SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED

A cynical, somewhat crass ex of mine once said, “The first three months of dating are a bubble. You actually think his shit doesn’t stink.” I would have couched it in terms like “rose-colored glasses” and scored my inner thoughts to the tune “’S Wonderful,” but we were always a po-tay-to, po-tah-to couple. Enough about him. These days, it’s Daniel and me. Three months has passed; the bubble, if there ever was one, has burst. Best behavior gives way to reality. To be sure, I haven’t been my best self this week.

According to Wikipedia, May is National Bike Month, National Smile Month and National Guide Dog Month. (I always wonder what nation they’re referring to...Belarus? Botswana? Saint Vincent and the Grenadines?) As much as I like biking, smiling and any and all dogs, the most relevant designation for May is Mental Health Awareness Month. There’s a whole lot wrapped up in that for me.

I went through the first forty-nine years of life being “normal”. I worked—hard—and followed my parents’ playbook for whenever I felt “off”: Suck it up. I did everything I could to fit in. All those years of being a closeted gay and being “openly” gay with several asterisks proved good training ground. I became a master at hiding what society perceived as flaws. But maybe I wasn’t as much a master as I thought I was. Way back in law school, while at a social mixer at a Malibu bar, I recall a guy I was chatting with interrupting what I thought was a flowing conversation, a distinct air of annoyance in his voice as he said, “You know, you have a lot of quirks.”

Now the quirks have labels. They came in rapid succession shortly before my fiftieth birthday as a traumatic event triggered intense suicidal ideation and led to lock-up in a psych ward when I sought help. The act was intended to be protective, but it felt punitive. That’s what you get for sharing. The entire experience was scarring, but as a parting gift, I had my first label: major depressive disorder. That got tweaked to bipolar II while social anxiety and eating disorder, anorexia, filled out the portfolio. Last year, the insurance company overseeing my long-term leave of absence threw in its own term for good measure: totally disabled.

Surely all that would make my online dating profile stand out.

As I’ve mentioned before, Daniel knows all of this. True, it all came out during that shit-doesn’t-stink period, but that trimester is also known to be laden with mines, marked with red flags. Every week, it seemed, I was waving a new red flag. Daniel—poor, sweet Daniel—stayed.

Still, it’s one thing to stick around as the labels are shared; it’s quite another when the actual actions associated with the labels start to show.

Three months is a long time to be on one’s best behavior. The cracks started to show about a week ago. I could feel a flatness coming on, a state I was in for many months spanning 2018-2019. At the time, I attributed it to the cocktail of drugs I’d been prescribed to deal with me being bipolar: one to keep me from going too low, one to prevent me from going too high and an all-around “mood stabilizer” thrown in for good measure. Through persistent pleading, I got my daily pill popping down to two medications, then one, before I went off everything without telling doctors, leading to disastrous results. Sometimes we have to learn the hard way. I need meds, even if, as now, it’s just a single drug taken nightly at the lowest possible dosage.

Before this latest bout of flatness surfaced, I’d been having more dizziness when I got up from the sofa—little bouts of indoor surfing. My dreams also became increasingly vivid and surreal. Sometimes they were entertaining, but more often they were annoying and/or disturbing and/or exhausting. These are symptoms I’ve had in the past with certain medications but it seemed strange to have them arise anew with a pill I’d taken for six months without side effects.

As I ate dinner with Daniel and he excitedly shared the triumphs of his day, I struggled to sound supportive. I felt like I was following a response stream from a textbook. It didn’t seem genuine. I shared with him my flatness. He hadn’t noticed that I was off. Yes, all those years of masking things can make me almost pass as normal, particularly in the early going, but I needed Daniel to know what I was feeling...or not feeling. I also knew that, if the flatness stuck around, it would become more pronounced, and any attempt to mask would be futile.

After a bad sleep on the weekend—ahem, someone snores—I was even more off as we met some of his friends for a socially distanced gathering outside a coffee spot that’s stayed open for takeout throughout COVID-19. This morning social event is essential for Daniel while, even when I’m at my best, I find them painful. (Hello, social anxiety.) Once we parked, Daniel looked at me as I couldn’t get out of the vehicle. After several false starts, I stepped out and took my spot in line as Daniel joined the circle congregated outside and got a jump on his social fix. I prayed the line would move sloooowly. When I found my place in what had become an ever expanding human oval on the sidewalk, I did my best to laugh in the right places, to smile, to nod and to pepper the conversation with socially acceptable interjections (“Really?” “That’s amazing!” “Yeah...that Trump.”). Whenever it felt safe, I’d look pleadingly in Daniel’s eyes—Can we go? Please?! The longer we stayed, the more inept I felt. His friends would surely schedule an intervention. “Really, Daniel. What do you see in that guy?”

