Can We Reschedule My Monthly Breakdown To Next Week? A Time-Sensitive Meeting Popped Up.
“THIS ISN’T SOMETHING THAT I CAN SLAP A BANDAID ON AND GET OVER. LIKE MANY THINGS WITH BIPOLAR DEPRESSION, IT’S DEBILITATING.”
By Claire Joy Moss
(Djim Loic / Unsplash)
A small dot of moisture sat at the corner of my right eye for about an hour into work before I really noticed it. At first, I thought it was just the remnants of last night’s restless sleep and went to brush it away. Once I had thoroughly rubbed my hands all over my eyes, the drop reappeared. It was then that I realized that I had had a tear resting on my eye for most of the morning, a tear that was quickly replaced by another one, and another one, no matter how many times I tried to wipe it away. I was able to take one moment between my bursting inbox and a scheduled meeting to realize that oh god, I’m on the verge of tears. They’ve been brimming in my eyes since I’ve woken, and are just cresting over my lower lid. The tears never breached the dam, the rivulets never tracing a hot line down my face. I was frozen, a statue that a child could point at in a museum, and say, “Look, mom. That statue looks so sad.”
My eyes watered, my heart sobbed in pain, my brain was a thin line of nonsense translated roughly to bipolar depression mental breakdown in three, two, one...and I squeezed my eyes shut, blinked a few times, pushed my hair back, and entered the Zoom meeting.
“The problem with having bipolar depression and anxiety is the idea of hiding your emotions during a meltdown. It’s not as easy as pasting on a smile and pushing down all your sadness and realizing that later, it wasn’t that bad anyway.”
I was told, once, in not so many words, that people thought that I was angry all the time, and that I, essentially needed to “smile more,” a la Brie Larson. Chewing on that lovely bitter piece of information, my mind immediately went to the “angry black woman” stereotype that has been following black women for years. It was an odd thing to hear in such a “progressive” society, and I immediately took offense to it. That’s just my face. My eyebrows naturally arch, my lips naturally turn down at the corners. My forehead has slight lines etched into it from years of crying, and I don’t smile when things don’t make me smile. I’m not a smiler for smiling’s sake.
Apparently, this was something that people took notice of and misconstrued my natural face for something that it wasn't.
So, I learned to smile more.
The problem with having bipolar depression and anxiety is the idea of hiding your emotions during a meltdown. It’s not as easy as pasting on a smile and pushing down all your sadness and realizing that later, it wasn’t that bad anyway. There’s a darkness and heaviness to these episodes, where it feels like your body and soul have been emptied of any moments of joy and instead have been replaced with insurmountable levels of every ache that you can think of, intrusive thoughts, and misery. It’s not something that you can slap a bandaid on and get over - like many things with bipolar depression, it’s debilitating. So there I was, on a Thursday, getting ready to enter a meeting with someone who is way above me on the food chain, trying to put a smile on my face so I didn’t appear mad, while also thinking about how it would feel to smash my head against the wall. Sure, let’s talk about policies while I count every bad thing that’s ever happened to me. Yes, I can give feedback on the design while my stomach churns like the battered waves of the sea. I can definitely get this to you by EOD right after I scream into a pillow.
“We all like to pretend that we’re more open, as a society, to mental health issues, and that we’re more accepting of it.”
We all like to pretend that we’re more open, as a society, to mental health issues, and that we’re more accepting of it. I can tell you, with full authority, that it depends on the situation. In my first-year theory class, I told my teacher that no, I could not play the piano because my hands were shaking and I was having a panic attack. He made me take the quiz anyway, in front of all my peers, and then made fun of me later in the day.
I’ve gotten to the point of not hiding my mental illness and telling people that I feel need to know. My manager knows about my bipolar disorder, so when I say “I’m having a rough day, my anxiety is bad,” she’ll know not to push, let me take breaks if I need to, and just ask if I need anything. But it’s definitely not the same across the board, across the world at all. You have to find someone that will say, “That’s okay — take care of yourself,” when more people are prone to say, “I still need that spreadsheet done. You can cry later.”
What do I do? I used to take at least one mental health day off a month. Work can truly drag your soul through the trenches of war, depending on your position of power and privilege, and aren’t I lucky enough that I hold little power and privilege where I need it. I have an open line of communication with my manager, which is great for when I’m working in my one role in the office, but since I hold multiple roles with multiple project managers, it can be a slippery slope of navigating with them. It’ll be just a simple “I have a cold,” or “I don’t feel well,” when I want it to be, “If you ask me to do another last-minute thing one more time, I’m going to start ripping into my skin.”
I try to talk about these issues at work because some people just never have had to think about a mental health disorder or how it can affect every aspect of someone’s life. Having a job doesn’t mean that your personality magically changes — that’s inauthentic and hurtful to your psyche. Sometimes, I still don’t know if my words are making an impact, but that’s okay — I’ll try again. I’ll lay down, wipe my eyes, and enter the Zoom meeting.
Claire Joy Moss is an aspiring journalist and advocate living in Boston, Massachusetts with her cat, Lucy. She loves choral music, video games, and writing articles in her head when she can’t fall asleep. She hopes that her words can be as cathartic for her readers as they are for her.
