Manic Method

It’s no secret to anyone that I am bipolar (the one that gives you a propensity for mania and still kindly offers a thick, sluggish depression). I never remember the actual number—bipolar 1 or bipolar 2— because it doesn’t seem that important, anyways, the people in charge of these things always change their minds on which words are en Vogue. I still prefer the words manic depressive. Seems most fitting, but what would I know.

Everyone else knows that I am manic depressive. That is because I tell everyone. I also show everyone, in real time. This is partially why I feel empowered by telling everyone, on top of it. Like, after the fact. I make it sound good, I think. I just really don’t like to leave people guessing. Which is obvious. They’ll guess wrong. At least by telling them, I can suggest how they could guess right, in the future. Like, for other people, too. It’s very generous, to make fun of my bipolar on a public scale. But it is also very cathartic, to be ashamed out loud.

I don’t tell people I am bipolar because I am proud, and I don’t actually think my manic episodes are as funny as I deliver them to be. It just works out best for me to make it all seem laughable. It seems more insignificant when you’re laughing. To me it is very significant still, but when people are laughing with me, and not at me, I at least don’t feel as ashamed of myself. At least not in that moment.

I finally unpublished a few of my manic biog posts. They fell into the category of things that hang over your head and anchor you to an era, in a bad enough way that it feels metaphysical, and you can’t quite revisit them until you unlock and explore other areas of the map. Much of my life feels like that. Like, Legend of Zelda (a game I never played, but my ex unfortunately did play in front of me, which was very unsexy, despite the beautiful world building that unfolded on screen).

Not irrelevant, but distracting to bring up Legend of Zelda or my ex right now, though. It’s not irrelevant because my ex was a friend first, who was particularly wary of re-friending me after one of my collegiate manic episodes. He let other people lead the way, and when I proved myself, he re entered my life. He told me he weighed the pro’s and cons of dating me, a bipolar person, and ultimately he was OK with it (I did not want to date him, but that didn't really seem to matter much in the process). I really only bring this up to reassure anyone who is worried: people will still date you, even if you embarrass yourself thoroughly in front of them, in a very public way. All you have to do is make a really good come-back from it.

But this instance doesn’t speak to the main point I’m trying to make here. And believe it or not, I am actually trying to be more straightforward in my writing. If only to make up for how winding and confusing and god awful all of my manic writing was. Unfortunately I have to claim my manic self. Unfortunately I am kind-of like that all of the time. Kind-of. I am myself. I am always myself. I am just also bipolar, and I go manic, and I am often ashamed of that. I wonder often, too, what would induce shame in my life, without the bipolar and the mania to blame. I am sure I’d find something. So I am trying to stop being so shameful. Still, I deleted the blogs. Because I refine myself a lot. In doing so, there is less to be ashamed of. It’s kind of a self-loathing feedback loop, because why do I always have so much to edit and reframe, but that is my life-pro tip. I also write gratitude lists often, so I don’t get so lost in my self loathing. That is what I have been doing on substack. I do write grat lists in my journals, but I prefer to share about myself constantly, because if I don’t aim to be understood, I at least aim to be seen.

I talk about bipolar and mania because that Sophomore-year diagnosis was quite literally the worst thing to ever happen to me. I think it was also the worst thing to ever happen to my parents, which made it even worse for me. Im not sure we feel that way anymore. At least, my dad works in Tech and I actually am not the single outwardly-diagnosed bipolar person that he knows. People in the workforce often have to admit they are inflicted because bipolar symptoms can kind of become obvious in a role where you spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years at a time. My mom may or may not know outwardly-diagnosed bipolar people. She definitely knows bipolar people who do not share the fact, because technically you don’t need to, if you’re not making it super obvious to everyone around you. HIPPA mostly exists to not have hard conversations or share embarrassing inflictions, I think. And people are super embarrassed to be bipolar. As was I, which I think is part of the reason why it makes bipolar so deadly. Feels kind of hopeless to be infected with what is essentially mental Herpes. Because who will want me? And who will realize it is pretty much only a problem when it flares up? And I obviously, obviously did not ask for this life altering blip to be put on my radar. It’s arguably worse than herpes, because people who don’t even want to fuck me are concerned with the bipolar thing.

