Fuck the Glitter

There’s this book that’s been sitting on my reading list forever: a less than 200-page read entitled “Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?”

I’ve been carrying it around since I stole it from McLean Hospital during my inpatient stay there back in 2020. I haven’t cracked the book open yet but its title alone begs a question that I desperately need to answer.

Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?

I don’t know. But if I’m being honest, I’m fucking terrified.

I live in fear of sharing who I actually am every single day.

As a result I don’t just go about my day adulting like normal people do. I go about it pretending. I do it without noticing. It’s become as second-nature as breathing to me.

It's a problem I’ve had my entire existence.

I’m a people pleaser. To a pathological extent.

I’m so determined to be loved and accepted that I will literally say or do anything to be the kind of person that you don’t want to leave.

It’s a part of my abandonment issues and a maladaptive tendency I’ve had as long as I can remember.

It’s led to some huge issues, including the fact that underneath all that people-pleasing, I really don’t have a great idea who I am.

On top of that I have no self-esteem, so instead of figuring out who I am I just look outward for external validation, sinking myself further in the hole of existential crisis. I know. It’s exhausting.

It reminds me of this thing I wrote about during the 2016 election. Tweeting about Hillary Clinton, Dartmouth Politic Science Professor Brandan Nyhan wrote that Hillary Clinton had found herself in an “authenticity doom loop” with the media.

The idea was that Hillary Clinton was stuck in a sort of authenticity doom loop during the campaign: the media was beating her up over being inauthentic, but at every attempt to be authentic she just made herself look colder and more out of touch. For nerds interested I highly recommend you check out my piece on this idea, here: https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/clinton .

But TBH Brendan’s work on the subject is way better and can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/upshot/how-scott-walker-has-escaped-the-inauthentic-label-so-far.html .

(Sidenote: see, this is why my book is going to end up being a political memoir, because I literally can’t even explain my own personality disorder without delving into presidential politics and theory.)

I have an authenticity problem.

As such, it’s been very hard to write lately. Ever since the bipolar meteor hit my life I haven’t known whether to just show up as this imperfect self, or to keep soldiering on as if nothing has happened.

Recently while I was talking to my best friend Meghan, she reminded me how there for me she is by telling me that it’s okay for me to show up in our conversations without glitter on.

“I want you to know that conversations with me are a place where you don’t have to put any of the glitter on life, that things can be shitty and that’s okay.”

Reason 5,877 why I love Meghan is because she sees me so well. Her statement gave me the words for what I’m about to say, which is something that’s been swirling around in my head in this void of blog posts:

Fuck the glitter.

You know part of the reason why I’m afraid to write? Because I’m afraid that anything I write will be used against me in the court of crazy. Yes, the court of crazy. I think of it as the measuring stick by which I’m being measured as it relates to my bipolar.

But the reality is, the crazy police aren’t going to come and knock down my door. And this is my safe space to talk about things and process my feelings so to hell with it I’m just going to go big or go home on that front.

What’s the worst that can happen?

I’ll be committed to the hospital and have my life flipped upside down while I'm in there? Have to move back to Boston and start my life over from scratch?

Oh wait. All of that already happened. And guess what? I’m still alive. And sober.

So fuck the glitter.

Life has been really freaking hard since my bipolar diagnosis.

It's not that the diagnosis changed things per se, but it changed everything. From what meds I take to where I call home to what I believe about myself.

I’ve been too afraid to say that. Or to write about it for that matter.

Usually when I write a blog post, everything flows together into a neat little package and I end up with something I’m ready to post. It hasn’t felt like that lately and in my desire to not want to force it, I’ve erred on the side of keeping my writing to my journals.

But the reality is I need to air out my writing to process. That’s a huge reason I started this blog, to get my writing out there so it can exist outside of my brain and the confines of my journals.

So here we go.

In the last month and a half I have:

- Moved back to Boston to be closer to family, moving in with my Dad in his apartment outside of the city.

- Quit my job at Penn State University. A devastating loss that I’m still mourning and that you can read about here.

- Transitioned from the care of the healthcare professionals I got sober with to an entirely new batch of doctors here in Mass

- Begun triage work on my self-esteem

My goal in admitting this is that I can reclaim this space as one where I never let the pathological people-pleaser win, where I show up, unapologetically myself, imperfections and all.

It’s the way I need to start showing up in life because if my breakdown taught me anything it’s that this existence I’ve been living where I show up as who I think people want me to be is not sustainable. It involves too much holding of my breath, too much shoving down who I really am. And it led me to a psychotic break.

So no more.

From now on we say fuck the glitter.