Loving While Living With Mental Illness

And being loved, too.

Over lunch the other day, a friend and I were comparing concerns. We live with similar co-occurring mental health issues—general anxiety, bipolar disorder, and ADHD, most notably—and find solace in laughing freely about the ridiculous trappings of it all.

“A lot of times,” he said, “I can’t tell what’s being bipolar and what’s just…like, low blood sugar.”

Oof. I feel that. Or, I guess, it’s more accurate to say that I don’t know how it feels to not feel that.

My partner of (nearly, he reminded me last week) five years likens a relationship to “a hall of mirrors,” referring to the way that they reflect on us as much as our partners, magnifying us and creating confusion about where each individual begins and ends.

But when you’re also a person who is, we say politely, non-neurotypical, it’s easy to become fixated on your own reflection, trying to determine what’s you and what’s your disorder or ailment. Like Narcissus, we may even fall in—not out of self-love, but out of self-loathing, or a deep, powerful desire to parse our “real” selves from the parts of our brain that don’t quite work right.

All relationships are difficult, because human beings are difficult and we’re pretty terrible at talking to each other or…