If I Could Help One Person — Part Nine

Are you starting to see the pattern?

The rise. The fall. The wreckage. The rebuild. And then — just when you think you've finally found solid ground — the cycle begins again. This is the most honest way I know to describe what it means to live with bipolar disorder. Not the clinical version. Not the textbook definition. The lived version. The one that costs you jobs, relationships, and years of your life before you even fully understand what is happening to you.

For me, the gap between cycles — between mania and depression — tends to run somewhere between two and five years. Long enough that you almost forget it's coming. Long enough to build something real. And then the shift starts, quiet at first, and you watch it all begin to come apart again.

The Side of Mania Nobody Talks About

We talked earlier about how mania can sometimes feel like a gift — the energy, the clarity, the sense that you are finally operating at full capacity. But there is another side of mania that does not get discussed nearly enough, and it is the side that has done the most damage in my life: the agitation. The black and white thinking. The absolute certainty that everyone around you has become intolerable, and that the only reasonable response is to burn it all down and start over.

This is what has led me to quit every job I have ever had.

Not laziness. Not lack of ambition. Not an inability to commit. Mania. The shift would begin so gradually that I could never quite catch it in time. One day everything would feel manageable — good, even. And then, almost imperceptibly, the edges would start to sharpen. People who had never bothered me before would begin to grate. Small frustrations would feel like personal attacks. I would say things I did not mean, make decisions I could not take back, and convince myself — with complete and utter certainty — that I simply could not work with these people for one more day. That it was time to move on.

And so I would move on. Again.

"Burning bridges that light my way to the next episode. That is the most honest thing I have ever written about myself."

The Grief of the Trail You Leave Behind

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with looking back at the trail of exits you have left behind you — the positions you walked away from, the opportunities you did not give yourself the chance to see through, the professional relationships that ended not because of incompetence or indifference, but because your brain chemistry had other plans. I carry that grief. I am still learning what to do with it.

With a two-year gap on my résumé at this point, I do not know what the next chapter of my professional life looks like. I am not sure I can know yet. What I do know is that I am still here, still trying to understand the pattern well enough to interrupt it — and that, for now, has to be enough.