bipolar pathological liar — 1 fairly sure investigation

the ikea wardrobe collapsed at hour two and dave called about money and mom called about doctors. bipolar pathological liar, the article posited, as a category for two. stefan is in the wings explaining wine. maggie is on the margin. parsley you can skip. some categories you can also skip.

i had clicked the article from a sidebar of an unrelated piece about a movie i remember mainly for the ikea catalogue scene, which is to say i was already in a bad place when the headline arrived. the headline proposed a hybrid clinical thing, half mood disorder, half lying problem, presented like a flavor pairing. cinnamon and chili. blueberry and basil. bipolar pathological liar, two conditions in one box, ready to ship.

i am writing this from my desk on a friday at 1:51pm. carla is in an annual planning meeting on the third floor and i have, by the running tally, the rest of the working hour. i would like to compare two things which the internet has decided belong together but which, in my fairly-sure non-medical opinion, do not. one of them describes a real person. the other describes me on a slow afternoon. the difference matters.

so i opened a clean tab and started a comparison. it ran for forty minutes. dave called twice during it. mom called once. the unopened mail pile on the kitchen counter watched like a jury. i learned things, mostly about myself, none of them flattering. the cluster pillar on what a liar even is already does the heavy lifting on definitions, so i won’t relitigate. i’m here for the comparison only.

writing this from my desk. carla is in the annual planning walkthrough, the kind where someone uses the word roadmap eleven times. i have approximately fifty minutes. let’s go.

bipolar pathological liar, the careful comparison

here is the thing the article slid past. the term bipolar pathological liar is two nouns sharing one coat. it implies that the lying is part of the swing. sometimes it is. sometimes it isn’t. sometimes the lying belongs to the person and the mood belongs to the chemistry and they are roommates, not a couple. i refuse to confuse roommates with a couple. i live alone for a reason.

i pushed away from the desk and pictured the half-built ikea wardrobe sitting in my kitchen, which i had brought to work in spirit, the way other people bring family photos. the wardrobe collapsed at hour two of assembly, which is the kind of fact i tell people, and the way i tell it depends on whether i’m trying to sound competent or sympathetic. that’s not a mood swing. that’s editing. there is a difference.

the careful version of the comparison goes like this. one condition is a swinging room. the other is a person who, in the room, sometimes lies about whether they ate. you can have both. you can have one. you can have neither. the article wanted them welded. they are not welded. i am fairly sure there is a study about this, possibly in a serious magazine, which i did not read but which i can almost see in my mind’s archive.

dave laughed, mom asked, the shelf collapsed

dave called from his car to ask if i had thought any more about the three hundred. i had not. i told him i had. that is, by the running tally, lie number one of the afternoon, and it was not a mood-driven lie, it was a friendship-preservation lie, which is a different department.

dave laughed for nine straight minutes the last time i told him i’d “engaged with” the debt. he was driving. i could hear the turn signal. he kept saying “engaged with” the way other people say “tasting menu”. he is, on paper, in insurance. on the phone, he is a literary critic. he lives between those two jobs, untaxed.

mom called on sunday and asked if i was sleeping enough. she meant: are you sleeping too much, or not enough, or are you fine. she did not say bipolar. mom does not use the word. mom uses “are you alright” the way doctors use a stethoscope. i said i was fine. that is lie number two. it was, however, not a category lie. it was a sunday lie. sunday lies are their own department. they are warm.

the half-built shelf in the corner of the kitchen has been half-built since hour two of last sunday. that is not a metaphor. that is a literal flatpack with two side panels standing and a top board lying on the rug like a body outline. the shelf is, in this scene, the only honest object. it has not pretended to be a shelf. it has not lied about its progress. when guests come over (no guests come over) i would tell them it’s “in progress”. that is lie number three. there is a pattern, and the pattern is that none of these are mood-driven. they are admin.

stefan, who knew about wine and gave me unsolicited opinion on this

two months ago at a tasting event a man named stefan, in a vest, told a room of nodding adults that one wine had “notes of leather, tobacco, and forest floor”. i nodded. nodding is a category of lie i have not seen properly classified. i have nodded through wine, through real estate advice, through cousins explaining cryptocurrency, through a doctor’s appointment in which i pretended to know what “ferritin” was. nodding is consent, technically, and consent is a small public lie.

stefan, when he heard later that i’d been reading about bipolar pathological liar as a hybrid term, said — over the phone, unsolicited, a wednesday i did not want him on — that he thought the article was overreaching. stefan said it the way stefan says things, with a small audible smile, as if the world were on a tasting tray and he was holding the cracker. stefan is not a clinician. stefan sells, i’m fairly sure, software. but stefan has opinions on everything he has ever skimmed, and skimming is a republic stefan rules.

