What do you wear the first day back to work after a 90-day leave of absence because of a psychotic break? This is the question I found myself asking a little more than a year after I joined the Legal Aid Society of New York. The last time my colleagues had seen me, I’d been wearing a handlebar mustache better suited to a Hell’s Angel than a 26-year-old public defender. I’d also taken to wearing a Mohawk — tried a case like that even. We won, thank God.

At the happy hour following that trial, I stripped down to my underwear and did a titillating strip tease for a bunch of law students who were there as a part of a recruiting event for a white shoe law firm. It didn’t go over well but I didn’t care. I thought I nailed it.

For my first day back to work I dressed in a sober navy sweater and a pair of dark slacks. Normal haircut, neatly trimmed beard. I got there early to avoid the morning rush and the inevitable stares and whispers. I had been “away with some issues” — that was the official company line, but offices are gossip hotbeds, and I wondered how much of the real story had filtered through. Did they know that I’d marched through the city for 12 hours — manic, psychotic and convinced I was being videotaped by secret TV producers, the star of my own reality show? That the police had found me later that evening shirtless, barefoot and crying on a subway platform? That I’d been involuntarily committed to Bellevue, the notorious psych ward to which we at Legal Aid routinely sent our most mentally ill clients?

For most, an involuntary stay in a locked psychiatric ward becomes a closely guarded secret. But part of me wanted everyone to know. I wanted them to know that I had received a Bipolar I diagnosis — that the “madman” they’d been covering for was actually a very sick young man who did things he feels guilty about, but who also knows that he had no more control over the doing of those things than a cancer patient has over the state of his lymph nodes.