The first couple of times I was given the diagnosis bipolar II, I ignored it. I didn’t tell my parents or my friends. I never followed up. I just pretended I hadn’t heard it.
Bipolar is a mood disorder with two main mood swings: depression (down) and mania (up). Depression alone is a bit more common and, in my experience, easier for the average person to understand. But depression does not just mean sad. When I’m depressed, I’m in physical pain, sore on my chest and upper back in a way that makes me walk hunched over in the middle or cry out if touched the wrong way. I cry from being sad, but also from actual pain.
Mania, or hypomania, is harder to grasp. Mania can be euphoric—nothing can stop you; you’re the best. It can make me super social and highly flirtatious. It scatters my thoughts so I stop and start a million projects (I once wrote sixty pages of a feature film in three days without sleeping). I feel more inclined to drink or do drugs. It can also be depressive; I can get mean, or desperate.
Either way, I stop thinking. I lose control.
Bipolar disorder is episodic. A person with bipolar can seem very stable for a long time and then suddenly go off the rails. Without medication, this is what happens to me.
For someone who makes a living being transparent about her dating, sex, and family life on the internet, I’ve left out a big chunk of my story. So I’ll come clean here: I’m bipolar. And for as long as it has take me to open up about my disorder, it has taken me even longer to connect the dots between my mental health and my finances.
This includes spending money I didn’t have on whims I didn’t need. I told myself all of these impulsive purchases were “deserved.” There were specific purchases I needed to do my best work—for instance, the book on writing musicals. (I never wrote a musical, unless you count my unproduced treatment for the rock opera What’s My Age Again? The Blink 182-sical. Mark Hoppus, call me.) The only way I could write my new brilliant novel or my award-winning article idea was if I bought myself a new computer. I’d stay up all night talking myself into randomly filling out graduate school applications for schools in Japan and buying books on Japanese culture.
When I was manic, I wanted to spend all my money because life was a breeze, and who cared about social constructs like money? When I was down, I desperately needed material things to make me feel better. No matter what state I was in, I convinced myself not to look at my finances or try to sort out my bank accounts or plan for the future because it was “too stressful” and I was “too fragile right now.”
My first “breakdown” took place in 2008 when I was a sophomore in college. I had become too anxious to eat, and so I was stick thin and shaking constantly. I don’t fully remember how that episode ended but all I know is in photos of myself from back then, I am pale and sickly, and I never did anything to fix it. I waited it out and kept working myself to death at my job and at school (the newspaper, the honors program, classes). I didn’t go on meds then because the idea never occurred to me. The anxiety eventually became more manageable, and I convinced myself it was a fluke. Just like my money troubles, my mental health was a pattern I was staving off instead of treating.
Four years later, in May 2012, I crashed again. This was the second time I’d gone from intense manic work ethic to crushing suicidal depression in the course of one year, but I still didn’t understand that my brain chemistry might be to blame.
I’d been riding high. When my birthday came around in June, I threw myself a massive party at the improv theater where I performed in downtown NYC. The boy I was interested in didn’t show up because he was fighting with his girlfriend, so I got super-super-drunk.
The next day, I woke up with a massive hangover, and I couldn’t stop shaking. (Alcohol can exacerbate mental illness, because it’s a depressant.) My hangover eventually subsided, but later that night, I was still feeling crappy. I also had not stopped convulsing, shuddering every so often between waves of nausea. I’d had bad hangovers before, but this was more than that. I was totally unable to eat. The mere thought of food caused the shaking to intensify. I tried to eat some cooked spinach, which I normally love, and I threw it up violently. Something was really wrong.
My sister-in-law drove to Brooklyn from Nyack and picked me up at the apartment of a girl I was casually seeing. She took me back to her and my brother’s condo. I spent the next week in the same smelly gray pajamas, unable to get off their couch. I could barely move unless it was to blink. I stared off into nothing, basically comatose. I couldn’t express what was wrong, and so I didn’t talk. I did not sleep.
Eventually I became okay enough (or annoying enough) to be allowed to go back to my apartment in Harlem. I was embarrassed to have been such a burden on my family. I must have gone back to working, but I don’t remember it. I figured this extreme manic-depressive episode was a one-off (or a two-off, thinking back to 2008).
But two days later, I bought…wait for it…a plane ticket to Europe. Yes, you read that right. I spent the remaining money I had in my bank account, which was maybe $800, on a non-stop flight to Paris. I planned to go for two whole weeks.
In Europe, I slowly went more insane. I had done no research. I was not aware of the exchange rate, so I used that as an excuse to not understand how much I was spending. I had too much anxiety to talk to anyone. At night, to assuage my anxiety, I drank a lot. One day I took a train to Versailles and realized I had no money to eat while I was there, but it didn’t matter because the combination of hangover and anxiety made me throw up on the lawn of the palace. I wrote in my journal for that day, “Do you think Marie Antoinette ever vomited here?”
My last day in Paris, I went to a lesbian bar with a girl I was sort of dating’s ex who was also visiting the city. Leaving the bar, I reached into my purse and realized my wallet had been stolen. I had my passport in my bag, so I could feasibly get home, but I’d lost my credit and debit cards, $80 in cash, and a pair of earrings I’d bought in New Orleans that had sentimental value.
