What it Takes to Be the Non
Living with a personality disorder: yours, mine, the small stuff, the big stuff
I.
Personality disorders are hard to think about when you’ve never lived with one. The notion that individuals cannot always be held responsible for their actions goes against some of our very deepest programming. After all we are social creatures and if we can’t regulate behaviour by shaming or punishing people into compliance, how can we prevent the apes from turning on each other?
In 1906 a journalist was quoted saying, “There are only 9 meals between mankind and anarchy.” He was later parroted by Lenin and Trotsky who reduced it to 3 square meals because they had a point to make. But how many mental breakdowns does it take?
I am 34 years old and I’m expecting the apocalypse any minute now.
II.
I wake up to a garbled message from my mother on my mobile phone. The message is delivered in the calm voice of a shellshock victim, the recording padded with small words that trigger a rising panic in my chest: fell over, hospital, cold, help, lost a shoe.
Ma is bipolar, diabetic, 70 years of age, hard-headed, and proud. Her body is just this side of atrophied due to spending up to 20 hours a day in bed during depressive episodes. I’ve agreed to move into my parents’ flat to babysit her for two weeks while my father is travelling on business. When Ma is manic, I can barely keep up, but she’s in a depression cycle right now, so this should be easy-mode.
T’inquiète, je gère, I told Papa. I got this.
The moment I arrived, Ma flipped the switch to full-blown mania.
III.
Neurotypicals, AKA the Non(-Disordered), take for granted the Triple-A concept of autonomy, authority, and agency. There is a line in the sand, the red line of sanity which, once crossed, revokes your Triple-A status.
In public, we all try our very best to steer clear of that line for fear of being ridiculed, or ostracized, or sectioned. The term is revealing. It refers to a section of a UK mental health law and has this scary semantic overlap with words like excise and isolate. No one wants to be in that section.
In the domestic sphere, the red line is much farther away on the spectrum of crazy behaviour, beyond some horizon. Sometimes you don’t even see it until you’re in the thick of it. It’s staggering to imagine how much trauma results from undiagnosed and unspoken disorders playing out in the air-gapped black box of any nuclear family household: delving into online testimonials makes it pretty obvious this is a pandemic in everything but name.
But someone has to be Triple-A, if only once they leave the house for work. Otherwise who will fly the planes and wield the scalpels? Who will police the apes? Foucault would argue that the shameful secrecy of mental illness is not a bug, it’s a feature.
IV.
I leap out of bed and scramble through the deserted flat. I pull on socks, choking back tears. Her phone is going to voicemail but the front door is ajar and—Oh God—there she is, standing in the dark wearing nothing but underwear, the mobile in her hand whispering a busy dial tone.
She claims to be trying to talk to the neighbour. I peek out. Every door on the landing is closed. She had fallen over the day before and still thinks today is yesterday. She was calling the hospital but couldn’t remember the 2-digit emergency number and thought to ask the neighbours.
I was sleeping in the room next door. I can sleep through just about anything.
V.
I start shouting and it feels good. I pick up steam. I scream the way she would scream when I took a senseless risk as a kid. I barely know what I’m saying but it feels righteous. A boundary was crossed. Someone must be held accountable for causing me to feel this way. Look what you made me do.
I’m 34 years old and I’m screaming at my poor old mother at 7AM because at this rate I’m going to drop the ball and allow her to do something irreversible. It’s not an irrational fear. A few years back she tried to kill herself in this very flat while I stood there dissociating quietly. We both agreed after the fact that it wasn’t what it looked like. It was just a manic episode.
Maybe me losing my shit and berating her is exactly what PTSD looks like, or maybe it’s a totally rational reaction given the circumstances.
VI.
There is a reason that care-practitioners get depressed, suicidal, become angry at their wards, abuse them. There is a reason some people simply aren’t cut out for the job and yet, IRL, most caretakers are the conscripted friends and family of the patient. My dad taught me to be the Non and I step into his shoes when he isn’t there to wear them. I do it not by choice but with pride, because that’s just what a man does for family.
VII.
I shuffle Ma back to bed once I’ve calmed down enough to calm down the neighbours. I’m not usually awake at this ungodly hour unless I’m doing a nuit blanche, so I inspect the flat in the cold morning light.
The bathroom is a warzone. A cheap bath-powder mix has left an oily ring of red scum on the stark white porcelain and a scattering of ochre dust around a footprint. Every surface is populated with medication: bruise cream, skin lotion, salves and potions for the bits of her body that keep breaking off. I do my best to put her back together again, but I am 34 and my own body-parts are beginning to break off, too.
Her pill-box rattles as I check the contents, peering through the tiny revolving doors. The anties (AKA anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anti-epileptics, anti-histamines), the benzodiazepines, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the lithium.
I check the psychiatrist script, the latest recipe in the book, match it to the box and rattle it for luck. You had one job, I whisper.
VIII.
Ma is a Triple-A parent until a Non revokes her status. During a depressive episode, nothing matters. During a manic phase, everything is the most urgent matter and there is a lot of screaming. The middle is the sweet spot—that’s the target the meds are aiming for.
