The Voice That Wasn’t Me
I want to be honest with you before we go any further.
I almost didn’t write this book. Not because I didn’t have things to say — I have more than enough of those — but because writing it meant sitting with all of it. The diagnoses. The wreckage. The moments I can’t take back. There’s a version of me that would rather build something clean and logical, something that compiles without errors, than dig around in the mess of my own mind and ask other people to watch me do it.
But here we are.
My name is Jeremy Davis. I was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, in 1973, which is a small town most people have never heard of, and that’s about right for how I started. A little off the map. My parents divorced when I was two, and like a lot of kids in that situation, I grew up doing the math on absence and distance and what it means when the people you love are somewhere else. I learned early to fill those spaces with other things. Achievement, mostly.
I excelled at school. I excelled at sports. Being good at things felt like proof that I was okay. Then my back gave out in high school and took the athletics with it. I remember that loss more than people probably expect me to. It wasn’t just sports. It was an identity. It was the answer to the question who are you? And suddenly I didn’t have one.
I graduated early, got married at eighteen, went to college, and graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science. Silicon Valley. A career. A house in North Carolina. A daughter named Emily. A life that looked, from the outside, like someone who had figured it out.
I hadn’t figured it out. I just hadn’t been diagnosed yet.
Bipolar disorder came with a name in 2012. By then it had already been running my life for years without one. What followed that diagnosis was the adoption of my sister’s three children, the collapse of my first marriage, the breakdown, the long-term disability, the ECT treatments. All of that is in this book. Not to perform suffering for you, but because you need to know what this illness actually looks like when it’s untreated, undertreated, or just grinding away at everything you’ve built while you’re trying to hold the walls up with your bare hands.
I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am a trained software engineer turned manager from a small town in Washington who has spent the better part of his adult life trying to understand why his own brain keeps trying to burn everything down. I know this illness from the inside. I know what the clinical language sounds like when a doctor says it to you across a desk, and I know what it feels like at two in the morning when none of those words mean anything anymore.
That’s actually why I’m writing this.
There is a gap. A wide, painful gap between what the textbooks say bipolar disorder is and what it actually feels like to live inside it. What it feels like to love someone and say things to them that you would never, in your right mind, ever say. What it feels like to wake up to the aftermath and know that something spoke through you that was wearing your face.
I’ve started calling mine the Liar. That voice, that persona, that thing that showed up in a mixed state earlier this year and sent messages to my wife Heather that I cannot unread, and neither can she. The damage was real. The devastation on her face was real. And the thing that did it felt, in the moment, like me.
That’s the part nobody tells you about. The personas. The way bipolar disorder doesn’t just change your mood. It can change your entire operating self. The Liar is one of mine. Maybe you have your own. Maybe you’ve been trying to explain this to someone who loves you and you can’t find the words. Maybe you are someone who loves a person with bipolar disorder and you’re trying to understand how the person you know could have done or said the things they did.
This book is for all of us.
I’m not writing from some elevated place of recovery where everything is resolved and I’ve got it handled. My marriage is still healing. I am still healing. But I’ve lived enough of this — through enough breakdowns and rebuilds and fresh starts — to believe that the most useful thing I can offer isn’t clinical expertise. It’s the truth about what this is. The full truth. The hard, embarrassing, sometimes terrifying, ultimately human truth.
Because inside all of that, there is also hope. Not the greeting card kind. The kind that’s been tested. The kind that knows exactly what it’s up against and chooses to keep going anyway.
I kept going. I’m still keeping going. I win more often than I lose.
I hope this book helps you do the same.
— Jeremy M. Davis