On Mental Health, Surrender, and Maintenance.

It’s not your first time in a police car.

There was that time somebody hit your mom’s car. No—your dad’s car. You saw who was driving, so the police took you with them. They drove you to a house where a man was yelling and beating his wife. They brought him outside, and you confirmed that he was the driver. Then you rode back to your parents’ house in a speeding cop car.

This is very different.

Now you’re handcuffed in the back. It’s hot. You’re sweating. Your arms hurt where the cuffs pull against them, and all you know is that this is the right place for you to be.

You don’t know what else to do.

That’s how I felt after my break, when they came to take me away. I had disappeared. Driven off. I kept losing time, blacking out and waking up in different places, unable to stop whatever was happening to me.

I have never felt anything more destabilizing than waking up sober-ish and realizing I was somewhere I hadn’t known I was going. Before I could figure out what to do next, I had to figure out where I was. What had happened between the last thing I remembered and this moment? How much time was gone?

I knew who I was. I knew something was wrong. But knowing those things didn’t give me the ability to take control. I didn’t know what to do, how to do it, or how to explain to another person that I had lost my grip on reality.

Even explaining it now, I want to put the events in order. I disappeared. I drove. I woke up somewhere. But those sentences make it sound as though I was there for all of it, making one decision after another.

There were pieces I couldn’t account for. I was trying to understand what was happening with parts of what had happened already missing.

Before the Carolina Center, they took me to the hospital.

I lay there for hours while they ran tests and tried to figure out exactly what was going on. When the doctor came in, he asked if I knew what had happened.

“Probably trying to drive into traffic,” I said, half joking.

Only half.

At the time, one of my recurring suicidal thoughts was to drive my car off a bridge or into a tree. My answer wasn’t an account of what had happened—I couldn’t account for that. But it came from somewhere real. I knew where my thoughts had been going, even when I couldn’t remember where I had gone.

I don’t like talking about this. It’s uncomfortable to say, and I know it’s uncomfortable to hear. But I think it matters to tell the truth about how lost I was.

Deep depression was already hard enough to explain. With psychosis on top of it, I couldn’t reliably make sense of what was happening around me or inside me. I knew something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t turn that knowledge into an explanation, much less a way out.

For someone who hasn’t experienced it, that kind of disorientation may be almost impossible to imagine. Even now, I struggle to describe it. I can tell you about the handcuffs, the heat, the hours in the hospital. I can remember what I said to the doctor.

It’s harder to explain what it felt like to need help that badly and have a half joke be what came out of my mouth.

I’d like to say this is all in the past. That the suicidal thoughts eventually stopped. That the depression quit coming back. That I came out of those years with some kind of victory I could point to and say, There. I beat it.

But that wouldn’t be the truth.

For me, living with bipolar means learning maintenance. It means finding some peace without knowing how long it will last. It means learning that the return of depression doesn’t erase the work I’ve done, even when it makes that work difficult to feel.

There can be peace and still be storm clouds on the horizon. I can know there is more to my life than the way I feel and still have days when all I can see is the rain.

Sometimes it comes down so hard that I can’t imagine fighting my way through it. I don’t have a revelation. I don’t discover some new strength or find the words that make everything fall into place. I’m tired. I’m hurting. I’m trying to get through the day.

That belongs in this story, too. Otherwise, I’m only telling you about maintenance when it feels like peace.

Sometimes there is no feeling “better.” There is accepting help, doing what I can, and letting that be enough for the moment—even when it doesn’t feel like enough.

Sometimes there’s just being.

And accepting help assumes that you can reach it. That you can explain what you need. That someone hears you and understands enough to respond.

There’s a story in the news about a woman accused of killing her children, with questions about her mental health and whether she received the help she needed. I haven’t looked closely enough at the case to speak with certainty about her diagnosis, what happened, or how people responded when she sought help.

But that question—what happened when she asked for help—is what I keep coming back to.

The children’s deaths are devastating. They had lives ahead of them. Any discussion of their mother’s suffering has to leave room for that enormous, irreversible loss.

And still, I want to understand whether there were moments when this could have been prevented. If she told people she was coming apart, what happened next? What help was available? Was anyone able to recognize how much danger there was?

I struggle with the phrase “getting off scot-free” when people talk about the possibility of psychiatric treatment instead of prison. Treatment cannot undo what happened. Whatever the legal outcome, those children are gone.

I can’t know what she understands or feels now. I can’t know what recovery might look like for her, or how long she might need care. But I believe someone who is severely ill needs treatment, and that protecting other people has to be part of that care.

Having lost my own grip on reality, I find it hard to look away from the question of whether help could have reached her sooner. My experience doesn’t tell me what happened in her case. It does make me want us to take the words I need help seriously while there is still time for that help to change what happens next.

Because when you’re deeply depressed, reaching out can feel like a monumental task. Before you say a word, it already feels useless. You imagine being ignored. Misunderstood. You worry that once people know how bad things are inside your head, they’ll see you as someone they shouldn’t get too close to anymore.

You need someone, and you’re afraid that telling them why will make them leave.

I know that feeling well.

Even now, I know that telling these stories means letting people see things they might judge me for. There are things in these pages I can explain more easily than I can bear to have someone know about me. Writing them down doesn’t make that fear disappear.

But I decided a long time ago that I was going to live out loud. Loud enough, I hoped, that someone might see the trying alongside the failures. That they might understand how much effort could exist inside a life that looked, from the outside, like it was falling apart.

I failed often. I still struggle. And I want to be honest about that without letting it become the only thing I say about myself.

I was trying then, even when I didn’t know what to do. I’m trying now. That’s part of what I want these pages to preserve.

A few people I know have started writing down their own stories. Some are journaling. To me, that’s worth a million readers, downloads, or purchases of anything I’ve written.

I still struggle with how to release this work. What matters most to me is that it reaches someone who needs it. I want someone to find a piece of themselves here and feel able to say something they haven’t known how to say.

Most of the time, when I imagine my audience, I imagine my son reading this years from now. I imagine people I may never meet, living in a future I won’t get to see. I want to leave them an honest account of what it felt like to be here, trying to understand my life while I was still living it.

And I need to keep living it.

I would rather have a life where I can respond honestly to the world around me than one organized around attention. I know how easily my own mind can become a place I get lost in. I don’t think I would handle fame or immense fortune particularly well. I suspect they could make it easier to lose the balance I’m working to maintain.

I need ordinary days. I need some kind of regular job that gets me out of the house, gives me responsibilities, and puts me around other people. I need reasons to turn my attention toward something beyond what’s happening in my own brain.

That’s part of maintenance, too. Building a life with things that ask me to show up, even when I don’t have much to say about how I’m doing. Having something to do after I close the document.

Writing gives me a way to understand my life. But I also need to get up, leave the room, and participate in it.