Taking A Chance

A few days ago I walked out of my therapist's office feeling shaky, so I headed to the mall. The plan was simple: wander around, scope out Christmas gifts for my family, nothing more. I'm a soft target, if I'm being real about it. Those little kiosks in the middle of the walkway? I usually get past them by faking a phone call, speed-walking around the guys holding out samples, or cranking a song on my iPhone so I can't hear anyone. This time none of it worked. A man named Ohad reeled me right in.

I sat down in his chair and let him run through lotions, exfoliators, a whole lineup of skin products. And the strange part was that the stuff actually worked. I was genuinely impressed, which had never happened to me with a kiosk salesman. Then came the pitch: I could take home the lotions and the rest for a steal at 800 dollars.

Here's the situation. I'm twenty-three. I have jobs, plural, but not the kind of money that lets you drop 800 dollars on skin cream. The short version is that I walked away having spent 400 dollars on two products. Yes, it was bad judgment. But the deal felt real, and the products would cover maybe half the women in my family, so 400 dollars for roughly eight relatives seemed reasonable to me at the time. Then he tried to sell me one more thing for 500 dollars. I'm not exaggerating any of this. Go look up Forever Flawless cosmetics, the 24k gold lotions, the diamond line. I know how gullible it makes me sound. I was, and if I'm honest with myself, I still am.

Before I left, another man showed up and we started talking. Somehow it came out that I like to write, and what I do for work, and he asked whether I'd want to help him write a book. I have never done anything that spontaneous as saying yes to a job from a stranger at a mall kiosk. That isn't me. My parents would not sign off on it.

I'm twenty-three and I'm close to my parents. I trust how they read a situation. But parents aren't always right, and they don't always see what's best in every case, so I went behind their backs and did something that, in the moment I agreed to it, genuinely could have been dangerous. I knew almost nothing about this man. We'd met maybe an hour earlier, and in under an hour I'd agreed to write his book.

He's dying slowly from something, and I'm aware that anyone can claim they're dying and get people to believe it. I've done it. I've told friends and family I was dying while pretending online to be someone else. I once told people who loved me that I had died. So I know firsthand how easy it is to lie and be believed. This man could have been pulling me into something awful. But I had never taken a swing this big, and after everything with my bipolar, I wanted some excitement, even if there was risk attached.

I'll write more about him later. He's Israeli, and we click. We've had two meetings about the book so far. The problem is that I love writing my way, and writing for someone else has been harder than I expected. My style is my style. Shaping it into what another person wants is a whole different thing.

Today's meeting was rough. I couldn't figure out what he was looking for, and I'd spent the entire week producing pages he wasn't really satisfied with. That's how it goes. Tonight I half-expected a call telling me he'd found someone else to write for him. Instead he called to say he was proud of how hard I'd been working. And I realized I actually love working for someone this blunt, someone who will flat-out tell me my writing is garbage when, to him, it is.

Criticism is useful. Sometimes when even my parents point out that I've messed something up, I pin it on the bipolar when it has nothing to do with that. Usually it's just a combination of something I did and how another person reacted to it. We overthink. I think the overthinking gets in the way, and it gets worse with bipolar in the mix, when you circle an idea over and over until you finally notice how ridiculous your own thoughts have become.

Try taking a chance on something that makes you uneasy. Maybe that means ordering yourself to quit a thought pattern that, strangely, feels more comfortable than actually fixing the situation. Maybe it means you want out of the house, so you say yes to the party or pick up a shift at the diner down the street. Being uncomfortable has been my closest ally in getting toward my goals since my fight with bipolar.