“They really like you,” Daniel has said many times. I think it helps that Daniel’s ex proved himself to be an epic schmuck as their twenty-five year relationship imploded.

Another bad night’s sleep followed, this time on my own. A nightmare had me bolt upright, shouting, tears flowing, at 4:30 in the morning. I moved to the sofa in the living room, afraid to fall back asleep while unsuccessfully trying to dismiss the traumas my dream had triggered—my first hospitalization, a deep unworthiness, a conviction that I didn’t deserve to still be alive six years on. It would have been a complete write-off of a day but for the fact I had a research deadline I needed to meet. A busy mind is a great distraction. Until it isn’t. I met my deadline and held on the next day with some writing tasks and a six-mile walk with a dear friend who has had her own struggles with an eating disorder and mood disorders. I felt relief. I called Daniel and asked to join him for coffee the next morning with his friends.

But then I forgot to take my medication, only remembering as I sat in bed at midnight, still wide awake. It bothers me greatly that I now require my medication if I’m to have any chance of sleep.

A late pill means a day of grogginess will follow. Sure enough, when my alarm sounded, I was in a fog...and a funk. I forced myself to shower, dress and pick up Daniel to head to the cafe. I could barely speak. Pulling up and seeing a cluster of somewhat familiar faces gathered on the sidewalk, I felt overly critical and cranky. Don’t they have anything else to do? I bet their wives kick them out every morning. Why are they all so old? I assumed my spot in the line and eyed a Rottweiler tied to a parking meter. After I paid, I figured I would be able to spend my time with the dog, a socially acceptable way not to be social. Alas, the dog barked at me and bared its teeth. The owner, two in front of me in line, turned and gave me a similar look. Where were all the golden labs and cockapoos?

I handed Daniel his coffee and then pretended to look at something important on my phone. Eventually, Daniel came back over to see what was going on. “I just need to sit in my car,” I said. “Take your time and chat. I’m good.” He gave me a quizzical look and I captioned it in my mind as, What is wrong with you? It wasn’t just the prospect of social conversation that seemed painful. Keeping my eyes open was painful. Thinking about writing was painful. Everything was.

I held things together enough to drop Daniel off at his personal training session in a local park—gyms remain closed—and then went home to crash. Straight to bed. Pillow over head. Go away, world (and all those booming construction sounds from buildings going up all around me). An hour later, still doing a bang-on zombie impression, I moved to the couch, draping a blanket over me, back to the window, scrolling Twitter where hot guys with perfect hair whined about needing a haircut—a ruse to get several hundred ego-boosting comments and thousands of likes—and people argued back and forth about whether it’s okay to say anything positive about Adele’s weight loss. Mindlessness can be soul-crushing.

Daniel texted to check in with me. “Can I call you?”

I responded, perhaps too honestly, “Not right now, thanks. It’s too difficult to think.”

He asked if he could call me after work at 8:30. I couldn’t respond. I just needed everything to go away—Twitter, the construction din, even Daniel. I paged through the novel I’m currently reading, with the cheery title They Both Die at the End, baked a pumpkin pie and then ran for an hour and a half. Exercise is a great aid for depression while feeding my eating disorder. I made it through an hour of a movie on Netflix, shut my phone off and turned in for the night.

This morning I looked at my phone—Do any of us look out our window to take in the day before reaching for that bloody device? No messages from Daniel. As I got up and made coffee, I felt normal. Ish. That happens. Sometimes when I can’t bat away depression, I give into it, hang on and ride it out. I texted a good morning message to Daniel, reassured him that I was feeling better and shifted the focus to him. Uncharacteristically, it took a while before he responded. Twenty minutes, maybe. In that time, I told myself he was gone. Finally, he could smell the shit. Time to shut the door.

He exchanged a few texts and then he wrote, “Can I see you tonight after work?”

A gentleman, I told myself. He’s breaking up in person. No one wants to be with someone as messed up as me...totally disabled, in fact.

Nice ride. Time to unfasten the seat belt and walk away.

I took his Facetime call at lunch. There he was smiling broadly, sharing about his day and the details from yesterday that he was bursting to tell me. I got giggly, finding amusement in some random comment he made and he patiently let me work through it, not really understanding my humor but maybe the old me was back. He floated some weekend ideas and then, three minutes after the call ended, sent a link for an animal refuge along with the message, “We should go here when it opens back up.”

Yes, poor, sweet Daniel. Thinking about tonight, this weekend and possibly weeks into our future. I’d given him a glimpse of my darker side and the silly fool wasn’t to be scared off. Not yet, at least.