Bipolar Cycles and COVID-19 Has Made Me Miss My Friends Checking In

I am blessed with many friends, online and off, who are as dear to me as anyone can be. We have laughed together, cried together, eaten together, danced together, sung together, joked together, mourned together and loved together.

• What is Bipolar disorder?

Now that I’m back in my bipolar disorder cycles of depression and hypomania, hurtling around like a marble in a shoebox, I haven’t heard from any of them.

A lot of the contact I have with friends is on Facebook, and I have almost entirely stopped posting, replying or otherwise interacting there. No one seems to have noticed. At least no one has called or IMed to check on me.

Am I ghosting them? No, because I don’t want the relationships to end. In fact, I very much want them to continue. My scattered moods, primarily depression, have sapped my ability to reach out. It may be that they assume since I post my blogs every Sunday, I am all right.

I desperately want someone to reach out to me. I feel this is selfish and childish and unworthy. If I want human contact, I should be able to reach out and initiate it myself. But I haven’t been able to. Between the exhaustion of depression and the exhaustion of hypomania, it’s difficult to make any kind of effort.

The memes say that if you have a depressed friend, reach out to them, even when they can’t reach back. And there have been times when my excellent friends did that, back when I had been in the Pit of Despair. And they kept reaching, even when I didn’t respond.

I guess I miss those days — not the Pit of Despair, but the little parachutes of care that rained down and demanded nothing. The phone calls “just to check in” or to distract, the invitations that I was never going to be able to make myself go to or reciprocate, the awful jokes that I might not even be able to laugh at.

I understand that everyone is fighting their own battles these days, with isolation, anxiety, panic and other reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the vaccines, the separated families. Mental health struggles, especially including depression and anxiety, are spreading to people who have never experienced them before. A lot of people are suffering, and a lot of people don’t know what, if anything, they can do about it. People have had to resort to Zoom weddings and funerals and outside-the-window visits to relatives in nursing homes.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I have been so relatively stable and functional for so long now. I made it through a tornado and a year of home dislocation and all the associated disruptions and bureaucracy without having one of my famous meltdowns. So, now, when even I have not been expecting or experiencing any psychological trauma to speak of, it’s easy to understand that no one else has seen it or noticed.

Then there’s my husband. He is my rock, my caregiver, my emotional support. Ordinarily, he takes up most of the slack in making me feel seen and heard and cared for. But unfortunately, he is having depression and anxiety of his own right now. He has recently had health problems, has changed jobs, and has physically strenuous activities he must complete within a deadline. Of course, he is reacting with depression and anxiety of his own. And when both of us are depressed and anxious at the same time, it’s not pretty. We don’t have enough psychic stamina to help ourselves, much less each other.

So, I understand why it isn’t happening. But I miss the check-ins I’m not getting. The calls that don’t come. The personal long-distance reach-in. The wave from outside the window.

I’m not quite to the point of, “Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I guess I’ll go eat some worms.” But close.