Is This Recovery — or Is This the Illness?

How to tell your drive from your disorder when they’re wearing the same outfit.

You're doing great. Finally!

The calendar is full. The thing you made is working! You’ve gone viral!

That one Substack note got 1000 likes!

You're saying yes to everything and delivering on most of it, and people keep telling you how good you seem. How energized. How productive. How completely unlike the version of you from two years ago who couldn't get off the couch.

But…perhaps…somewhere underneath all of it, something very quiet in you is whispering “this isn't wellness.”

But you can't prove it. Because from the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, it looks exactly like your dreams coming true.

If you have the kind of brain I have, you know this ambiguity. It might be the hardest question my particular wiring (a brain that spins non stop) ever asks me, and it asks at the worst possible time, mid-show:

“Is this recovery? Or is this the illness, doing its best impression of recovery?”

I've now learned twice, the hard way, which is apparently the number of times I need to learn things: momentum can impersonate recovery.

For those of us with bipolar wiring or adjacent mood disorders (I have a touch of it, type II to be exact), the feeling of finally becoming the person I was always trying to be is sometimes health. And sometimes it's hypomania in health's clothing, running your life at a speed your body never agreed to. The cruelest part is that it doesn't feel like a symptom. It feels like you’ve arrived. And that’s confusing.🫤

Let me tell you how I found out. Again.

Somewhere in the last year, without quite realizing it, I slipped into what now feels like a hypomanic episode. The momentum felt like recovery. The relentless scheduling felt like finally, finally becoming the person I was always trying to be.

I have written a solo show about falling apart and getting better, about using my writing to save me, about it working. And the show kept growing, the way good things do when you pour everything into them. It found an audience. It found a life of its own.

And I kept feeding it.

What I didn't see was that I was feeding it with pieces of myself I didn't actually have to spare.

I wrote a show about being sick. And the show made me sick. And I performed the show while getting sicker. And the audience gave me a standing ovation. And I stood there in my body, which had just been through something genuinely frightening, (a panic attack and a puking episode off stage mid show) and I smiled.

I hit a breaking point and canceled the two remaining shows. A thing I do not do.

But I was afraid this might put me in the hospital. So I cancelled.😞

There's a longer, truer version of this story. It involves a night I threw up in the middle of my own solo show, and I've written a monologue about it that I'll release here soon(ish). There's also more to say about why I got so sick in the first place, some of it involving things that were happening behind the scenes, including with my director. I'm not ready to write about that part yet. But I will be.

For now, the useful question: how do you tell them apart?

Here's how I understand it based on lots of experts.

Real recovery and hypomania both produce energy, output, and optimism.

On the level of productivity they're nearly identical, which is why it’s hard to spot. The difference shows up somewhere else: in how each one responds to rest.

Have you noticed a lot of books about rest lately? I have.

I don’t love rest, but I’ve come to appreciate it, and understand it’s necessary.

Recovery can survive a pause. It might not love one (ambitious people never fully love pausing), but it can tolerate a day off without treating it as a crisis.

Hypomania does not like it one bit.

It’s kryptonite is the pause…”if I stop, I'll lose everything. If I'm sick enough to cancel, I shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the rest.”

I said that exact sentence to my husband.

The momentum isn't serving you.

You're serving it.

And it will spend you down to the last piece you didn't have to spare, applauding the whole fricking time.

So here's the test: schedule a deliberate pause, and watch your reaction to it. Not the pause itself. Your reaction to the pause.

Calm, even reluctant acceptance? Probably drive.

Panic, guilt, bargaining, a sudden list of nineteen reasons the pause is irresponsible?

I don't always know which one I'm in. I'm not sure I'm ever supposed to know with certainty.

There's a little mystery to this wiring, and I've made some peace with not finding out the ending. I’m more interesting that way and I have more to write about.

Tragedy + Time= Comedy, ya know.

The practice for today comes from my dad, the late great Larry Bell.

When he turned 50, he had each of us kids and my mom write him letters. He took them to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite and read them up there, alone. He had eight more years to live. I like to think his wisest self was asking him to stop and connect before there was no more time. I like to think nature whispers to us, and he tuned in.

Mine has been whispering to me too. I've been performing right through it. My entire life, honestly.

So here's what I'm doing now, now that I’ve hit my 50th birthday, and what I hand you: put rest on the calendar in the same ink as the shows and performances and major presentations of big projects.

Booked with the exact seriousness of a performance, because that's the only seriousness people like us respect.

And here's the rule that makes it work. You would never cancel a show for a rest. The practice is refusing to cancel a rest for a show. That's it. That's the whole discipline. If the thought of protecting that block makes something in you start bargaining... well. Now you have your test result too.

After I canceled the second show, my husband took care of me. Chicken and rice from the Thai place down the street. A slow walk with no agenda. Handmade lime sorbet. Mint tea. He reminded me I didn't need to write anyone back. And slowly, in that quiet, pieces of me started returning. Not all of them. But enough.

It feels like I've cycled back to where I was six years ago. But I know, in the part of me that is wiser and quieter and doesn't perform for anyone, that I haven't gone backward. I've just found a new edge of myself I didn't know was there. Now I know where it is. Now I can be a little more careful with it.

We are always growing. Each day a new chance to become.

I can only breathe. Look around.

And begin again, more gently this time.

But Jesus, it’s hard.