I think I’d be much less devastated with my diagnosis had I actually found what I was looking for when I was scouring the internet at that time. I was mainly trying to see what the consensus on bipolar 1 was, and if I could still graduate on time (if at all), find a husband, have a career, belong in a community, etc. I would dig around the internet looking for celebrity diagnosis call-outs, mentions of mania in movies or TV, in books, in songs. I developed an ear and an eye for the sort of things that exposed any inkling that bipolar walks among us. Because the quantitative search results told me other people did have it. It was the lack qualitative search results that told me it was a humiliating secret. There are code words and excuses. People prefer to say they suffer from exhaustion, or anxiety, or depression. The word bipolar isn’t great.

When I claimed my bipolar on campus, it was because I didn't really have another option. I didn’t have the opportunity to cry exhaustion, because I was sort of like the campus Kanye at Villanova. Like, I was loud. I was kind of forced into claiming the truth, because a lot of people witnessed the truth, and a lot of people knew me by name, for better or for worse. That’s mostly because of my own doing. As soon as I figured out my barings at school my Freshman year, I realized that I preferred to plant myself in the middle of everything. And my version of everything was frat dance floors, and the Bartley Exchange in the Business school, which is where everybody who was important or felt like they were important hung out in between classes. I didn’t necessarily aim for the guys with great looks, and went for the guys with reputations instead, because I also wanted to have a reputation (good or bad, I didn’t really care, I just liked being known. And I still do, obviously). This was prior to any glimpse of mania, but also during the mania. Which is how everybody kind of knew about it. And people talk, especially when the talk is about a sorority party girl who went of the deep end and claimed aliens or doomsday or time travel or all of the above. This story can obviously be told in a tone of voice that makes it sound really funny and crazy (in a dramatized-that’s-so-crazy way, not in the real-crazy way that it actually was). It was not funny. It was literally humiliating, and it made me want to LiTerAlLy Die.

It would have been extremely, extremely helpful for me to see a hot little bipolar girl, around my age, from a well-to-do family, graduating college and working a stable job and living a fairly social life. I wanted to see me, or someone doing better than me. Reddit commenters claiming bipolar were not doing well at all, actually. So I would’ve taken less than a thriving girl with bipolar. Seeing someone absolutely average would’ve been super helpful. . It seemed like no one on the internet wanted to admit they were bipolar. And as much as I wanted to distance myself from the diagnosis and the reputation and the situation and the truth of who I was, publicly, in my life and in my communities, I knew it was the path of least resistance to just lean in. It would make me look better if I could admit to the hard truth and own it, rather than lie or hide sheepishly, It’s not like it was my fault. And when people tried to throw it in my face (behind my back, but like, sabotage my relationships or discredit me or whatever) I felt very powerful to claim the whole thing. It took balls, and I had the opportunity to show that I had a big pair.

When I took to the internet, it all came together as: I have to continue to own this bipolar thing, because if I dont lead with it, someone who hates me and wants to embarrass me will be more than happy to undermine me by sharing the truth. And it would undermine me, if I weren’t able to control the narrative. I try to see the ability to claim and control this story of mine as a gift. Because a lot of people wish they could tell people exactly who and what they are, but often times people aren’t exactly honest about who and what they are, because they prefer to sound better and want applause, or want pity and try to sound deserving of such. I have to be pretty honest, because there are facts to these things, and the more honest I am about my shameful sad and embarrassing stories, the more credible I am. Because if I tell the truth as clearly and succinctly as the person who hates me and wants to embarrass me, if not more so, then I am the more reliable source, because I am the source. So I do lead the narrative, and I do approach it with humor. People are more likely to enjoy a humorous story than a scary one, and my stories don’t exactly need to be dramatized, considering the fact of the matter (jumping off of overpasses in Washington DC to practice being 007, etc).

