One of the interesting things about living a bipolar life is that it is structurally humiliating: it is humiliating to think about all the things you tried to do when you were a person who thought yourself capable of anything; it is also humiliating to think about all the things you failed to do when you were a person who thought yourself capable of nothing. It’s almost certain that, in these periods, you hurt people, likely the ones you care most about — I have. I was 21 the first time my symptoms were severe enough to be upgraded from what’s called “hypomania” into “mania” proper, a distinction I learned of after I badly hurt someone I loved. In the months after, I struggled to make sense of my guilt: it is hard to accept you were responsible for hurting someone when you were “not yourself;” it is harder still if the person you hurt hurt you back. Trying to figure this out almost killed me, but I survived, and when I did, I took the project of organizing my life around my illness with renewed seriousness: for the next eight years, nearly every significant decision I made flowed out of the very simple goal of not letting my illness harm those I cared about, starting with myself. Where I have landed, in terms of how to navigate feeling accountable to the people in your life as a bipolar person, is the same place I have landed in terms of how to navigate feeling accountable to the people in your life as any sort of person: ultimately, what matters is not who is to blame for the problems you face in your life but who will solve them — if your response to a problem is to blame someone else, and then do nothing about it, one of two things is true: either you believe the other person will solve the problem, or you are okay living your life with the problem still there.
I am a person who has, historically, struggled to live her life. For fifteen years, faced with the choice between solving a problem in my life or accepting it, I rejected the false binary: why not just end my life? For fifteen years, there were periods where things as small as those innocent bits of social friction everyone encounters every single day — the awkward laugh someone gives when they don’t understand your joke, the unexpected punctuation someone may use in a text — were enough to send me into survival mode. My experience of having spent many years suicidal is that each of these periods can feel like it’s compounding: this is because the problem suicide solves is the problem of your existence, and if you feel that your existence is one that will never be free from these suicidal periods, each successive one will feel heavier and heavier until, one day, it will feel too heavy.
Something I have found generally difficult about living with mental illness is accepting that many others do not. This is the kind of thing I know abstractly, and thus, if asked, would never deny, but when I move through the world, when I talk to other people, when I see the decisions they make, I struggle to understand what it must be like to never consider this third option. I tend to experience other people as being beyond my comprehension, in part because I think they experience me this way as well. Where our inability to understand each other becomes asymmetric, however, is that many of these people in my life seem to understand one another. It is not that my social world is an archipelago, and that each of us little islands comes to understand the other across our mutual divides; it’s more just that I am offshore.
Others are there too. Something else I have found generally difficult about living with mental illness is learning how not to feel so alone. This is one potential benefit of a diagnostic category: it is comforting to understand the problems you face as problems millions of other people face, in part because they then become problems millions of other people have overcome: the bipolar suicide rate is high, but it is not 100%. Many mentally ill people live full lives of dignity. Many mentally ill people are valuable and loved members of their social world. But this does not happen by default. I have had to change much of my mentally ill life because it was, quite literally, unlivable, and in that process, I have concretely felt the truth of an abstractly obvious statement: you can only change what already exists. There are lives I want that I cannot and will never live. This is, in one sense, what it means to be “disabled,” but in another sense, simply what it means to be alive.
The most useful thing my old therapist said to me was
a diagnosis is useful until it isn’t.
She said this to me not as a general theoretical statement about the practice of diagnosis, but as a contextual piece of advice, one tailored specifically to me: I think she saw that I was overly attached to my self-understanding as “a mentally ill person,” and that my continuing to conceptualize myself this way was no longer serving me — put another way, she saw that I was ready to begin a new kind of life long before I did. She was right, but I don’t regret the time I spent afraid to let go. It is scary to let go of things. What if you fall?
