This is an account of what I have experienced in my social situations. I find interacting with others extremely, extremely difficult if I’m not familiar with the person or people who are there. It is a debilitating situation that is an uttermost infuriating predicament. There’s no possible rational explanation for such an exaggerated response to such a simple thing.
So, if you can relate then I can at least rest with the knowledge Im not alone and if you want to, please leave your own opinions and comments and experiences on this if you feel happy to do so.
Feel free also to leave a comment about anything you want or give it a like. I don’t have a massive audience and I would love to be able to reach a wider community of people with similar interesting stories and experiences as me to help promote the presentation of Bipolar Disorder to increase awareness and understanding, hopefully too, ending the stigma surrounding it in society 
It starts too fast.
Before the moment has a name it is already everywhere.
A look. A noise. A nothing.
My mind detonates around it.
Meaning multiplies uncontrollably, splinters of intention, imagined subtexts breeding like mould. Every micro-expression becomes a broadcast. Every silence is deliberate. I am no longer participating in a social interaction; I am being processed by it. Analysed. Filed. Rejected in advance.
My thoughts accelerate past coherence.
Imagine being an unpunctuated piece of writing.
“They see it they hear it you’re wrong you’ve always been wrong why did you speak why didn’t you speak why are you here why are you like this”
There is no punctuation anymore, just velocity. Anxiety reaches a pitch where it stops sounding like fear and starts sounding like prophecy. The future arrives early and it is hostile.
Then; lock.
My body shuts down like a system protecting corrupted data. Catatonia descends not as numbness but as containment. If I move, I will spill. If I speak, I will confirm. Stillness becomes camouflage. From the outside I appear compliant, present, mild. Inside I am flaying myself alive for clues I missed seconds ago.
Paranoia sharpens into something surgical. I no longer feel watched. I know I am being appraised and found excessive. My existence feels loud even when I am silent. My presence feels like a social error no one is impolite enough to point out. I imagine their relief when I leave. I imagine the unspoken agreement that I am difficult, unstable, best handled in small doses or not at all.
The self begins to thin.
I start editing myself mid-thought.
Then mid-feeling.
Then pre-emptively.
I erase reactions before they surface. I cancel desires before they register. By becoming less me, I attempt to become less noticeable. But the more I subtract, the more grotesque the remainder feels, an outline with no justification, a person-shaped inconvenience lingering where something useful should be.
Mania flickers again, brief, but emphatically vicious. A surge of insight that feels almost divine: I am the problem. I always was. The clarity is intoxicating. Cruel but elegant. Everything aligns around that conclusion, and for a moment the chaos feels organised, purposeful, righteous.
Then it rots.
What’s left is exhaustion so complete it borders on extinction. I don’t want reassurance. I don’t want understanding. And I want absence. Not death; just non-participation. To be socially unregistered. To stop casting a psychological shadow that invites interpretation and judgement.
When the interaction ends, I don’t leave it. It moves into me. Replays in accelerated decay, each loop more distorted, more damning. My mind will worry it like a wound, reopening it nightly, proving again and again that I am unsafe in proximity to others, and worse, unsafe in my own head.
This is the quiet horror of it:
I am awake.
I am aware.
And I am slowly deleting myself to survive the noise.
About This Post:
Living With Bipolar Disorder: Social Interactions & The Fear is a guest post written by Stuart Sanderson and first appeared on his site. Stuart has shared multiple posts about his experience with bipolar disorder on this blog as well as his own blog. If it’s something you would like to read more about, do check out his blog.
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