Manic episodes are a bit like a stimulant high. I can’t know this for sure, experientially, because I’m not bipolar (so far, so good) but I’ve been around people on stims and taken enough of them myself to know the overlap with clinical mania is real, because every decision you ever made is built on dopamine regulation anyway. The result is less-than-ideal executive functions. It can be an absolute nightmare à la Florida Man, or it can be a rager of a party, like the first time Ma took me clubbing when I was 13.
We defer judgement to our parents. We put our faith in them unconditionally. I used to think the raging and screaming were a measure of Ma’s love. As were the moments of euphoria. She loves fierce, like a wild animal. She loves, in fact, without measure. Love as high as the highest mountain, as deep as the deepest sea.
I am 34 years old but I was just a child when I learned that if love does not feel like an unstoppable force of nature, it probably doesn’t count as love at all.
IX.
When I started dating and living with a woman with a personality disorder (jury is still out on which one exactly), it felt like coming home. My relationship became a full-time job as the Non, revoking my partner’s Triple-A status whenever justified by the need for damage control and then, as time went by, whenever convenient.
I’m no doctor but it’s becoming pretty obvious by now that I’m the kind of guy who gets off on feeling needed by other people—a compulsive saviour. According to my “research” this is the deepest kind of insecurity. And it’s not even about the patient—it’s just me running a coding script that worked in the past: my portable, deployable safe space.
X.
There is a phrase in therapy jargon known as FOG — Fear, Obligation, Guilt. In the context of dysfunctional relationships, manipulators put you in the FOG in order to bend you to their will. The toolkit is extensive, from gaslighting to self-harm all the way to suicidal ultimatums.
The acronym is a cheat-sheet to use in the moment, like a CPR tutorial. It’s hard to know when you’re in the FOG and just as hard to know if you are the one generating it, and why. After all, parents manipulate their children with truly cold-blooded ingenuity and oftentimes, down the line, their children will thank them for it. It’s just part of the toolkit.
Maybe one answer to the asymmetry in codependent relationships is to accept that the Non isn’t really a Non in the first place.
To accept that it always takes two to tango.
To accept that I’m still not a fucking doctor and maybe I should be talking to one about the status of my Triple-A status, which may very well be a textbook case of the one-eyed leading the blind.
XI.
After the episode, on the walk to work, I call Ma to apologize. She apologizes back because we are British after all. I’m an hour late because punctuality just seems so insignificant in the face of all these unstoppable forces of nature.
I apologize for the yelling but I’m silently apologizing for the little things, too, which don’t seem big enough to say out loud. I cut her short. I keep the change. I reverse the roles whenever she tries to parent. I play dumb, which is just one of the many casual forms of gaslighting.
I do not feel guilty for doing this until Ma drops a solid, concrete block of wisdom that reminds me that I’m the kid here. I am 34 years old and every time I think I’ve figured out what parenting is supposed to look like, I get blind-sided.
XII.
I curse under my breath as I scrub the layer of rusty bath scum because it looks like the aftermath of a massacre and that can’t be good for anyone’s mental stability.
I’ve done so much research on personality disorders that I’ve come to realize there is a bit of every disorder in every single one of us. Under the veneer of maturity and adulthood, on the hidden spectrum, mental illness is the norm rather than the exception. The only ones you hear about are the ones who make a splash.
The real question is not, am I crazy, but rather, do I have too much of this crazy, or that one? Do they play well with others and, perhaps more critically, do they allow me to get shit done?
XIII.
That evening, the episode already behind us, I watch Netflix with Ma. We share a cigarette even though we both quit. I don’t pass her the joint because the meds lower her seizure threshold. That would really kill the vibe. We laugh at her memory loss, which got bad since the electroconvulsive therapy and is no laughing matter, but sometimes it really is comedy gold. When we binge on movies and shows together the fear of losing each other, be it mind or body or both, the fear at the core of most if not all human woes, feels thin and distant. When my girlfriend calls I put her on speaker so we can all share a joke together, and everything is right in the world. Papa will be home soon and I can go back to my own flat to be the Non in a relationship I seem to have chosen for that very reason.
Disordered-versus-Non makes sense, to a point, but as convenient as binary thinking might be it just doesn’t apply in the real world. Disorders do not exist in a vacuum. The line between compassion and enabling, between abuse and self-defence, between love and codependency—that line is a moving target. And when the FOG rolls in and everyone is dancing the fucking tango, that line may as well not exist at all.
All that one can do is: (A) adopt a hardline policy of radical compassion; (B) self-care in such a manner as this does not conflict with (A); and (C) pay the bills and maintain a baseline decorum of normalcy so the neighbours don’t think you’re a menace to society who needs to be sectioned.
I think this is what they call adulting. I am 40 years old and I don’t know if I meet the Triple-A standard anymore, or if I ever did, but I’ll be the Non when I have to be. Someone has to do the job. I have one good eye and a saviour complex, and while I won’t necessarily be on time or actually save anyone, I will most definitely show up. It’s the least I can do.
Wow Yann. I was moved (admittedly, to tears) absolutely loved this piece. Vulnerable and honest.
wow.