Last year, after I told my therapist I was ready to live my life without her, and she, smiling, agreed, I began to experiment with self-worth: I recognized that it was something I had, and that meant it was something I could use: I could, for the first time in my life, ask my parents to help support me financially so that I could dedicate my time to different political and community service projects; I could try very different kinds of writing; I could relate to the people in my life in a new way, and when I did all this, I found that I could be better to them, kinder, more patient; six years after I was sexually assaulted by a stranger in public, I began to chat freely with the strangers who would approach me, and I found that with them, I could be better, kinder, and more patient, too — in short, for the first time in my life, I truly felt I was living a life I wanted to live, one in which I was doing what I understood to be genuine good. It felt real. It felt meaningful. And when I saw that this life of trying to do right by people was the real life I really had, for the first time in my 29 years of living, I felt straightforwardly proud.
It is perhaps narratively unsurprising, then, that just two weeks before I turn 30, I have never felt so humiliated. My main political and community service project ended in a way that was particularly humiliating for me, and the thing I was most proud of in my life — a decade long romantic partnership — likewise. I usually take walks to ground myself, and last December, on one such walk, I stupidly tripped and fractured a foot bone; now, I spend a lot of time waiting for underfunded buses at San Francisco bus stops, barely registering the anti-ICE or Free Palestine fliers that surround me as I, like any communist, am already thinking about ICE and Israel and the things about our world they represent, if only so I can think more clearly about the other people who live in that world, ones whose lives are full of pains and hardships I can scarcely comprehend — how could I not? Here one of them is at this very bus stop, after all, explaining some insane thing from their life as I extend them the cigarette and ear I’m choosing to offer in place of cash, the only cash I have on me being a single, somehow always sweatsoaked $20. I am, all things considered, fine: I am not the first person to be unemployed and newly single; I have a lot of friends and a loving family, many of whom remind me of this and also that at the center of that support system is the current, very strong version of myself, a person I’m happy to report has not once, in the past few months, given the suicidal solution any serious, or even reflexive, consideration. It is worth working on your self, if for no other reason than it is the hardest thing for someone else to take away from you. But it’s also good to find the things outside of your self that give you strength, and for me, one of the virtues of Literature is that it is full of people who are not only as humiliatingly insane as I am, but humiliatingly insane in the same way, the kinds of people who might make me feel a bit better about the fact that with my year of humiliation, hopefully, coming to a close, it’s apparently still not done, as here I am, writing yet another fucking essay about David Foster Wallace?
Infinite Jest, Wallace’s most famous work, also turns 30 this month, and having decided to do so a few months ago with a friend, and now one more, I am rereading it for the occasion. I was 16 the first time I read it, adolescently sweatsoaked and generally suicidal; the second time, I was 26, recovering from a vaginoplasty and about halfway through writing my first novel, School. Given Wallace’s superficial reputation as a “litbro author,” and given what I had just paid someone $500 to do to my penis, I approached this second read with a smirk, though my jaw quickly slacked into something a little more, how did he write this? This third time, coming back, in a hard period, to a book about how hard it is to stop coming back to things when you’re in a hard period, I’ve been smiling to myself in a different way, thinking thoughts like, God — I am such a dumb bitch! and feeling, as much as I can manage these days, humility’s serenity.
But fuck! What a crazy novel. I’m only 100 pages in right now, and I don’t know that I have much interesting to say about the novel itself except that if “contemporary literature” has yet to produce a Great American Novel that can replace Infinite Jest, it’s probably because Infinite Jest continues to be contemporary literature: written and published in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the “end of history,” Infinite Jest is a testament to what life under capitalism is like in the absence of what Thomas Pynchon — an author both Wallace and I loved — called a Counterforce. It is remarkable how much the structure of Infinite Jest anticipates looking at your phone: fragment after fragment, assembled in the same place using some opaque, algorithmic chronology, in what feels like an infinite feed of content. Much has changed since Wallace’s time, of course, but it’s hard to feel like much has really progressed. If today’s Wallace would not be trying his, her, or their hand at poorly imitated AAVE, or confusingly transphobic and anti-Québécois plots, he, she, or they would certainly still be writing about trying to make sense of life in a world that only seems to change for the worse. Perhaps the simplest way I could summarize my understanding of the Marxist tradition is that, in the final analysis, most of what happens in our social world only happens because humans make it happen. Nothing — neither communist revolution nor capitalist suffering — is inevitable.
