The Bipolar Game

A Personal Reflection on Emptiness, Suicide, & Touch

PROLOGUE

In 2013 memoir, I shared the pain of living with a mood disorder. The content below is similar, but from a more recent time. The story feels far too personal to post online. However, the benefit that some readers may receive from the insights makes it necessary to shine light on it. So, I made a compromise and am making it available for paid subscribers who are interested in my writing in general.

The original version of this essay was composed in 2018, and it laid dormant for many months. I wasn’t even sure why I had written it. In 2019, I decided to share it with my therapist during one of our therapy sessions. As I read the essay to him, the tears and the pain reappeared. But this time the despair I had felt in 2017 was transformed into sadness and compassion.

Despair is the collapse of hope. It is not an “illness.” Rather, it is an emotional state we are all susceptible to. Social isolation can promote despair. Therefore, despair is an inability to communicate one’s inner world to another human being living in that world. If we do not have another relational body to share our understanding of the world we fall into despair.

I’ve made quite a few additions and changes to this essay since 2019, including references and more clarity around the concept of the specific “game” I was playing. When asked how we are doing—all too often—we choose to play the “I’m Fine” game. In its most extreme form, this game is one of life-and-death and leads to the psychiatric hospital, jail cell, or morgue. I chose life.

-Andrew Archer (June 30, 2025)

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Outdoors all afternoon

under a gunmetal sky

staking my garden down,

I kneeled to the crickets trilling

underfoot as if about

to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again

marveled to hear so clear

and brave a music pour

from such a small machine.

—Stanley Kunitz, Touch Me

I’M FINE

When I was really depressed and people causally asked how I was, I used to say, “I’m fine, how are you?” My suffering was concealed: if no light is shed on darkness, what remains is unseen.

It must have been a record high temperature in Minnesota one sunny weekend in February of 2017. However, the external sun rays and the heat were things I was unable to feel. Internally, the intense anxiety, despair, and depression from the previous fall and winter remained unthawed. My body was filled with both agitation and paralysis. And at the same time, I was emotionally numb. In this state of despair, all my feelings were denied, discounted, or disregarded. I just tried to present as “I’m Fine.”

On that February day, I awoke at the house of my future in-laws. Suicidal thoughts were a near constant, but I didn’t actively think, “I’m going to kill myself today.” It was a Saturday, and I presented myself to the family as normally as I could. My then infant son and I played on his floor mat in the living room as any newfound father would do. However, it took a lot of energy for me to present as if I were fine.

Years later, I realized a psychological game of mine that relates to my experience with manic depression. The thesis is that one presents themselves as “Okay” when on the inside they feel “not-Okay.” This deceptive game—I’m Fine—is tantamount to hide-and-seek or cat-and-mouse. There is a seeker and one being sought. For example, the agitation of mania distresses others and they invariably seek out the maniac and ask, “Are you okay?” This is the more sympathetic question compared to the rhetorical “What the fuck is wrong with you!” For me, the answer to either question was a false one: “I’m Fine…maybe you’re crazy.”