The Letter

Last year, over a long weekend, I hit send on my resignation letter.

I'd spent three days drafting it. A job I loved, but had become convinced was wrong. By the end of the weekend it didn't feel like quitting. It felt like an act of public service.

What I didn't know was that something was brewing inside me. I would learn later that I have bipolar I. A serious illness of extreme mood swings, from the highs of mania to the lows of depression, and in my case with psychotic features.

Mania, for me, felt like acceleration. Thoughts linking at high speed. Everything becoming inevitable. I paced through the night writing essays about politics, morality, national integrity.

I became convinced I'd found a fracture inside the organization where I worked as a government analyst. There was only one truth, and I believed I was the only one who could see it. Everyone else was distorting it. I wrote as if I'd been appointed to defend reality itself. When I reread the letter, I felt proud. When I pressed send, I felt righteous.

I imagined it going far beyond my workplace. Officials briefed at the highest levels. My letter debated by the government. I posted it publicly on my website and sent it to friends, colleagues, bosses.

Then I refreshed the news. Nothing happened.

At home, things began to unravel as the mania intensified. Sleep disappeared. Routines collapsed. The people around me began to worry.

The consequences spread. After a psychotic break, my parenting time was cut to supervised visits.

I told myself it was procedural. Temporary. In truth, lawyers were already discussing my arrangements. While I argued grand theories about the fate of the country, other people managed the fallout.

My fiancé tried to slow me down. Sleep. See a doctor. Pause. I mistook love for obstruction. The relationship ended. The wedding never happened.

Friends went quiet. Group chats stopped. Some of my messages were forwarded to clinicians and lawyers.

I called it betrayal. It was fear. Fear of who I had become, and of what I might do next.

Three days after I sent the letter, police came to my door and brought me to a psychiatric unit. It was my fourth involuntary hospitalization in four months.

I wasn't frightened. I was irritated.

I still believed history was moving in my direction. I didn't think I was being reckless with my career or my life. I thought I was acting for the greater good.

One evening my father was visiting me in hospital, as he did every night. I told him the King was in town because of my resignation letter.

It felt obvious. We had met him once, years earlier, and my letter clearly had consequences that reached the highest levels. When my father said he didn't believe me, I yelled at him to leave. He left quietly.

In my chart, the doctors began using words like grandiosity. Delusional thinking. Poor insight.

Over the next six weeks the mania thinned. Medication dulled its edges. The theories collapsed. No one in government ever debated my letter. No official called. The world moved on from the thing I thought would change everything.

Weeks later, rereading the letter, I began to consider that I might have been wrong.

It didn't feel like insight. It felt like humiliation. The sentences were absolute. Final. Certain in a way that now frightened me.

I felt exposed.

And beneath that was grief.

During the episode the mania had felt like a gift. Articulate. Driven. Fearless. Now I could see it had been lying to me the whole time. I missed it anyway.

Six weeks after my last admission, I was discharged. My employer rescinded the resignation, placed me on medical leave, and required medical clearance before I could return.

They didn't close the door on my career. But much of my life had to be rebuilt. The house was empty now. I brought in roommates. I started rebuilding my relationship with my children. Some friendships came back. Others didn't.

Months later I returned to work part-time. Everything felt different. Files had moved. Deadlines had passed. Decisions had been made without me. I wasn't indispensable. But I wasn't discarded either.

For a while I thought of the episode as something behind me. An eruption. A hospitalization. A mess to clean up. But bipolar disorder doesn't fit that kind of tidy story. Recovery means accepting that the risk of mania never simply goes away.

The most unsettling moment came when I reread the letter again, four months later. It didn't read like a breakdown. It read like a manifesto. Structured. Coherent. Persuasive.

That was when I understood it could happen again. I could write something just as certain, and just as wrong, and not know until the damage was done.

The country didn't need saving. I did.

Now I draft emails and reread them twice before sending. I shorten my arguments. I choose my words carefully. And before I press send, I ask the question I never asked that weekend.

What if I'm wrong?