My dad loves classical music, and at some point last year, hoping to incentivize my unrealized curiosity about that tradition with another thing I was new to — filial piety — I began with the single most canonical work I knew: Beethoven’s 5th. Talking about it with my dad, he mentioned something about Beethoven’s “inevitability,” an insight he attributed to Leonard Bernstein. Wallace’s inevitability — and that, I’d suspect, of any “great artist” — is a product of his talent: reading a writer who, it’s clear, could do anything he wanted with language, you are forced to wonder: why choose this? Something more particular to Wallace, however, is the urgency of his writing, the sense that at times, what he’s writing about was controlling him. Whether you like feeling this tension, whether you like his writing at all, there is no denying that while you are reading it you feel — to some degree — that you are experiencing what it feels like to be him.
I’ve had a hard time forgiving myself for wanting to be David Foster Wallace, in part, I suppose, because I could never forgive him for not wanting to be himself. In the three years that have passed since I last reread Infinite Jest, I have struggled to finish a single thing he’s written: participating in his self-loathing makes me too sad; I remember what it felt like to feel that way, and of course, the joy of being finally free from it. For many years, I have found Wallace’s insistence that
I treasure my regular-guyness. I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer. Is that I’m pretty much just like everybody else.
grating. This is another tension in his work, neatly embodied in Infinite Jest by the two protagonists, regular guy Don Gately and misunderstood genius Hal Incandenza. But walking, at cane speeds, the three blocks between two of the inevitable post-breakup friend talks I’ve been having, and thinking about the first of them, a talk that I had had with one of the many friends in my life who, when I present them with my intellectualization of my life, like to remind me, smiling, that I am not special, I realized that until that moment, a few days ago, I did not really understand David Foster Wallace, and that probably, I would spend the rest of my life realizing new ways in which that is true: the reality is that you can come up with all the elaborate intellectualizations you want, but at the end of the day, when it comes time to act, you’re going to have to do things the same way everyone else does, one step at a time. This is why Wallace loved earning his clichés. When you’ve had the life experience you need for them to hit, girl, do they fucking hit!
In truth, it has been a long time since Wallace was my “problematic fave;” that title almost certainly goes to Mao Zedong, a Chinese poet best known for his other work, for me, most relevantly, an essay that began as a lecture he gave in 1937, entitled “On Practice.” Thoughts can only be evaluated in tandem with the actions they entail: this is the difficulty of wrestling with the thoughts of those who have hurt others.
Consistently, the strongest pushback I receive from readers of my writing is driven by the idea that I write too much about my life: what can I say in my defense besides, it happens to be the one that I am living. Wallace drew a stark line between what he called “irony” and what he called “sincerity;” I wish he hadn’t: I see the same division in American culture, but to me it has nothing to do with irony or sincerity, but with seriousness and unseriousness. Take your life seriously. You’re the only one that can. Another salient division in our culture is the one between populism and democracy: when a massive media conglomerate — or an author of “literary fiction” — puts out art that meets us at our most base, and doesn’t bring us anywhere else, that is populism; when an artist challenges you to follow them somewhere daunting, and when they succeed in making you see that you can, that is democracy. Irony can be serious business, if you want it to be. Sincerity can be schlock. Art, more than almost anything else in this world, is what you decide to make of it.
The literary suicide I’ve named this three book writing project after was Bartleby, a Herman Melville character whose defining feature is that he, whenever anyone asks him to do something, says
I would prefer not to.
Those who meet Bartleby — whether diagetically or critically or even just recreationally — tend to see him as inhuman, although, in my read, the only thing that is truly human is the ability to imagine the real world otherwise. One of the virtues of having spent much of your life suicidal is that you really know that you can always say no — it’s usually just the consequences that stop you. Suicidality, like just about everything else, is what you make of it. Perhaps those who have never known otherwise will not understand the sheer joy of wanting to stay alive, or perhaps they always have — what matters for me, right now, is that I do. I still have hundreds and hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest left to escape into, but I know the novel, unlike the fictional movie at its center, will one day end — what doesn’t?