. Backward, from the healing language of I have a mental illness into the self-defeating identity trap of I am mentally ill.

This was a major insight in my book, Practicing Mental Illness – Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Mange Challenging Moods. I’ve repeated it so often in this newsletter that it seems my only good idea. But it bears repeating: I believe the first step toward healing from and managing life successfully with a mental illness is a linguistic one. You must stop thinking, and saying, I am mentally ill, and start insisting to yourself and others, that I have a mental illness. Mental illness is not who you are. It’s an illness, like any other illness, that you can treat and overcome. This was a key factor in my leading a positive, productive life, full of love and meaning, with bipolar disorder.

But suddenly I’m not so sure.

My resume is pathetic. Early on I was a sales executive until my first major manic episode led to a complete implosion of my career, and a long hospitalization. Then, a sheet music retailer gave me a job as store manager, despite that I had just been released from the hospital, and I botched it. I wasn’t well enough to do the job, the mania returned, and again I was out of work. I recovered and took a job as a barista with a large coffee chain until my manager denied me a promotion specifically because of my disease. It wasn’t poor performance. It was honesty. I had entered a period in my life where I was open about my disease and I was punished for it. I left retail and began working with developmentally disabled adults until a hypomanic fueled run-in with an HR executive led to my dismissal. Only the support of my wife kept me from a steep fall. But I still fell and wrote two books about my experience and started this newsletter. I went all in on being an advocate for those with mental illness as I thought that maybe telling my story could help others. But not everyone understands.

At a later job, selling whisky at a liquor store, I was harassed about having a mental illness to the point of quitting. Every step of the way, almost every job I lost, was tied to an episode of the illness. There was no telling what came first, the episode or the dismissal, but they were intimately related. They could not be separated. Bipolar disorder ruled my life during these troubling times, and it either failed me or I just failed. However, again I recovered and found my last job with a retailer of outdoor sports equipment and clothing, and loved the company and the people I worked with. I also stuffed my diagnosis back underground. I scrubbed my LinkedIn profile of all mention and inference of anything to do with mental illness. I never talked about it at work or with any of the people I worked with. But people Google people. Google me and my books and my newsletter are all over the first page. There is no hiding from the algorithms that direct and trail our lives, and the digital trail I leave states clearly that I am mentally ill. To most who find me online the concept of I have a mental illness rather than I am mentally ill is difficult to grasp, seems irrelevant, and is soon lost. To anyone who looks, I am mentally ill.

So I continued to run from it. A couple of months ago I published what I intended to be the last post of this newsletter. I purged all reference to bipolar disorder from my life. At work I suffered no bad behavior, had no absenteeism, and led my team to tremendous results in my department. Better results than the department had ever produced. The people who worked at the store were like family, and I fit right in. Work was fun. I looked forward to every day. I planned to hold this job until I retired. Still, people Googled me. A few bought my books. Discussions of my experience with bipolar disorder were unavoidable.

Still, I turned away from mental illness. Either I was over it or I sublimated it. There is no evidence that my disability had anything to do with my being chosen as one of the people the company laid off. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was my age or my short tenure with the company. Maybe it was my higher salary. Or maybe it was just numbers, a random choice. But these things are rarely random. Someone had to go, and two other coworkers and I were chosen to be the ones to go. Other sales leads were reassigned, but I was dismissed, along with my two coworkers, with no other position offered. It was over. And of course, bipolar disorder came roaring back.

This is when the idea of mental illness and the experience of mental illness merge and embody the entire individual. Yes, I have done well despite suffering from bipolar disorder. Extraordinarily well. But it still infuses my being. It still impacts everything, especially stressful and negative things, that happens to me. It would be easy to use mental illness as an excuse for all failure, and I resist this. But still, it’s always there. I try to maintain that’s it’s not part of my identity. But at times like this that feels like a denial. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps mental illness is more than just something I have. Perhaps…

Once again bipolar disorder consumes me and spits me out chewed up by roiling moods and, sometimes, an inability to even function. Or to care. Or to try. It’s just a job, I tell myself. It’s just an episode. Another job taken down by another episode. Sure, it will pass, but it will leave scars. Scars, insecurity and fear. It’s a kind of terror, this disease. And like a teenager in a slasher movie I run from it, barricade the door, and hide under the bed. But the axe always rips through the door and the monster always paces heavily around the room. And the victim is always found. It’s never going away, is it? Then there’s always a sequel. Always, hopefully this one more time, another chance.