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When I was young, I grew up thinking my mum was a woman who made friends everywhere she went. Whatever the situation: a doctor’s waiting room, a school event, the weekly grocery shop, there was always someone my mother would have a long yarn with.
It was only as I noticed that these moments of gregariousness were followed by stints where she couldn’t get out of bed or string words together, that I saw there were two sides of the coin. Her moods created an unstable childhood where I was fostered or in the care of family friends, until she remarried when I was 10 and my stepfather became my primary carer.
By understanding my mother I’ve learnt how to better manage my relationships.
In my adolescence, during a session with my high school counsellor I learnt the name of my mother’s malady, bipolar, and a bit more about it. There was a brain chemistry imbalance and when my mother was in the lure of the manic aspect, she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop talking, and had no inhibitions. When she was in the low, the depressive episode, she was felled by the black dog. While she was on medication, the stress of being a sole parent after tragically becoming a widow at 30 – when she lost my father to pancreatic cancer – sent her into a spiral of deep emotional turmoil and uncertainty.
Even as I came to understand what she was going through, and realised that all those strangers who my mother was so friendly with were not exactly enthralled by her convivial gestures, it was too late. As an adolescent, I was imprinted by her tendencies and had fallen into the same patterns of creating intimacy and friendship through boundless oversharing. Whenever I met a new friendship prospect, I would bomb them with my life story, a saga that was shaped by my mother’s bipolar episodes.
As I entered maturity, I realised acquaintances would sometimes flinch in the same way I used to see strangers pull away from my mother when she was in her heightened manic episode. On many occasions, I have been struck by guilty 3am insomnia fits as I mull over my oversharing tendency and the thoughtless cadence of commentary that flows like lava.
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My speciality was trauma bonding with strangers, where we would spill our most intimate and horrific memories in a burst of euphoric oversharing, ultimately feeling as if we’d been friends for decades, instead of minutes. After our lives inevitably drifted, there would remain an echo of intimacy where I’d find myself dwelling on them, despite my reluctance to dip back into the friendship or to return to that difficult space.
As I battled my insomnia, and the mental health issues it brought, I feared I too was at risk of bipolar. Thankfully as I won the battle with my insomnia and learnt to win through strict routines, exercise regimes, vitamins, and sleeping pills when it spiralled for too long, I realised this was the last vestige that I needed to curb.
Slowly, as I have used memoir writing and counselling to process the psychological damage I suffered, I learnt that what I was doing was “trauma dumping”, which is oversharing my difficult personal experiences with others and potentially distressing the listener. While sharing our intimate moments is about getting to know each other and creating a bond, there is a fine line between being in a friendship and treating a conversation as a counselling session.
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