This is a story, a story that is difficult to tell. It’s about man, a woman, two children—a girl age 9—a boy age 6 ½. It’s about how this man and this woman came to each other, came to love one another, came to have children they loved and adored as deep as deep can be.
It’s about how this man and this woman eventually grew apart, even while living in the same house and then living in separate houses.
It’s a story too true and too hard to capture in mere words and sentences. It’s a story about loss and grief. It’s a story about mental illness.
This story is about understanding too late and tremendous guilt. It’s about sorrow and sorrys that again and again amount to nothing. It’s about apart and endings that never end.
This is a story about a man who was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder in his third decade but never accepted it. Didn’t trust doctors, didn’t believe their opinions and tests. A man who walked away from this diagnosis mostly because he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand.
It’s about a man who pretended that he was above mental illness. Who didn’t want to accept it. Who believed that a mental illness was just another failure in his life.
This is about the same man who hid behind the facade of self-medicating. Who became an addict. Who realized too late that he needed help.
It’s about a man who, while getting help, finally accepted his damaged life, accepted his addiction and left it behind. A man who realized how many years he had lost and how many people he had hurt.
This is a story about a man and fear. A man whose beaten up childhood left wounds too long untreated and not understood for too many decades. Scars that may never truly heal but make sense in his life and actions.
A man who took the legacy of parenting left to him and turned it 180 degrees. A man who became so worried and convinced in dark nightmares that he would visit the same experiences of his childhood on his children that he scattered. Thought that no father was better than the father he grew up with.
This story is about a man who out of love so wondrous and fulfilling—a love he was convinced didn’t exist—turned his back on the only truly good thing he had added to this world. A man who knows today he paid an enormous price in the delusion of protecting his children. Who wishes he could reshape time, take what he knows now about his difficult journey, diminished self-esteem to the moment he decided that the only option was to leave.
This is a story about a man who dearly loves his children and regrets to the marrow of bones any hurt he has caused them. Whose fear of life drove him away from a potentially beautiful life.
A man who ran as a sacrifice to his children, who didn’t comprehend the cogs and gears of his mind, how it differed because of a disease. A man who for many years was cast away, floating on an empty sea.
This is a story about a man and failure. This is about a man gone, a woman strong, two children—a girl now 17—a boy now 15. About the passage of time and how the man looks at clocks but knows he can never go back.
This story is true.
bipolar circus 