Loss: Uncertain Friendships (the difficult explanations)

This is the continuation of the previous essay.

My friends do not see our relationship as I do (good explanation).  This idea has been on my mind for several years now, a painful one to examine and an even more painful one to accept, as I must.  I have thought of these various people as friends.  It is probable, however, that they see our relationship as something different, as something warm, certainly, as something enjoyable, but as something less than friendship–perhaps casual friend might capture it?  So they are happy enough to hear from me every once in a while, but I am not, as the saying goes, on their radar, it would never occur to them to get in touch with me.  They are busy people with demanding jobs; non-working hours are carefully prioritized amongst family and close friends.  I do not fit into either category; I do not count.

The stigma of mental illness operates at a subconscious level in my friends (good explanation).  Over the last four months or so, I have been circling around this conclusion, shying away from it, trying to avoid it.  But it will not disappear. Alice does not go through all the painful mental gymnastics that I have.  She says simply, to herself, when she has announced her illness:

 “Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community.  Alice expected to be an outcast.  Even the well-intentioned and educated tended to keep a fearful distance from the mentally ill.”  Lisa Genova, Still Alice, p. 198

 At first I attributed such thoughts to only one person, a very dear relative.  At a dinner party she gave about a year ago, she and the other guest, whom I had not met previously, were both health professionals.  For a while there was not much I could contribute to the conversation, focused as it was on the impact of new health policies on their work, but at one point there was an opening for me.  I started by saying, “When I was a patient in a psychiatric unit . . .”.  Then I saw the look on my relative’s face: shame.  She was ashamed that I had bipolar disorder and that I had been hospitalized for it.  This realization explained so much of her behaviour since my diagnosis that I had not been able to understand previously.

Her friend peppered me with questions about what went on on a psychiatric unit.  Both women had worked for about thirty-five years in a hospital setting, and they had some idea of what happened on every other unit in the hospital, except the psychiatric unit.  I was appalled by their ignorance.  They were clearly surprised about how normal life was on 2 North.  I can only guess at how they had imagined the patients behaved.  But I think I did something for the cause that evening.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that part of the reason I rarely see or hear from most friends unless I initiate the contact, that part of the reason I am not invited to leisure events, is because people–even intelligent and highly educated people who comprise my social circle–subconsciously fear mental illness.  They do not understand it and they do not know how to respond to it.

For example, there are limits on what and how much my friends are willing to hear about my illness before I witness visible physical and emotional withdrawal.  They, on the other hand, can discuss their feelings and concerns in the minutest detail and there is no cause for uneasiness, because they do not have a mental illness and therefore what they are going to say is predictable and unthreatening.  But who knows how someone with a mental condition might react?

People know what to do if a friend has a serious physical condition.  They can set up a rotation of visits, supply a pot of home-made soup, pool together to hire a cleaning service or a meal delivery service, arrange get-togethers to support the friend early in the illness and later to celebrate milestones in recovery, and on and on.  I am not sure why they think that what they do for people who have other kinds of serious illness will not be appropriate for someone with a mental illness.

 * * * * * * * * *

 All this analysis proves what I already knew, that if I wish to continue having  the people I call friends in my life I have to accept that I am going to be the one to initiate contact.  I have to accept that they are not going to get in touch with me, for the reasons I elaborated above.  I have to accept that if I want reciprocity I am going to have to make new friendships.  I am just not certain that friendships made in one’s 60’s can have the depth of those made earlier in life, although clearly most of the friendships I have now are not as deep as I had thought they were.

I never felt loneliness until I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, not even during the couple of years before my diagnosis, when I was just as ill.  It seems it was not me but the diagnosis that changed everything.   Friendships, once effortless and constant, even across time zones, are now complicated and uncertain.  Bipolar disorder is painful and lonely.  Uncertainty about friendships–such an aching loss.

Loss: Uncertain Friendships (the easy explanations)

This is the first half of the essay on what happened to my friendships when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  The second half follows immediately.

For me bipolar disorder has been all about loss.  Certainly having to stop work well before retirement age was a dreadful loss for me to bear:  so much of my identity, of my feelings of self-worth and purpose, of the meaningfulness of my life, were rooted in my work.  As Alice, the main character in the novel Still Alice, so succinctly says:

 “[Alice] felt like the biggest part of her self, the part she’d praised and polished regularly on its mighty pedestal, had died.”  Lisa Genova, Still Alice, pp. 187-188

 But leaving work early also resulted in another significant loss, that of friendships, because virtually all of my friendships were developed through the workplace.  Again Alice expresses my feelings when she describes what she felt when all collegial relationships/friendships seemed to cease.

 “ . . . ignored, alienated.”  Lisa Genova, Still Alice, p. 198 

Alice is a female university professor who loves teaching as much as research; who loves the intellectual challenge of her work; who loves the variety of interactions with her Faculty colleagues and with colleagues at other universities; who actually thinks of her Faculty colleagues as family; and who is diagnosed when she is 50 years old with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease–and whose life is then turned upside down.  Much of this portrayal could describe me, except that I have never thought of my colleagues as family and that I was 52 when I was diagnosed with treatment-resistant bipolar disorder type II.  Early on-set Alzheimer’s and bipolar disorder are very different conditions, yet I saw myself reflected in many of the fictional Alice’s experiences, as the two examples above demonstrate.

There are few people in whose friendship I am confident.  With  all those whom I call friends–both those who live locally and those who live at a distance–the burden of maintaining the relationship has fallen on my shoulders.  If I did not periodically initiate communication, I do not know, I really do not know, if I ever would hear from these friends, if, in fact, we are still, or ever were, friends.  What does it mean, that I must initiate all communications?  What does that say about the state of our friendship, if our relationship can still so be called?  Do these people wish, in some hidden place, that I would stop getting in touch?  Have I, god forbid, become a nuisance?

For years now I have tried to puzzle out the answers to these questions.  (I know the simplest thing to do would be to ask them, but I do not have the fortitude for that, nor would I wish to put them on the spot that way.)  All my efforts to comprehend the situation, a most painful endeavour, have led to five possible explanations.  The first I reject.  The next two I believe may very well play some role in explaining the changed communication patterns between me and my friends; the fourth and fifth, a large role, the main role.

My friends are afraid of disturbing me when I am unwell (not a viable explanation).  Since 2005 I have been obviously high-functioning and quite capable of interacting with individuals and groups for considerable periods of time.  All my local friends have observed this.  Besides, e-mail–available to both local and long-distance friends–circumvents this fear, by allowing me to respond in my own time, whenever I am able to.  A wish not to disturb me when I am unwell may be offered as a rationale for leaving initiation of contact to me, but it does not seem a very credible one.

I am invisible in the lives of my friends (fair explanation).  In the case of friends who live locally, I no longer am physically present to them as I once was–we do not see each other in the hallways, at coffee, in Faculty and committee meetings, during our shared projects.  Thus I am invisible to them and consequently not considered when social plans are being made.  I want and need to be visible again; the only route open to me is the initiation of contacts, because no one else will do it.

My friends have experienced changes in personal and professional circumstances (fair explanation).  A few of my friends have had their duties and responsibilities at work considerably increased, and three have had major occurrences in their personal lives.  Perhaps others have experienced something similar that I do not yet know about.  Such happenings could easily have an effect on the frequency of our communications, and perhaps on who initiates them.  So, again I am the one who must make the effort to maintain the friendship if it is to be maintained.

The second half of this essay follows immediately.