Excerpt - The Faces of Bipolar

FROM THE BOOK

It Wasn’t Me. And It Was.

That is the sentence I could never make anyone understand. Not my wife. Not my doctors. Not, for the longest time, myself. I have bipolar disorder. For most of my life, no one had a name for it, including me.

I was the kid who was good at everything, because being good at things felt like proof I was okay. I built the Silicon Valley career, bought the house, raised a daughter, made a life that looked, from the outside, like a man who had it figured out.

I had not figured it out. I just had not been diagnosed yet.

Here is what no textbook ever told me, and what I need to tell you. Bipolar disorder does not only change how you feel. It changes who you seem to be. It produces personas: distinct, convincing versions of you that arrive wearing your face and speaking in your voice, and that feel, while you are inside them, like the truest thing you have ever been.

I have named ten of them.

There is the Antagonist, who turns a flat tone of voice into a war. The Grandiose Champion, the one you actually miss when it leaves. The Scared Child underneath them all. And the most dangerous of the ten, the one I call the Liar: the voice that swears you are not sick, that the medication is the problem, that the people trying to help you are the enemy.

Earlier this year, the Liar picked up my phone and sent messages to my best friend about my wife. Heather read them later. The damage was real. And the thing that did it felt, in the moment, exactly like me.

If you live with this, you already know the feeling I am describing, and you have probably spent years failing to find words for it. If you love someone who does, you have watched them become a person you did not recognize, and wondered how the one you know could have done it.

This book is for both of you.

I am not writing from a mountaintop. My marriage is still healing. I am still healing. But I know the visitors now. I can name them. Most days, I can see them coming. I have rebuilt more times than I can count, and every time, I kept more of myself than I lost.

I win more often than I lose now. I wrote the book I needed and could never find. If any of this sounds like your life, or like someone you love, come meet the rest of them.

A memoir of bipolar disorder, and the ten faces it wears.

– Jeremy M. Davis