Unreliable Narrator

Living with someone with Bipolar Disorder (2) is a little bit like living in a book with an unreliable narrator. There's Gideon. Sweet, normal, fun, affection, passionate, brilliant, creative Gideon. He likes writing, he likes basketball, he doesn't mind his job.

Then there's manic Gideon, who wants to run away to California and publish his novel in two weeks and quit his job to write full time and play twelve different sports and drink and flip his truck. Manic Gideon wants to get married next week and start a family, buy a house in the country and raise goats and have his own garden and fuck and fuck and fuck. He wants to go back to college for a degree in musical theater and start his own landscaping business.

Depressed Gideon is the worst. Depressed Gideon is apathetic. He doesn't love me. He doesn't hate me. He just...doesn't care about me. He shakes when I touch him. He cries when I look at him. He forgets to eat, leaves cold cups of coffee on the kitchen table, stares at his computer screen. Stares at the television screen. Stares at my face, mouth agape, while I sob and beg him to "just be nice." Depressed Gideon never loved me. I was just convenient, an escape plan.

He eventually cycles out of whatever phase he's in, holds me, tells me everything is okay and it wasn't real, not really him. He didn't mean that. He's sorry that it hurt. Some things he says are real. Some aren't. But in the moment he's saying it, it all seems real. And somehow, I'm expected to hold three truths at once.

And he didn't mean it. It was unreliable. But when you see a disease talking to you through the mouth of a person you live with and love, who you know loves you, it's devastating. You look like Gideon, but you don't talk like Gideon. Learning to separate the disorder from my very wonderful boyfriend has taken mental jumping jacks on a level I usually reserve for babying my own anxiety and neuroticism.

Is it any wonder, then, why I'm back?

Gideon's seeing a physician; he's diagnosed. He's medicated, takes his mood stabilizer, which he hates, because even though it helps control the mania, it makes the depression that much worse. The mania, statistically, is more dangerous. It could get lead to a manic break, a full-blown psychotic episode, and get him involuntarily hospitalized. So it's more important to treat the mania now.

I have a hard time, sometimes, remembering that as much as I feel like I'm suffering, and as much as I feel like I want to quit, it's somehow even worse for him, because it's inside his own brain, and he can't leave it. Gideon, when he's himself, he's the best thing that's ever happened to me. But sometimes I don't see him for a few weeks, or even a month or two. And it's weird, sharing a bed with a very cruel, tense, weeping, cursing monster with your lover's face. I know it's his disease, not mine; it just hurts. He knows it hurts, but I'd rather get this out here than lay this on him too. I'm sorry for anyone who takes offense to this pity party. I just don't really have anywhere to go to sort it.

So, is it any wonder, then, that I'm back?