I went back to my day job and took on more hours. Eventually I left to take a higher-paying full-time job with much-needed benefits. I still had credit card debt from my mania, but I never thought about it. I figured it was a problem that future-me could deal with. I was convinced I was special and was going to succeed so wildly at this young age that the debt didn’t matter. It was the era of Donald Glover and Lady Gaga, after all. I was meant to make millions by the time I was 25. (To be “25 sitting on 25 mil,” as Drake put it.)
On the rare occasions that I logged into Bank of America online, I would peek at the number in my checking account and then close it quickly like it was an ancient cursed book. I overdrafted constantly. Every time I ran out of money, my mom would, behind my dad’s back, put fifty bucks into my account to cover the $30 overdraft fee and give me twenty bucks to play with. (Love, but also enabling!) The boat kept filling with water, and I kept trying to drain it with a thimble.
I talked about this with NO ONE. I figured everyone I knew was doing the same thing, racking up credit card debt and praying for a light at the end of the tunnel.
My mental health spiraled downward. My shakiness and anxiety hadn’t fully subsided since the summer, and I decided it couldn’t hurt to look into medical help beyond talk therapy. In winter 2012, I started seeing a pay-as-you-can psychiatrist who prescribed me Klonopin and Celexa to specifically address the anxiety and depression. On this medication cocktail, I was exhausted. I slept for days. I missed work. My roommate called my parents. I’d been acting like a zombie and was speaking incoherently.
One night, I woke up in a haze with my dad standing over me. He’d flown from South Florida to bring me home. I went off the meds I’d been on. I saw and spoke to almost no one. I cried all the time. I slowly got better.
A year later, I moved to L.A. My job provided health insurance, and since I was stressed about the move, I went back on meds: Zoloft and Klonopin. I thought I was so responsible. I thought everything was stable.
But I had another breakdown in 2016. A psychiatrist in L.A. asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with bipolar II, and I finally said yes. I had been—multiple times.
If I was going to really fix my financial troubles, then I had to admit there were other things at play beyond irresponsibility and youthful ignorance. I could learn about taxes and individual retirement accounts, and I could work really hard to get out of debt, but in the end, I was always one mental lapse away from destroying my credit score. I was on medication for depression, but that wasn’t addressing this problem. Eight years after my first breakdown, I finally started on Lamictal specifically for bipolar disorder, and gradually I got a handle on my brain.
I’m not saying medication is the answer for everyone. I’m not a doctor, and I’m not you. Also, my meds are now covered by insurance. My therapist costs me $125 a session and my psychiatrist costs me $225 every two months, but it’s money I have now and that I’m willing to spend on myself. I know not everyone is in that position.
But another thing that saved me from financial ruin was realizing that there were other psychological factors that contributed to my overspending. The impulsivity of mania is aided and abetted by shopping apps. People don’t even see the cash in their paycheck before it’s swiped into Ubers and Amazon Prime. I’ve deleted food-delivery apps and other triggers from my phone for that reason.
When you’re feeling crappy, “comfort spending” lifts your spirits, and when you’re flying high, you can experience what’s called “manic spending.” An example of manic spending is when I feel I’ve worked hard at something and therefore deserve new sneakers immediately. Comfort spending is when I’m sad from working too hard and need new sneakers to feel better. Even if you don’t have bipolar disorder, you might be buying material things to fill the emptiness inside.
“Manic spending is no different than the hyper-sexuality or anything that comes with mania,” Julie Fast, a writer, educator, and expert on bipolar disorder said on my podcast, Bad With Money. “No frontal lobe. No ability to say, ‘I can’t afford that.’ All of that is gone.”
Money and mental health are tied up in a chicken-and-egg situation. People with severe mental illness can be more susceptible to job loss, debt, homelessness, and money mismanagement. And those problems can also lead to poor mental health and keep them from getting treatment.
I still have these blue periods with days of painful sobbing. I still overspend on manic impulse buys and have to constantly stop myself from getting a puppy on a whim. But I’m aware of it, and I am being treated for it with medication and lots of therapy.
The comedian Sara Schaefer, who speaks openly about her mental health in her stand-up, told me in a 2016 episode of my podcast that she had $65,000 of credit card debt because she used money as a way to regulate her depression. “I would get depressed, and I would shop alone. I still like shopping alone. I don’t like people being there, because I don’t like judgment,” she said. When you’re depressed and you feel like you can’t control anything, making a purchase is something you can control.
Starting in childhood, whenever something bad happened, Schaefer said her parents would buy her a Pound Puppy toy. She made a “dangerous connection” between spending money and improving her mood. “We started joking that any gift for when you felt bad about anything was just called a Pound Puppy,” she said.
A “Pound Puppy” is a familiar mollifier, if not a familiar name for it. I’m sure many people in line at a Sephora or Foot Locker right now would tell you the same thing: Buying yourself a little present quiets the sad, even if you don’t have a diagnosed mental illness. Spending gets you high. But we can’t live our lives surrounded by Pound Puppies. We have to eventually address the barking.
Copyright © 2018 by Gabrielle Dunn. This edited excerpt is from the book Bad With Money by Gaby Dunn, published by ATRIA, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
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