bipolar and compulsive lying — 1 investigation

dave is on speaker about a wire that did not happen. mom murmurs from her extension about her tests. bipolar and compulsive lying, the search proposed, as if a mood and a math problem belonged in the same shopping cart. the call i ducked earlier is still ringing inside my head. toilet paper roll goes UNDER, noted.

i opened a tab to write this from my desk at 12:14pm on a friday. carla is in an all-hands on the third floor with the door closed and a printed agenda visible through the window, which is a kind of weather report — the agenda has nine items, so i have, give or take, ninety minutes before she walks back past with that small look she does when she is reading the back of someone’s slide.

i’m not here to write a clinical anything. i decline the manual. i decline the bullet points. what i have is an open browser, a search bar that thought a mood and a behavior were a matched pair, and a mild headache the shape of the call i did not pick up at 7:14am.

i’m going to do this carefully because the search box is a careless instrument and i’d like, for one investigation, to not match its energy. the pillar i set up earlier on what makes a person actually a liar in the strict sense stands as the spine here, and this longtail post is a side door to it, not a replacement.

1. bipolar and compulsive lying, the careful table

the table is the only honest part of this post, and even the table is partial. i’m putting it here because tables, unlike paragraphs, refuse to slip into a soothing voice. they sit there. they have edges. they’re harder to lie with.

the table is, by design, three rows of refusal and one row of permission. i can roll my eyes at a search bar from a desk. i cannot, from the same desk, decide that someone who lies a lot is in a mood-state, or that someone in a mood-state is therefore lying. those are different jobs. one of them is mine.

2. why i decline the medical comparison cleanly

here is the move i am refusing to make: take a clinical word, take a behavior word, set them next to each other, and let the headline do the work. the search bar invited me to do exactly that and i’m declining at the door.

i have read, in the way a person at a desk reads, that some shows treat the mood word as a personality trait you can wear like a coat. the 2012 film with the dance contest and the diner scene made a whole movie out of it, more carefully than most. that movie is a movie. it is not a textbook. i would like to be the kind of person who remembers the difference at the moment of typing, and not after.

compulsive lying, on its own and without the mood word stapled to it, is a thing that exists in human conversation and i have an opinion on it; i wrote a separate file on what compulsive lying actually looks like at close range. that’s the right room for that conversation. this room is for the shopping-cart problem, the one where someone shoved two unrelated items together and walked off.

i’m going to keep saying the focus phrase in this post — bipolar and compulsive lying, bipolar and compulsive lying — because that is what brought you in, and because i want the phrase to sit on the page in plain sight while i do the small and unsexy thing of pulling it apart.

3. dave called, mom called, neither asked the doctor’s question

so. dave called at 7:18am about a wire that did not happen, which is, as wires go, a very dave wire. dave is on the speaker because i was washing a coffee mug and dave does not require eye contact, only acknowledgement. dave said the wire was “in motion”. in motion is, in dave’s vocabulary, a word that means stationary. dave still owes me three hundred. nobody on the call mentioned the three hundred. that is a kind of compulsive omission we have agreed on, dave and i, like roommates agreeing not to talk about whose turn it is to buy paper towels.

then mom called from her extension because mom believes in extensions. it was sunday morning her time, and on a sunday she has a list. the list this sunday was: her tests, the neighbor’s mailbox, a casserole that “set up wrong”, and the question she always asks at the end which is “are you eating”. i said yes. i had eaten an apple and a piece of toast that was, in cardboard terms, on the firm side. i told her i had eaten “some breakfast”. the words were accurate. the picture in her head from the words was not. that is a small lie. it is, on this thursday, my third small lie before lunch.

here’s the thing — at no point in either call did anybody ask the doctor’s question. nobody said “and how have you been sleeping for the last two weeks”. nobody said “have you noticed your speed-of-talking change”. the doctor’s question is a different category. dave and mom were doing the friend question and the mother question. the doctor’s question lives in a doctor’s office, asked by a person who has met you twice already and has notes.

this is what i mean by declining the comparison. the search bar tried to put me in the doctor’s chair and i’m declining the chair. i am sitting in the friend chair, with the speakerphone, with mom’s extension, with dave’s wire that did not happen, and the work from this chair is a different and smaller work.