I am not, like, proud to lose my mind, don’t get me wrong. My mom always asks me why I’m so proud of myself, and she asks it with thinly veiled disgust. Because if I come off as proud, then my mom would come of as deeply deeply mortified, if we even acknowledge the truth of the matter. In her mind, I am not bipolar. I did drugs. And she’s right, I did do drugs. I did adderall and coke in college, like everyone else, except I had a psychotic break, and they did not. I am just as happy to say I had drug-induced mania as I am to say I’m bipolar, which is to say that I am moderately unhappy but willing (to admit reality, independent of the words used to describe reality). But it is important to note that I had episodes after two years of stone-cold straight edge sobriety. Which was after 3 or 4 years of no episodes at all, and stable lithium use, and and and and. I was basically just doing life mostly right, as right as I could have been doing it, and I still blew up in my own face with yet another manic episode. Public. And I had to clean up more shame, which is just as much a part of the bipolar experience as any of the acute mania or depression or paranoia or whatever else. I always carry a tinge of shame with me, even when I am doing my very best. Mostly because the name Kelley Dicso, no matter how great she is doing, will always be juxtaposed with a very particular, very untouchably crazy delusional psychotic mental state. I fear I will always be in relation to, or in a distance of those episodes. Like, astronauts on the moon are always at a certain distance from earth. Even if they accomplished landing, and they returned safely.

I guess I am ashamed because demure and successful and refined, beautiful, aspirational young ladies don’t jump off of overpasses when they’re visiting their college friends in their first post-grad apartment. I am ashamed because I want to be more of something that I kind of am, and less of something that I definitely am. I hope that because I am both things to some degree, I am now particular, and can be my own flagship version of what it means to be a person, and a girl, and a successful girl, and a bipolar person, and a bipolar girl, and a successful bipolar girl. There aren’t many examples of this, and of course I would like to be an example. A good example, not a warning. So for that reason, I find it important to carry the least amount of shame possible.

I do many anti-shame rituals, actually. I listen to songs I was desperately attached to during a manic episode. If I rode my bike around for hours at a time last summer, thinking my way into a fantasy sci-fi time travel reality, then I ride my bike around this summer. This summer, I consider that mindset: that I had a unique ability to communicate wisdoms from the heavens, that I am very Special, and Chosen, that I am divinely protected. I consider the small seeds of faith that I have still, and how they got out of control, and how humans are inclined for pattern recognition, and thanks to chemical imbalances in my brain, I got to be all fucking crazy about it. I ride my bike and try to desensitize myself to the extravagance of it all, without being totally triggered by myself. It is a challenge.

I fight through a lot of shame now because there was too much built up at that time to deal with it all at once. I keep giving myself a bigger and bigger audience every time I am manic, because deep down, the realest-least manic version of myself does believe I am special, and that I have an important message to share. So I am trying to follow a North Star. It just sucks that I build an audience that maybe doesn’t have much empathy for me when I spiral out and start acting fucking crazy. And I guess I don’t really need empathy to overcome my own challenges. At the end of the day I need to be OK with myself, and then I move towards making things OK with family and friends, and then I can consider the wider role that society plays in my life, and whether I constantly need the approval and acceptance of people en masse. I don’t think I do. Half the time I just place my biggest fears and self-doubts onto people en-masse anyways. I’ve never really been able to read anyones mind, or squeeze out the pure elixir of ideas and thoughts and associations and projections that I illicit in the minds of other people. Said elixir would be able to tell me who I truly am, from the eyes of someone who I don’t know. Why the fuck would I need to know that, anyways?

So yes, I did come home to my parents house in New Jersey and get struck back to this time last year, when I was extremely down bad, mixed manic-depressive suicidal episode, feeling isolated and haunted in crowded rooms full of people who love me. It made me spin out for a second, and it made me hate myself, and I felt embarrassed and like a total loser, and like I was doomed from the start, and why try being better when I will always be haunted by my past. And then I opposite actioned those thoughts. Because that is what I do.

I walked with my dad on the boardwalk, too, and confessed where my head was at. And let words gush out of me uncontrollably, explaining how I think I’ve improved in some areas, and other areas (like social life, and writing a book, and creating a non-traditional career for myself) still feel like big failures. And I do this to my dad often on these boardwalk-walks, where I talk for too long in a really gluttonous self-absorbed type of way, and I feel shameful every time, only after it’s too late. I feel shameful for doing it, and I feel shameful because I take the response poorly (internally, and externally I just holdback tears, because I am now feeling the burn of being such embarrassment to my family. As if it all happened just now, even though it was a year or two years or 5 years ago. It is always happening just now, because this will always be a part of who I am, and a part of my narrative, like an astronaut relative to the moon).

