Upon discharge from the IMH, the psychiatrist said dismissively, addressing my parents, “Tell her to get an easy job.” That must have hurt my parents, having supported me through years of law school, a degree that was difficult, but that I still graduated with. I thought of the people he was referring to: people who clean tables, who work at Mcdonald’s, who deliver food. They don’t have easy jobs. Every job is hard. And I wasn’t about to give up on my ambition to be a novelist just because I have bipolar.

I am not disabled. I have a condition that is difficult to manage, but not impossible. As a writer, I looked at it as a twisted blessing. What better condition could I order from the kingdom of plausible sickness, than one which afforded me the ability to feel the hopelessness of millions, as well as the grandiosity of millions? What condition could be more funny than one which convinces you one minute that life is everything, and the next that life is nothing?

Of course, the stories of my manic episodes are funny; cocktail dinner party anecdotes. But the reality is that they did not take place in fiction, but in the real world; in my real life, with people who were worried sick and stressed out trying to take care of me.

There is a term for people grieving the ones they love, who haven’t passed away, but have lost their presence of mind due to dementia or mental illness. That term is “ambiguous loss”. This is what my family has gone through, and what my closest friends have witnessed. Even after I moved back home and was living with my family, it was as if I had died: the daughter, the sister that they knew was gone, and some stranger’s soul had taken over my body by force, yelling at them that it was all their fault I was this way, that they were bad parents, that I didn’t belong with them but back on the streets of San Francisco, with my real family. Lacking the ability to be responsible for myself, I blamed everything on them: all my unhappiness and all my failures.

My cinematography mentor in Los Angeles said this. At the end of a good movie, everybody is wrong. This is true here, in this story.

My parents had insanely high expectations of me, and I reacted childishly by being reckless with my life, being careless about my education, acting completely antithetical to the daughter they wanted me to be. They wanted me to be polite and caring, and I was rude and aggressive. They wanted me to have a successful career, and I picked fights at every full-time corporate gig I got, until I got fired, or was asked to resign. They wanted me to get married and have children, and I turned down every marriage proposal without considering it.

At the end, we were all wrong, and we were all fine. At the end, we were all trying our best in the throes of the brutal sickness. And at the end, they were the ones who loved me courageously through the long haul. Who while fighting with me, were fighting for me. This proof of unconditional love was a holy truth. And now, my gratitude and redemption manifests in my efforts to take care of them as they near retirement age. One can repent without being guilty. My bipolar condition isn’t my fault, but now with insight into my behaviour during episodes, I can take responsibility for the things I say, the way I act.