4. the small lies that survive every mood

the small lies survive everything. the small lies are the wd-40 of the working week. they show up in good weeks, bad weeks, flat weeks. they are not, in any sensible reading, a symptom of anything except being a person who has things to do and forty seconds in which to do them.

a partial list, only from this week:

1. monday. landlord asked if the kitchen was “behaving”. it was not behaving. i said “mostly”, which was the only word i had time for. small lie of texture. cost: zero. value: forty minutes saved.
2. wednesday. a colleague asked if i had “looped in” a person i had not looped in. i said “i was about to”, which was true at the moment of speech and untrue forty seconds before. that is the strangest rung of the small-lie ladder, the one where a sentence becomes true the second you say it.
3. thursday, 9:42am. dave’s wire. i said “great” four times. each “great” was a lie. each “great” was also, in a small way, a kindness — dave needed the grease, i had grease.
4. thursday, 12:14pm. mom asked about breakfast. apple, firm toast, “some breakfast”. priority lie, not a moral one. a longer answer would have cost both of us a sunday afternoon.

none of these belong in a doctor’s office. none of these belong in a search box that asked about bipolar and compulsive lying as if the two were a combo meal. these are small lies of an ordinary thursday, told by a guy with a desk, a meeting calendar, and a microwave he is on first-name terms with.

5. the desk where i did not draw a conclusion

the desk is the wrong place to draw the conclusion the search wanted. that’s the whole post in one sentence, but i’ll spread it out because i’m being paid in clicks rather than wisdom.

the desk has, on it, this morning: a coffee that has gone the way coffees go around minute thirty, a notebook with two pages of nothing useful, a phone face-down because the phone is part of the problem, the seventh microwave in my life is across the kitchen behind a closed door (this is the seventh microwave; the previous six died in interesting ways i will not relitigate today), and the third yoga mat, mentally, is still under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving, definitely not being used as designed.

none of those objects, lined up in a row, have the authority to draw a clinical conclusion. they have the authority to draw a small one, which is: when a search bar offers you a combo of a mood word and a behavior word, you can decline. you can say, like a man at a deli refusing the upsell, “no, just the one thing, thank you”. the upsell is the diagnosis. the one thing is the table from section one, with its three rows of refusal.

i did not, today, look up bipolar and compulsive lying on any site that uses the word “literature” out loud. i am, in this post, the man at the desk, refusing the upsell, drinking a coffee that is going off, looking at a closed kitchen door, behind which the seventh microwave is keeping its own counsel.

6. verdict, the table is incomplete, on purpose

so. the table in section one has four rows. it could have had forty. i kept it short on purpose. a long table would start to look like a manual, and a manual i am not. you came in on the search “bipolar and compulsive lying” and i am sending you out with the same phrase, the same two words on either side of an “and”, and a small request that you treat the “and” with suspicion.

this isn’t dumb of you to have searched, by the way — the dumb in the situation is the box’s, not yours, which is why the small chart on where ordinary dumb thinking actually lives in a regular week belongs in the conversation here. the box rewards the click; you only paid attention. those are different jobs.

if a person you love is going through a mood thing, they need a person with a degree, not a person with a desk. if a person you love lies a lot, you need to keep your own receipts and decide, on a calendar of your choosing, what you can carry. those are different problems with different people in the room.

the verdict, which is overstating it, is: the search bar offered me a duplex; i bought the smaller of the two units and rented out the louder one to no one. on this thursday at the desk, with carla still in the all-hands and the agenda visibly ongoing, that’s the only conclusion that fits inside the time i have.

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