When I gush to my parents about my insecurities, I feel like even more of a loser by being so unsure of myself, and so needy to hear what my parents think of me, and what they believe I need to do in order to be better, worthy, and not shameful, even though I don’t really want a life like my parents life at all. It’s embarrassing that I need external approval at all, especially because I know that I have been working pretty hard, day in and day out, to opposite action my awful, shameful thoughts, and to partake in hobbies and habits that will make me a better person. I also know that I feel way better about myself, my life, and my future today than I ever did before. So I am doing better, and why am I asking?

So I told my dad I have been writing “personal essays” on substack, and I took a step back from my blog. I told him I was humiliated by all of my manic blog posts, and I ruined my online-portfolio with the scrambled confusing and tangential manic garbage. I embarrassed myself by informing my anonymous internet audience that I’d like to be a fashion designer super spy, monk-nun, entrepreneur, actress author producer, amongst other professions that I can’t remember. Or that I can’t exactly put words to. Like, I want to be the person who runs fosters home for imaginary friends but for manic people, in the country side. I think I spent many paragraphs detailing that specific aspiration, actually. Because it is a profession that doesn’t exist. See, I was being very creative. I was world building on my blog. And I see that from this side of the journey through madness and back, and I can actually explain myself. It’s just a very shameful process to do so. Like, I really could re-type an entire blog post running with the whole legends of Zelda thing I started with. Simultaneously touching on everything here. I can write garbage, is what I’m saying. And I can enjoy it. I’m just saying that I am very aware that I don’t make sense half the time I’m not manic, and I am less aware when I am manic, that I don’t always make sense to people, and that people don’t always want to understand, anyways. But that is regardless of whether I am manic or not. That has more to do with other people than it has to do with me. I am always trying my best to be understood, even when I wish I wasn't. I bet its much much easier to be OK with being misunderstood.

I did have a phase where I was fascinated by crazy. Before I was crazy, I mean. Like, I really wanted to understand it, as an outsider, because it was fascinating to me. The same way I had a phase where I was fascinated with slavery and with the holocaust. It’s interesting to learn about things that are hard to understand. It’s even interesting to me now, having understood it from the inside out. I’ve overcome 4 major manic episodes and subsequent inpatient stays. I am proud of the overcoming part. But I am still very ashamed of the manic part. I know there are people in my audience who resonate with me because they have also been in my position, wrestling with mental health in some form or another. I think other people are maybe just fascinated that someone who presents very normal is actually afflicted with something that is very taboo by nature, and difficult to understand, even when you’re trying. “Manic” and “bipolar” are not just words for me to emphasize something absurd or acutely nuts. For me it’s a narrative that can be portrayed as very interesting, if you’re not considering the humiliation of my family, my friends, my younger self, and my future self. I am claiming something very ugly and shameful every time I talk about it. It’s just tough, because I am myself the whole time I spend manic. I am so entirely out of touch with reality that I don’t seem like myself to anyone else. It is extremely confusing to communicate my thoughts and ideas, which feel very pressing, by the way, during a manic episode. It makes no sense, in a time like that, why people are not understanding me. And I draw and write notes and rip out pages of books, and most recently, I wrote bad blog posts and made videos and webpages in an effort to communicate ideas that maybe were less important in the grand scheme of things than what I believed them to be at the time. I threw every ounce of myself every time, into communicating, and that’s why it’s so fucking embarrassing, after all. I think mostly because I didn’t do a good job at it. And secondarily because it maybe made less sense than I believed, and maybe I was not as divinely inspired as I thought. I did keep all my artifacts, and I have my psych ward papers and my pre-ward manic creations, too. And I look at those things in retrospect because I am curious to understand, and I kind of do see what I am saying. Which is kind of another layer to the shame. Because no, I do not want to claim this version of myself in her entirety. I can claim it was me, and it is interesting to look at, at a distance. I dont want to admit that normal, good me can understand freak manic me in a way that no one else ever could. Because that means that we do share a brain, and we exist next to each other, even when the mania is dormant. I hate that. I would maybe like it if it benefitted me in some way. Which is why I talk about it so much too, with seemingly so much pride. I really don’t like hating an entire part of myself, and big chunks of my life, and I don’t like hating my future, and my potential. I want to shine a better light on the mania and the bipolar of it all, if only so I can live with it, without needing someone else to confirm that I’m doing a good job.

