Your expectation of being misunderstood, where does that come from, do you think?

Does that expectation relate to your diagnosis or traits?

It’s a learned expectation. Perception and communication are important to bipolar criteria and, in a different way, are central to autism criteria too. I think the high likelihood of misunderstanding and being misunderstood is built into both diagnoses, by definition.

 

Could you say a bit more about you experience with bipolar and writing? I am especially interested in perception and communication that you mention.

If you can hear and see things other people aren’t hearing and seeing, or you’re experiencing a delusion, or your emotional reactions seem disproportionate, then you’re also regularly encountering people who don’t find you intelligible. You aren’t even necessarily intelligible to yourself; maybe you’re “double bookkeeping”, behaving in a way that doesn’t match your patterns of thought and feeling. I’ve never been able to write during a bipolar episode, so to the extent being bipolar does influence my creative interests or style, it’s always during recovery. In my experience it’s relatively straightforward to interest commissioning editors in writing on depression, anxiety, trauma – but not psychosis. There isn’t stigma attached to the bipolar label per se, but any psychotic symptoms aren’t considered “relatable”. That’s a limitation on how possible it is to overcome misunderstanding through literature, quite separate from what can be done creatively to build empathy.

 

Sometimes I hear authors describe their writing process as a kind of madness and I’m never quite sure whether that’s an opportunity for peer connection or not. For instance, it’s very common to hear novelists describe how their characters started talking to them as if they had an independent existence. The novelist “hears” their characters’ voices and is forced off-plan. I sometimes want to ask, “wait, are you being whimsical, or do you actually hallucinate?” As a metaphor it pulls me short, because when I hear voices as an auditory hallucination, it doesn’t feel anything like the experience of inventing fictional characters.  Those two things feel very different to me, although I am curious about other mad writers who feel an overlap. There is this Romantic tradition of associating madness with creativity, and older classical ideas of being visited by the muse, which I don’t identify with very much. 

 

When you write in what way do you change your expression? Does it depend on what you are writing?

It does, and there’s a degree of this which I think is just entirely regular writing practice – when I write fiction, I draw up style sheets for each project covering vocabulary, syntax, and tone, and I treat those as part and parcel of world building. That’s quite a common approach for writers of all neurotypes, as far as I’m aware, although I wonder if it suits me well because the rules are very clear; they can be taught and learnt explicitly. I felt the same way as a copywriter, when I’d have to adopt whichever house style the client asked for. 

 

The changes I make also depend on who else is involved in publishing my work. On that front I’ve had great experiences, and also fraught, miserable ones. 

 

What are the differences between your “authentic” expression and that which you tend to write in? I’m interested in this – is there not something of you in that writing, even though you have re-worked to suit an audience? Why do you feel that this an uncomfortable compromise? 

One of my clinical psychologists once observed that I have better than average declarative knowledge of how people act around each other, but my procedural knowledge is worse. 

 

For instance, I’m very bad at flirting – but I can give an excellent verbal description of all the different microgestures made by someone flirting, stage by stage. Meanwhile, a confident flirt might struggle to explain how it was done. When I’m writing, I can describe certain kinds of relating without an implicit understanding of how to do it in real life. I actually like the challenge of working that way, and I like getting praised for a good job, when I’m lucky enough to move a reader. It’s just there is a strangeness to hearing I’ve depicted something beautifully when I’m on the outside of it. I don’t think it’s an uncomfortable compromise, exactly. I’d call it a dissonance. 

 

I do get rewards and enjoyment from exercising that declarative approach in fiction, which complicates any clear dividing line between authentic and inauthentic expression. And all my books also contain material I have implicit understanding of – they’re a mixture – although it causes a different kind of dissonance when the parts I identify with more directly attract the most reader puzzlement.

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What is the reason, do you think, that your mode of communication, whether written or spoken is “detail orientated, information heavy” as you put it? 

If I’m trying to render experience on the page, and I’m very specific describing clothing or architectural features or anything else, that’s because the same level of detail is constitutive of day-to-day perception for me. I’m good with patterns and explicit rules, so coherent arrangement per se isn’t usually a problem in my speech or writing, even at my most intensely detailed.

 

Writing advice along the lines of “cut whatever readers skip to get to the action” used to dismay me. I know it’s really a point about pacing, but I enjoy reading detailed description on its own terms, presumably at greater length than is usual. I do wonder whether received wisdom on when and where to cut description invokes a particular perceptual baseline that I’m out of step with. Novelists can defy expectations for literary experiment or, in my corner of upmarket commercial fiction, to give voice to a quirky narrator; but I think that points to unequal burdens of justification, where the typical is regarded as the natural – as something that gets to just be rather than requires explanation.

 

When I say I expect to be misunderstood, I’m not limiting that to manner of expression. Rather, I think there’s a possibility of two-way empathy problems, and different respective experiences that shape how my communication lands.  I remember once – this isn’t an example from novel writing, but life writing I suppose – I was invited to a diary event, where people exhumed their teenage diaries to laugh at their adolescent melodrama. After looking through my own old diaries I declined. For instance, there were pages and pages where I described roll-on roll-off ferries, which I knew wouldn’t fit the vibe. As descriptions they were perfectly clear, and in the abstract, I can see how they might be amusing too, but people would have been puzzled at why I’d written such a thing, I think.

 

These are traits that might fit a diagnosis, or might be explicable in terms of personal history, or both. In the drive for content, social media amplifies over-certain claims about this or that thing being related to neurotype, so I try to hold any connections lightly, and with curiosity.