Do They Really Know?

Posted on June 23, 2006 in Mania The Phone

I applied to take part in a research study at UCI. Fifty dollars for four hours of “work” and lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Nice that I can sometimes make a little money being a professional bipolar.

A nonchalant chat followed. I expressed my interest in the results of the study. Not a problem. “It’s that I’m always trying to understand why things appear to me as they do.”

“We all do that,” the research assistant said. “I do that.”

The conversation went unsteadily after that and in the end — after about five minutes, he got rid of me. Diligent student of conversations and my own moods that I am, I reviewed everything and marked the point when the researcher claimed to be like me as the one where I started to feel uneasy.

I realized that I wanted to say “Do you? Do you know what it is like to know the right thing to do or say and yet be beguiled by your brain into doing something else? Do you know the shame that inevitably comes?” Sometimes I feel that we bipolars invented the sense of guilt. I have been to too many funerals and courts to believe this for long.

I’d have gone on: “The surrounding cosmos is the same for both of us, but experience is not. There’s a mechanism, a process that I need to exercise constantly. It’s check check check countercheck to be sure that I am not stepping in someone’s flowerbed of the intellect. Moreover, I have to distrust my perceptions. The question is how far?”

Another note: medical professionals of all varieties often get rushed if I start to talk too much. I feel shamed by this behavior and often retreat into a mild depression after it. Do I scare them like I scare everyone else by the cadences of my speech when I am manic? I think the best way to approach this study might be to view it as a diagnostic procedure limited in time and space. Go in, get it done, and go home. After lunch, of course.