Member-only story
Episode One — Diagnosed.
11 min readNov 30, 2020
“Bipolar. Extremely manic to be precise,” That was the diagnosis that required about thirty seconds of Dr. Henderson’s sustained observation. His professional demeanor seemed a bit shaken, if not altogether troubled and wholly disturbed by the mass exodus of verbiage, equal parts desultory rant and enraged black thought that was the culmination and height of my first episode as he called it. But this was not a TV show, it was my life, and it would be for the better part of the next decade.
He had but one question for my concerned parents: “Is he always like this?” My parents, who put aside decades of marital distance for their son in crisis, were nonplussed by his query, and equally shaken by my recent behavior.
Certainly, I was not always like this, in fact, all reports pointed to mania’s diametric opposite. Considerations of my countenance and comportment from my earliest kindergarten reports to those who knew me well had always begun with that terribly vague word, “quiet.” In retrospect it must have been the 23 years of calm before the storm, the eye/I of which would be the topic of many discussions involving those close to me and detached clinicians.
