CORA’S BREAKFAST AND LUNCH IN TORONTO . . . 1:00 p.m.

French toast and sausage with tea for Alice. Spinach and Cheddar Crepomlette with coffee for me.

THE CONVERSATION

Alice is a pseudonym that will most likely be outgrown. As the woman behind it continues to learn about herself and her life with bipolar disorder, she hopes to eventually reveal her true identity on her blog Alice in Bipolarland.

The blog Alice began this month speaks so eloquently to who she is that it seems contrived to be writing about her. Her own writing sears with honesty and smacks of the bravery required to share even a glimpse of who you are with the rest of the world. It is work that anyone else would be proud to put their name on, but it is not so simple.

Not everyone wants to have their name associated with a mental illness. And while the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was somewhat of a relief, all these years later Alice is using her blog to try to untangle who she is as a person from whom she is as a person living with bipolar disorder.

Alice says that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder helped her “to know that [she] wasn’t being selfish or letting [her]self be in a mood.”  She remembers a cousin she only saw at Christmases saying, “All those times in the past, I just sort of thought you were being a bitch. I understand now.”

There is still a lot that Alice herself is trying to understand. She continues to work with her doctor to find medication that is effective, after first naively hoping and then ill advisedly trying to live without it. She continues to chart her moods in an effort to understand her triggers and make the best possible choices about how to manage her life.

Alice is unsure where she fits among those who have bipolar disorder. Much of the writing she has read focuses on people who are less able to function with their bipolar disorder than she is. Alice is able to pay her rent, maintain steady employment and enjoy long lasting friendships.

But she has not forgotten that, “The thing that scared me the most was knowing that it was not something that you could cure. It was going to affect every part of my life, forever.”

Her blog highlights many of those effects and represents her perspective on how to manage life with the disorder. Alice is at a point where she admits, “I understand the illness. I’m only just understanding myself in it.

She adds, “I realized that I hide behind it a lot. I take for granted that it’s something that happens to me. I don’t really delve into it or take responsibility for my emotions the way I should. Putting it on the Internet makes me responsible to other people.”

Those who know Alice would not be surprised that she explains, “I’d rather help someone than be helped myself.” She is still haunted by the look on her parents’ faces when they came to see her at the hospital after a suicide attempt. While they want to understand, she struggles with the fact that they have given her the life she at one point tried to end.

Though she is in a better place now, Alice has a very hard time picturing the future. It is hard to make plans too far in advance because she simply does not know how she will feel when the time comes. She knows she is a writer and that she has friends and family that love her. She dreams of having a family of her own and has written a list of things to do before her thirtieth birthday next year.

Not one to minimize her illness, it is still hard for anyone who meets Alice to accept a world that would limit her possibilities because she is living with bipolar disorder. She wants the same things we all want: “to be happy, to be settled in a good job and to be in a healthy relationship.”

She also wants to help others understand bipolar disorder and take responsibility for her own life. Before she turns thirty, she plans to lie in a field of flowers and dance on a rooftop.

These are neither salves for depression, nor the whims of mania. They are the hopes of a bright young woman coming into her own.  Not only can she do these things, she is doing them with the hope that if not today, maybe tomorrow. It is a brave way of living who she is.

STILL DIGESTING

Alice fully admits that she doesn’t like talking about her illness. It is still difficult to discuss with her parents despite the fact that they want to understand. They don’t even know about her blog yet.

So it is a privilege that Alice would talk with me. She is a compelling woman both in writing and in person. Fully aware that she can alternately put on a happy face or isolate herself to protect others from seeing the severity of her moods, I trust that someone who is looking as fearlessly into themselves as she is will find something real.

Alice writes and speaks of herself with the critical eye of one who needs answers and knows that she must make her own.  In my struggle to write about someone who can so clearly write about themselves, I had a chance to peel back another layer of what sustains us.

This project is really about reflecting back to people the impact they are having. I have already written about how closely I have had to look at myself through this process and a number of readers have shared their own reflections. I am not sure if I have written clearly enough about the impact the people I eat with make without realizing it.

Alice is extraordinary, even though she does not know it yet. Her power lies not in the happy face she can put on, but in who she really is when she lets it down. In a world where journalists are often encouraged to expose people, it is a true privilege to be a writer who documents people exposing themselves.

There is a power in who we are and when we take responsibility for that power, we are indeed impactful.  The fact is that the tough stuff is what we transform into the best of who we are. Alice is not bipolar disorder, but she is using the fact that she has it to understand herself and approach others with more sensitivity.

We spoke about the difficulty friends, family, colleagues and even some professionals have knowing how to address people who are struggling beneath the rather impersonal diagnoses and issues that plague so many. Whether we write about ourselves, read about others or simply enjoy all the conversations in between, there is more to us than the labels we use to understand and ultimately transform what ails us.

For Alice, like most of us, it is the company of a friend who is comfortable saying nothing at all that provides the greatest comfort.  When we say nothing at all, whether we sit alone or in company, we’d do well to take a moment to be amazed by the courage it takes to be human and to consider the fact that we all have it.