I used to be a whiz at introducing myself. I was wanton and indiscriminate with my business card, laying it on everybody I met. "Terri L. Cheney, Esq./Attorney At Law," it read, and that "Esquire" meant everything to me. It was my passport to the normal world, where people didn't battle nameless shrieking demons in their heads and fight an ongoing war against ever-shifting, ever-treacherous moods. Lawyers are presumptively sane - or at least, presumptively functional. Armed with that card, I could meet anyone, and no one would ever guess what was really going on inside me.
I was an entertainment litigator for many years, representing the likes of Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and major motion picture studios. It was a perfect cover and I played it to the hilt: careful clothes, careful hair, studied smile. I worked on poise in the mirror. Sound strange? It was necessary, because I never knew when I'd fall spectacularly apart and have to rely on my façade to get me through.
I knew way too much about facades. I'd been covering up for my erratic behavior - extreme bouts of despair, followed by wild spurts of exuberance - ever since I was a little girl. But it wasn't until I was thirty-four years old, in 1994, that I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I told no one: not my friends, my coworkers, no one. I was certain I would lose my job and be ostracized if I dared to breathe a word. So I lied, I pretended, I swallowed the truth. But my illness was growing stronger each year, and it became harder and harder to hide.
Then my father died in 1997, and I was hit by a hurricane-force depression. Suicide was all I could think about, and after I tried it - twice, the second time bloodier than the first - I finally agreed to be hospitalized. The doctors tried hard to help, but like so many of the patients, I couldn't verbalize my symptoms. I had no vocabulary for what was wrong with me, because depression is one long, inarticulate howl. Frustrated, I turned at last to writing - not for publication, but to salvage my own life. Word by clumsy word, my fractured past gradually began to come together. Seven years later, I realized that I had written a book.
Manic was published in 2008, which was wonderful and thrilling and what more could anyone ask for - except that now I was officially outed. When you write a memoir called Manic, it's pretty hard to pretend that you're not bipolar. I had no idea how my story would be received. I'd done things under the influence of my illness that I wasn't very proud of: seductions, betrayals, a stint in jail . . . It wasn't always pretty, and it certainly didn't fit with the neat, shiny exterior I'd spent my whole life trying to preserve.
I expected censure, stigma - anything but what actually happened. I was inundated by emails from around the world. Total strangers came up to me at readings and hugged me, applauding my courage and telling me their own stories. The solicitude and compassion have been simply overwhelming. It seems to me that there is a tremendous curiosity about bipolar disorder right now, and the time is ripe for disclosure.
I threw away my old business cards and had new ones printed up. With just my name on them. No more "Esquire." No more façade.
It's a strange new world. I make eye contact now when I'm introduced.
