EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series called Share Your Story. The Bipolar Addict is a safe space where bipolar voices from all walks of life can come together to commiserate and empathize with one another. If you’ve got something on your mind, and you’d like to share it with the world on The Bipolar Addict, now is your time. You can divulge in secret or publicly. Contact us to send in your story.
My phone died. Not the battery, the whole stupid machine just went black one day and I felt a rush of relief I hadn’t known in weeks. In the days leading up to the sudden crash of my little pocket computer, I’d come to fear the ding of yet another text message, the harbinger of an upcoming question I couldn’t answer, a problem I couldn’t solve. Each little ding was a tiny needle poking at me, deeper each time, threatening to plunge right into the marrow. Now, with my phone dead, there was no more ding, no more apprehension, no more needle. I could relax. But I didn’t.
A month before my phone died, a friend of mine went MIA. When I was finally able to reach Ariel, she was in a nursing facility following a suicide attempt. The first night we spoke, we sobbed unintelligibly from either side of the line. We were both so scared. My heart was breaking and hers was already smashed. “I’m coming to see you tomorrow, OK? Is that OK? Can I come see you?” I choked. She said yes and I promptly cleared my entire schedule.
The next day I high-tailed it to the shithole excuse for a medical facility where my friend was staying. We spent about eight hours together, mostly holding each other, shaking, crying. She was so deep in the depression hole she could barely stand. Eventually, visiting hours were over and I had to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I felt like I was abandoning my friend in hell.
She and I met, spoke, and texted constantly for about the next ten days. Her pain became my engine, ever accelerating, and if I did anything for myself, it was so I could be available to her at any moment. I’d shoved all of my other obligations into a heap and hissed at them for daring to claim precedence over the current situation. Even knowing that my behavior was unsustainable didn’t stop me from trying to make it otherwise.
I bailed on band practice, not just to make more time for my friend, but because very little makes me feel as good as playing music, and feeling good while my friend was suffering created a strong foothold for what I insisted to myself was justified guilt. When I went to therapy, I talked to my doctor on behalf of my friend rather than addressing my own state of mind and strategizing how I could be an effective ally. “Here’s what happened, Doc. What should she do about it?” I became resentful of other friends for inviting me out. Didn’t they know a human life was at stake and that I was the only thing standing between my friend and a premature grave? How dare they!
I sped forward under the credo that someone has to do something! But, upon running low on fuel, I no longer wanted that someone to be me.
Historically, this is always how I’ve reacted when a loved one is in crisis:
Step 1. Dive full force into triage mode up to the point of abandoning my wellbeing.
Step 2. Attempt to don the full mantle of the other party’s suffering because I can take the pain!
Step 3. Medicate our combined pain with an increase in my prescribed meds and a misuse of my non-prescribed meds (just cannabis, guys).
Step 4. Lose control of my anxiety and invent excuses to hide from the responsibility I placed disproportionately on myself.
Step 5. Die inside.
Except this time it seemed that I was dying on the outside too. Meals turned into protein bars and sleep needed to be induced. Forget exercise. Dodge socializing. Jettison music, reading, writing. Reframe any joy as blasphemy. The bag of bricks should’ve landed on me when, while trying to make arrangements for my friend at a new inpatient facility, an admissions officer told me over the phone to take care of myself. People had been hurling this platitude verbatim at my face for weeks, but this guy could hear the crumble in my voice. Fuck.
So here I sit: with this Taking Care Of Myself business. A cousin of “my condolences,” “take care of yourself” is a sincere way of saying, “I sincerely don’t know what to say.” Being told to take care of myself was beginning to make me bristle almost as much as my stupid phone dinging. My friend had almost died, she was being threatened with a psych hold by an insurance scam of a hospital, her living situation was insecure, and she was depressed enough to want to end her life. I remembered what that feels like. How could anything else take priority?
And it wasn’t as if I’d gotten so bad that I’d stopped showering. I was also obediently taking my meds and going to therapy. So what if I was constantly trembling and, on more than two occasions, completely forgot where I was? Ariel was hurting worse. I just needed to keep the boat steady, never say anything wrong (even by accident), and refuse any happiness, because if she couldn’t have it, what right did I have to it? After all, it’s immoral not to give someone your blood — just in case — when they really only need you to hold their hand. Right?
No, not right. And I suppose I should tell you now that my anxiety did reach a full crescendo and I realized it when I felt relief at the demise of my phone. The incident rendered me suddenly unreachable, allowing me to pump the brakes before I ended up in the hospital myself. (Which, yes, I did fantasize about because they took my phone away last time. I think you’re noticing a pattern here.)
I’ve spent the last couple of months examining my behavior, the motivations behind it, and why I’m like this. I understood what people meant when they told me to take care of myself. They wanted me to remember that my life also had value and was worth looking after, and that I wasn’t withholding anything from my friend by drawing appropriate boundaries and spending some time by myself. I wish I could say that I’ve completely figured out how to make those things work, but learning to take care of myself isn’t something I can do in the space of two months. I’m still reconciling my sense of guilt with my sense of duty.
I also wish I could tell you how to handle this kind of situation if you ever find yourself in my shoes, but I can’t, because I’m not you. What I can say, at the very least, is that talking things over with trustworthy people was helpful. Don’t carry the burden alone.
At the heart of this little episode of Ellen’s Growing Pains is a basic question: How can people with a mental illness be good allies to each other? The answer is that we need to show allegiance to ourselves. I think those of us who’ve been in a situation like Ariel understand fundamentally what she was going through, so we may feel an urge to dive in headlong. After all, haven’t there been times when we wished someone else could just take the fucking wheel for once?
But this is simply bad strategy. By making Ariel’s pain the sole focus of my waking life, I ended up doing her a disservice by resultantly trying to avoid her after becoming overwhelmed. If your tendencies are like mine, know this: Boundaries aren’t made of barbed wire and any happiness you might experience isn’t coming at the expense of someone else’s. You can still enjoy a hot bath and be an effective ally to a friend in crisis, I promise.
