It’s Not a Four Letter Word
The First Step: Breaking the Silence
The most difficult part of my journey with bipolar disorder wasn't the diagnosis or the medication; it was the terrifying, paralyzing act of simply asking for help. It sounds like a cliché because we hear it so often, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly: men are conditioned from boyhood to ignore their internal weather. We are taught that stoicism is survival, that feelings are something to be conquered or buried, not shared. For years, I wore that silence like armor, believing that to admit I was struggling was to admit I was broken. That silence is a heavy, suffocating weight, and it is the primary reason why so many of us, including friends I have lost, find ourselves isolated in a crowded room, unable to bridge the gap between our pain and the hand reaching out to help us.
Consider the instinct for physical survival. If you were thrown into deep water and felt your lungs burning for air, you wouldn’t politely wonder if you were making a scene; you would flail, you would kick, and you would scream until someone pulled you out. If you woke up to the smell of smoke and saw flames licking up the walls of your house, your natural inclination would be to scream for help immediately. You wouldn't wait until the roof collapsed to decide the situation was serious. In those moments, the body knows that survival depends on making noise, on alerting the world that you are in danger. We accept this for the physical body, yet when the mind is drowning or the soul is on fire, we convince ourselves to stay quiet.
We have to dismantle the lie that an emergency must be visible to be valid. A crisis doesn't need to look like a car wreck or a burning building to require immediate intervention; sometimes the most dangerous fires are the ones burning where no one else can see them. Asking for help is not a resignation of strength; it is the mental equivalent of flailing in the water. It is the survival instinct kicking in against the conditioning that tells us to sink quietly. It doesn't have to be an apparent emergency to the outside world for it to be critical to you. Recognizing that my internal house was on fire was the first step; screaming for a bucket of water was the second, and it is the only reason I am here to tell the story today.