I am really method acting here, as a person with dignity and grace. I am proud of myself for restoring my sanity. I am proud of myself for still going, and for not dying (by my own hand, overcome with the shame of it all, or dying by the consequences of my insanely-risky-insane behavior). I am definitely divinely protected.

In some schools of thought, none that I’ve been exposed to interpersonally in real life, this bipolar business could be a good thing. Like, the genius of madness. Artists and stuff. I am not around artists, my community is much more Privately-Educated Corporate Catholic than that, but I know that a lot of them are bipolar. People say you’re more creative when you're manic. Which is kind of true, because you’re able to create an entire world of non-reality. But what is the value in creativity if no one understands it, or likes it, or thinks it’s very good at all? And you could say the fun of it all, or the process, but what if being manic isn’t actually all that fun? What if it’s scary, and embarrassing, and a huge part of the process in dealing with mania is actually dealing with the shame of it all? What if the balance of being creative is so hard to find, wedged between pits of depression and chunks of elation so intense that it becomes destructive, that you need to be jailed off and drugged, because you pose a threat to yourself and your family and maybe in society. Not even in a physical way, necessarily. But in a reputational sense, you’re acting like a freak and completely discrediting yourself, and no one will take you seriously or employ you or hang out with you until you figure it out. And you really have to prove you figured it out, because most other people won’t want to carry the burden of your manic shame. They just want to insist they’re OK with dating you after the hard part is over.

Things have worked pretty seamlessly for me because I am quick to clean house after my episodes, and I laugh at when it was super dirty because what the fuck, who wants a dirty house with a dirty pool, but guys this pool is cleaner than most now, and the lounge chairs are nice and the umbrellas are cute and we are grilling later, im doing everything right, this Is not just a pool anymore, its an experience, and all the people who swim and lounge here are hot and ripped and equally concerned with success and aesthetics and comfort and pleasure. Cmon guys. Hang with me.

I always wanted a good life with comfort and success and aesthetics and pleasure.

The manic stuff was just a huge obstacle, something to figure out, in seeking that. And I get extra credit, because I plan to achieve those things despite or in conjunction with the manic business. Which means it was harder for me, and I did it anyways. And I did it even though I never saw or heard about anyone else doing it, especially no one on reddit. I overcame things despite the people on reddit saying that it wasn’t doable, actually.

So to be clear on the experience of Mania: Half the time I spend manic, I am trying to figure something out. I believe I am figuring it out, that I have it all figured out in a way that no one else can quite see, that I have been hand selected to provide a path for others to figure it out, and sometimes, on top of all that, there is some sort of impending doom that makes it all very time-sensitive, figure it out as fast as possible, I will give it my all to try and help the world figure it all out, I am God-sent after all. And for that reason, I never regret going inpatient. I want to be clear about that too. That has been part of my method in recovering from an episode, and despite my inpatient hospitals being a hell hole shit show, it is a privilege to have access to care and solitude and medication. I can’t acknowledge overcoming the mania without crediting this leg of the journey. Even though I fucking hate this part, and the institutions need to be better and do better, I digress.

Each time, I have come out the other side able to function and reintegrate into society. I am obviously still figuring everything out, but it feels much more regular, and less divine, and less urgent and scary and people actually see where I am coming from, and help me in trying to get where I need to go.

So I am as proud as my mother thinks I am, with the whole bipolar thing, but the pride sits in different buckets than what she measures. If it wasn’t such a trigger-topic, she’d definitely understand me and the manic experience a lot better. Instead, we just don’t really talk about it. Which is fine, because I care more that she accepts me, and less that she understands me. I talk about it for people who want to understand or be understood properly. And not everyone will. And not everyone can. I am really into the idea of accepting myself, though. Beyond just like, talking about it on the internet. And I’m not entirely there yet, but I am making an effort, and I am making some headway, if I measure the same buckets I always have.