"My ability to engage in passive conversation has left me. I can't trust my mind right now, it has become poison." - blog entry, Dec 12, 2007.
He blogs because he does not want most people to know about his illness, and yet he needs to talk about it. His name is Mike, twentysomething, married, living in Ottawa - that is all he wants known. If you stumbled upon his website, http://www.iambipolar.ca, you would not know even that he is a guy.
People tend to react three ways when they find out you have bipolar disorder, he says. They over-empathize and "treat you like a baby." Or they think "you're straight-out crazy" and fear you. Or, if you're lucky, they treat you the same, except to make sure you're okay. That last group, he believes, is the smallest one.
"It's sometimes so difficult to see what is real and what is not, when your mind is possessed by your mood..." - blog, May 3, 2008.
He was diagnosed nine months ago. "I was numb," he says in an interview. "Your everyday world kind of disappears for a bit. Everything just takes on a big spacey feeling."
In hindsight, he says, he knew something was off-kilter for a long time. He felt like two people.
In the summer, he was the party guy, who went out long nights in a row and thought nothing of sitting down at a table of strangers and striking up a conversation. He drank too much and spent too much money.
Then the fall would come, and he would lock himself up in his house. He ignored his friends. He slept. In those times, he says, "everything seems dead to you. Music doesn't have sound. Flavour doesn't taste good. People seem fake."
Eventually, most of his friends dropped him for good. They thought that he was two-faced.
"You do things in one mood that you would never do in another, and you have to somehow find a way to reconcile this conflict during your fleeting moments of stability." - blog, June 1, 2008.
When he told his parents, it was like revealing a secret part of his life to them. They worry "like crazy," he says. For his wife, it was a relief to finally have an explanation for his behaviour. He wrestled with telling his boss and two close colleagues - the conversation "petrified" him - but he felt that they needed an explanation for why he joked one day and was sullen the next.
He made good choices, he says. The people he told treat him as he had hoped - like a normal person with a chronic illness that flares on occasion.
He feels free to be candid online - it's his therapy. He has not yet met another person with bipolar disorder. His peer support comes from the anonymous visitors to his Web forum.
He wrestles most with his perception of self - this is the main thread of his blog entries. He wonders what he would be like if the illness wasn't there. It is muted now by medication, a strict regime of vitamins and healthy habits. (He no longer drinks or goes to a bar.)
But he knows that he has the disorder for life. Depending on which way the switch flicks, he says, "your likes, your dislikes, your ambitions, your energy just completely change. If this is a disorder, and not me, who am I? If I can remove all these symptoms - the depression and the hypomania, what's left?"
"I still have those questions every day," he says in his blog. "Am I my mind? What is mind? Who am I?"
Erin Anderssen is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail. This is one in a series on Canadians who must deal with mental-health issues.
