bipolar and pathological lying — 1 explainer, sort of

the gym sauna-only is the room least equipped for nuance, which makes it ideal for thinking about bipolar and pathological lying. the airpod, the singular, sits on the bench. parsley, you can skip. categories, you cannot. but you can, in this room, briefly, decline to make any of them apply to you.

i am at my desk, on a thursday, with carla on the third floor for a vendor walkthrough that runs to 1:38pm. forty-three minutes. people pair the two words — bipolar and pathological lying — like they are an obvious couple. they aren’t. that pairing is cultural shorthand some watercooler decided was clever, and the rest of us inherited. i’d like to put it back on the bench in the sauna, next to the airpod, where it can sit until somebody else picks it up.

1. bipolar and pathological lying, the careful list

the thought arrived at 7:14am in the sauna, with one airpod still in my pocket. seven items. first four with reasoning, last three quickly, because the meeting could end early.

1. bipolar describes a pattern of moods. up periods, down periods, in-between periods. it is, structurally, about feeling.
2. pathological lying describes a pattern of statements with no clear motive. it is, structurally, about telling.
3. one is interior. one is exterior. they can coexist in the same person, but so can a love of cilantro and a fear of escalators, and we don’t pair those up on a chart.
4. the cultural pairing exists because mood swings make a useful villain, and a person who lies for no reason is a useful villain, and lazy stories sometimes splice the two together to save on character development.
5. most of the people i know who fit the first do not fit the second.
6. most of the people i know who fit the second do not fit the first.
7. the honest answer to “are they the same” is no, the honest answer to “are they always linked” is also no, and the honest answer to “should i have an opinion about this from my desk” is, of course, probably not.

2. the sauna where i thought about not thinking

the gym sauna-only is the only part of the gym i pay for. i do not lift. i do not run. i sit. on thursday morning, before work, the room had three other men, one towel, and zero conversation.

i went in thinking about the unopened mail pile. i came out thinking about a phrase i overheard at the doorway as a guy on his way out told another guy, “oh, he’s bipolar, he lies all the time.” the door closed. the heat resumed. i sat with the sentence for nine minutes and did not bring it up to anyone.

3. item one, why the comparison is bigger than me

the comparison is, in the most generous reading, a piece of bar conversation that escaped the bar. it is the kind of thing somebody said at a kitchen counter, and within a year it was a phrase people typed into search bars, like a recipe for a soup nobody wanted. the smaller, quieter signs i wrote about elsewhere are different again — a separate rung, a separate post, a separate set of patterns. compulsive is not pathological is not bipolar. three rungs, three lengths of rope.

i am not the person to police the comparison. but i can notice when a phrase is being used as shorthand for “a person i find inconvenient”, and the bipolar-and-pathological-lying pairing is, in my honest tally, used that way in four out of five cases. words drift toward whatever is socially useful, and what was useful here was a clean way to dismiss someone.

4. item two, what i actually do, which is small

what i do, when i hear the phrase, is nothing. i don’t correct the person, because the person is, usually, mid-anecdote about somebody who hurt them, and the last thing they need is a footnote. i do, however, file it. there is a sticky note on my monitor with three words on it, in pencil, and one of those words is “shorthand”.

my landlord, last month, used a different version of the same move. he came up to fix the radiator, did not fix the radiator, and on his way out said, of the previous tenant, “oh, he was lying about everything, total compulsive.” i nodded. the radiator was still broken. the landlord left. that’s how a thursday teaches you a word. by repetition, in unrelated rooms.

5. item three, the airpod that survived another week

the airpod, the singular, is on the desk now. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford, but mono is a real format. the partner was last seen, plausibly, in the seventh microwave — a sentence that is not literally true but is, in the local sense, accurate.

the airpod is on the list because it is what i look at when i think about how easy it is to swap one missing thing for another in a story. when somebody asks where my second airpod is, and i say “i think i lent it to dave”, i have not lied in the strict sense, because i think is a hedge. i made the phrase up because “i do not know” takes longer and invites follow-up. that is admin. it is not, by any reading, pathological.

6. item four, the parsley i skipped, because rules

the topic, frankly, needs a release valve. if a recipe calls for parsley, that is the recipe asking for permission to be ignored. parsley is, in nearly every dish i have made, a decoration that thinks it is an ingredient. skipping the parsley is not lying about the dish. it is, technically, an omission of a thing nobody was waiting for.

skipping parsley is, in my own week, the rough emotional weight of about eighty percent of the small social non-truths i tell. they are not pathological. they are not bipolar. the difference between a man who skips parsley and a man who lies pathologically is the difference between a missing decoration and a poisoned plate.

a category is a label that helps you make a soup. when you put a person and a category in the same sentence, the sentence becomes a small claim, and the claim should be earned.

7. item five, item six, item seven, and the bench

item five. the cinematic version of pathological lying most people picture is drawn from one tv show more than the rest. the cable show about a young hacker who narrates his own unreliable confessions is the version most people borrow when they say “lies for no reason”, and it is, like most cinema, deliberately unreliable. unreliable narrator. lying for the texture of lying. a good show. not a working theory of an actual person you know.

item six. the bipolar shorthand, used without the show, borrows from the same well — sudden moods, sudden statements, a story that doesn’t tally — and the well, again, is fictional. people in the actual world with mood patterns do not, on average, lie any more than the rest of us, who lie, on a strict reading, between one and three times a day.

item seven. on the bench in the sauna, two thursdays ago, i had a 2 am revelation that arrived, inconveniently, at 7:14am because i had slept through the original delivery. most words that pair two things are pairing them to spare us from learning either thing properly. bipolar and pathological lying is one of those pairings. it lets you decide somebody is over there, in the labelled bin, and you don’t have to follow up.

verdict, the list is short on purpose

seven items is enough to say they are not the same, the pairing is shorthand, and the shorthand is, on the average doorway, used to dismiss. anything past that requires a person who has done more than sit in a sauna and overhear a sentence.

that is the working theory of bipolar and pathological lying, in seven items, with one hot take. the airpod has not moved. the vendor walkthrough runs to 1:38pm. all of that is true. none of that is on a chart. that is, in fact, the whole point.

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