ethical self-presentation, sensibility, and unreliable cognition

My ex here always have this thin layer of moisture shimmering across his large eyes, as if he’s always hovering between laughing and crying, being so attached to the sensory world. He has heaps of friends (someone like me would say “too many” to manage), sees them alot, and makes sense of the pervasiveness of himself through american fiction, and architectural and design problems; a kind of way of being that makes him happy, and that works for at least 81/2 months of the year. He also suffers from a rare form of bipolar 2 that like clockwork, affects him for the whole three months of every summer. For those 3 months he has trouble getting out of bed, feels the need to sleep and rest most of the time, can’t handle very much stimulation of any kind, can’t even walk past the outside of a nice book or CD shop without his mood rapidly swinging to hopelessness/aversion/alarm, about how much information it contains that he can’t cognize. He can’t stay in for too long, or it gets worse, so he has to make decisions about when/how to go out, where his strategy is just to ‘follow’: his friends, a flow, whatever will have him brush up against external energy without risking too much of his own.

He knows he’s like a non-cognising, zombified, lilting version of an only slightly more fixed but much stronger, charming self that he has a much more ordinary hold on for the rest of the year. He manages this disconnect, for the most part, very well, with small sighs and small non-obvious quittings of images and things. That is, he can still remember himself, and perform himself, and every now and again take an item or task out of the the vastly expanded ‘too hard’ basket But he doesn’t really know what can realistically be taken out of it, and completed, and what of his behaviour might just appear, even to himself, to be an empty performance, bound for incompletion, and just a meaningless gesture within a fairly masculine denial that he’d be suspicious of all year round. Meanwhile, there is the matter of being a fulltime employee.

Sunday I spent helping him write a letter to his work, informing them, (again) of his bipolar 2, the exact symptoms that affect his work, as reasons for his absence, slowness, for not being able to multi-task and “just get many different projects done at the same time”. i.e. the ordinary demands of unrealistic expectations, exacerbated by the fact of him being, temporarily, a rather unordinary model employee. We talked about the bleeding together of so many different larger than work issues to do with privacy, optimism, guilt, shame, solitary suffering and unreliability, to himself, to the ‘team’ identity of the kind of work he does, his not wanting to be taken off the most interesting projects (which his brain responds best to because of their novelty). About the idea of responsible relationships. We drew up personality charts of his different supervisors and colleagues, so we could tell which of them would need to know which parts of the story, which of them might be unaccommodating or more accommodating, which of them are easier or more personal/personable in the office.

Mostly though, we talked about what a strategy looked like that could account for the pretty high possiblity of this happening for three months of every year for the rest of his life. i.e. the impossibility of “not telling”, and hoping that things might anyway turn out. Yet the need to leave and manage some sort of paradoxical hole, or piece of space, for the possibility of things being better, or “not as bad” in some other future time. Indeed, he is trialling yet another break-through med this year, which has him seeming “better than last year, or when I’ve seen you this time of the year” to his closest friends, which has made it hard for him to determine and remember how much better that–this–actually is.

We surmised that his position, in his own university as workplace, surrounded by mentors and people who had employed him even after supervising his masters thesis over the course of a previous summer’s episode – that difficultly witnessed – that he was in a position, perhaps, only perhaps, for his condition to be factored in to his contract somehow, during this time of the year. Or for an actual strategy to be discussed. The senior creatives also hate admin, appreciate his sense of humour, and already oversaw his very outlandish masters thesis, and his difficulty writing it during a previous summer, before even giving him the job. He knows, more recently, that there are to be no cancelled contracts in the near future. That his job – albeit prior to declaring temporary cognitive disability – was safe for the time being. What has he got to lose? So after 5 hours, and naps, and food, we went to the state library, where it took him just as long to translate back in to dutch the official and considered letter that we came up with. I hope that he goes okay.