“the issue,” stefan said, in the voice he uses for issues, “is that the article wants the lying to be the symptom. but the lying is the person. you can’t make a personality into a side effect.”

i wrote that down. i hate when stefan is correct. it ruins the rest of the day. i looked at the half-built shelf and said, mostly to the shelf, “stefan was correct again.” the shelf had no comment. shelves rarely do.

maggie, who runs a small business, would file this neatly

maggie is a person from before. she ran into me three times in 2019 at a coffee shop near the post office i now avoid, and on the third time she said the sentence i remember exactly: “you keep saying you’ll start.” she runs a small business now, with employees and payroll, the kind of life i can describe but not perform. she would, if you handed her this comparison, file it correctly. she would put the mood condition in one folder and the lying habit in another, label both, sign and date them. maggie is the opposite of a hybrid term. maggie is a label maker.

i thought about emailing her. i did not. i don’t write emails to people from before; chatgpt screens emails for me on the rare occasions emails happen, and even chatgpt would have flagged that one. there are categories of message that should never leave the desk. “hi maggie, please help me distinguish two psychiatric concepts i have no formal training in” is one of them.

maggie is on the margin of this post on purpose. she is the version of me that took the shelf seriously. she is also the reason i can’t pretend the comparison is academic. when i compare two terms, i compare two ways of being a person, and one of them is hers, sort of, by inference.

the half-built shelf as accidental witness

here is the comparison in plain table form, which is what the search engine wants, and which i would like to provide because i am a citizen.

mood condition — a swinging interior weather. requires a doctor. requires medication, sometimes. is not a hobby. cannot be willed. has actual paperwork. comes with a chart. is none of my business in this post.

habit of lying without need — a behavioral residue. requires no medical chart. lives in friendships, voicemails, sunday calls, ikea instructions read aloud to no one. can sometimes be willed, the way you can will yourself to floss. has paperwork only if you are very organized, and the lying type rarely is.

both, in the same person — possible, observed, real, not what i’m describing here, not what most google searches are describing either, and the conflation is what the article was selling.

the third yoga mat lives under my couch since 2023, evolving into whatever it’s evolving into. it is, like the shelf, an honest witness. it has not lied about its yoga-mat-ness. it just isn’t being used. there’s a category for that and the category is not pathological. the category is “owned, deferred, sad, fine.”

if a recipe calls for parsley, in this house, the parsley does not appear and the recipe survives. i transfer that logic to other places. some categories are parsley. bipolar pathological liar, as a fused term aimed at me on a friday afternoon, is parsley. real instances exist. mine is not one.

verdict, the comparison is a coat for two people

the verdict is the title of this section. the comparison is a coat. one sleeve is a real condition that has, somewhere, real people in real waiting rooms. the other sleeve is a habit that lives in friendships and ikea boxes. wearing the coat as if it were one garment is what the article wanted. i would like, formally, in writing, to refuse.

the seventh microwave, may it rest, used to spin food in circles in front of me while i made decisions about how to describe my week to mom. it died last spring. its replacement is more honest. it does not spin. the food sits there and is heated. that is what i would like from terminology too. less spinning. heat the actual thing.

i looked once more at the half-built shelf, which has not moved in three days. the shelf is not bipolar. the shelf is not lying. the shelf is paused. there is a category called paused that gets wrongly logged as everything else. paused is its own thing. paused is most of my life.

if you want a longer, slower walk through what “lying without need” actually looks like in a kitchen, the longtail post on what a pathological liar means in plain language covers the ground i’m skipping here. it has different exhibits. the kindle features prominently. you’ll know when you get there.

and if at some point in this post you have wondered whether the question underneath all of it is “am i a stupid person for clicking the article in the first place”, that is a different cluster, and i defend myself there. the post on whether the word stupid even applies to me is a manifesto that took me forty minutes and one cold call from dave to write. the answer involves a fork, a microwave, and a refusal to be labeled by the third paragraph of an unsigned blog post.