The Weird Wide Web

I had a dream last night that my cat died and I've been really irritable with him lately because I Don't Want To Be Touched, so now I'm hormonal and sad at work and just want to go home to make him happy. I saw a dragonfly on my break and got sad because it reminded me of him.

I had to leave my friend's house in the middle of a TV show last night because I'm changing my bipolar meds and had a surge of intensity. I walked out into the dark, humid and overgrown yard by myself and had an increasingly unsettling experience. Everything was especially vivid. It’s like my consciousness is sitting a half millimeter behind my eyes. So intensely present, vision so intensely clear. I was looking through the back gate up at the street lamp and the twisting illuminated leaves, and then the gate opened on its own, in the wind I’m sure, but it felt like a natural extension of the magic state I was in. I walked through and turned around to see it close behind me on its own as well. I walked down the alley, embarrassed to have stopped the show, my body electrified. I saw a bike coming towards me and ducked back in the gate then went inside. I found myself somehow both intensely aware and unaware as I drove home in the dark semi-rain. Fearful I would forget how to drive, but deftly navigating every obstacle, including a disorienting situation at a stoplight with two cars blocking the lane, one trying to get out, then the other, and two bicyclists in the mix too, one a woman with long hair jumping up and down on the bike in the rain. This too felt magical and like a dream.

I've been at my job for almost a month now and I'm starting to form relationships with my coworkers. Something that makes me so sad is that I can't tell them that I have bipolar disorder. It's something I think about all day every day. I have to structure my entire life around it. It's a giant part of who I am and it's this burden I carry, and I want to tell them because it's such a big part of my life and it's horrible and I want to be close to them and be understood. But it's like....we've had this big cultural shift in the past decade where public attitudes towards mental health have changed. Anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD---these things are no longer unmentionable. My boss has ADHD--he told me so! But not all conditions have undergone this shift and certain mental illnesses are still taboo and unmentionable. Schizophrenia, anorexia, bipolar, really all the conditions that are the most difficult to deal with are still relegated to secrecy whereas if I had like CANCER I could just say that. It could be part of how people understood me and wouldn't be this secret burden that I have to hide and explain my way around. I was out yesterday sick and I showed up today without the flu. Would love to say, oh that's my condition. But it has to just be a secret.