I thought I was done beating this dead horse and People keep reviving it.
You are reading today’s brand-new fun-filled episode of Tukayote Helianthus Explains Dumbass Shit, at a Kindergarten Level, to Grown-Ass Adults Who Should Know Better.
Welcome.
People have been labeling me. A lot of people. A lot of labels.
Everyone has a name for what I am doing in my life now.
Everyone is wrong.
Isolating. Manic. Avoidant. Lonely. Shutting down. Concerning. Worrying. The diagnoses have been flying in from every direction, from people who love me, from people who used to love me, from people who knew the old version of me well enough to notice that this version doesn’t look the same and decided that must mean something is wrong.
I understand the impulse. I do. When someone you know suddenly removes half their life, goes quiet on social media, walks away from relationships, sits alone more than they ever have, and writes thousands of words publicly processing the most intense internal season of their existence, it looks like something. It looks like a lot of somethings, apparently. Everyone has had a word for it.
Every single one of them has been wrong.
What you have been watching is not a warning sign. It is not a red flag. It is not a crisis, a breakdown, a manic episode, or a man disappearing into himself out of fear. What you have been watching is what doing the work actually looks like from the outside, and I understand that it doesn’t look the way you expected, because I don’t look the way you expected. That’s not an accident. That’s the whole point.
I am not the person you are worried about. I am not the person you are diagnosing. I am not the person you are grieving, or misreading, or trying to redirect back toward something familiar.
I am unrecognizable. On purpose. By design. At great cost.
And I am done being quiet while people put the wrong name on it.
Capisce?
I Bled For This.
Every Single Drop.
Let me tell you what I actually went through. Because you don’t get to watch me build something from rubble and call the building isolation.
I have been hospitalized in a psych ward more times than I want to count (at least a bakers dozen). I have dealt with psychosis. I have been through medication changes that felt like having my brain rewired without anesthesia. I danced alone on a basketball court in a public park to a song literally called “Ego Death,” bass rattling my bones, sweat pouring, screaming lyrics into empty space like a confession I didn’t know I was making yet, because something inside me was dying and needed a body to pass through. I have stood at the Little Squalicum Pier at 10PM in the rain and howling wind and screamed into the ocean until my throat gave out. I have cried alone at several restaurants. I have cried in parking lots. I have cried driving home from moments of real love so unfamiliar it broke me open, crying into my phone because I didn’t know what to do with something that wasn’t destruction.
I wrote amends to people I hurt. I bled on the page. I walked every single day, rain or shine, because movement was the only thing keeping me from going under.
I fell. Hard. My knees were shredded and bleeding. My headphones landed ten feet away on the pavement. I still had four and a half miles to get home. I got up and kept walking. And then I fell again. And again. My knees bled again, every time. Every single time, I got up and kept going.
I watched a relationship I loved end, a relationship I exploded in a single moment of panic and avoidance, and I had to sit with what I did without flinching. I didn’t get to be the victim of that one. I broke someone’s heart and I owned every piece of it, publicly and privately, without disappearing into a story where I was the hero. That’s what self-love that actually costs something looks like. Not bubble baths and affirmations. Sitting in the wreckage you made and refusing to look away. Choosing accountability over comfort, over and over, until it stops being a choice and starts being who you are.
I experienced ego death. The real kind. The kind that feels like psychological waterboarding stretched across months. The kind that has no audience, no applause, no recognition. Just you. Completely alone. Confused and crying and bleeding internally while the world keeps functioning like nothing is happening and your entire identity is detonating. I didn’t gently lose myself. I destroyed an identity that was killing me and everyone around me, on purpose, and then had to figure out who the hell I was underneath all of that wreckage, with no roadmap and zero guarantee there was anything worth finding down there.
Spoiler: there was. I am what I found. And I am love. And I am so far from who I was that the distance is almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t watch it happen in real time.
I went back into voluntary psychiatric care. I kept every therapy appointment, every single week. I went deeper into IFS. I eliminated cannabis in the middle of all of it, in the middle of the hardest season of my life, because I decided my sobriety meant something and I was going to protect it even when everything else was on fire.
That is what you are asking me to risk when you tell me you’re worried I’m isolating.
Isolation is when you disappear because the world feels too dangerous. Isolation is retreat dressed up as rest. It is your fear doing the choosing, not you. I know exactly what that looks like because I have lived inside it for years. I know the putrid fucking smell of it.
This is not that.
This is me protecting the work I bled for. Every person I have removed. Every pattern I have declined to repeat. Every situation I have walked away from. All of it is me saying I will not do this again. I will not skin my knees on the same pavement. I will not blow up another relationship I love because my nervous system panicked and my patterns grabbed the wheel. I will not go back to being the guy who was drunk and psychotic and drug-fueled and the life of every party and the death of every relationship he ever touched.
That guy is unrecognizable to me now. I know because I was him. And I am not going back to him. Not for comfort. Not for familiarity. Not because someone misses who I used to be.
You do not get to miss who I used to be more than I get to be who I am now.
Capisce?
I Am More Alone Than I Have Ever Been In My Entire Life.
And I Have Never Been Less Lonely.
Now let’s talk about alone. Because this one matters and I need you to actually sit with it.
I grew up on 53 acres in rural Idaho, 35 miles from a school where my entire class was twelve kids. My mother moved me there to chase her own life with her new husband, away from everything I had known, away from my father, away from my friends, away from any version of normal. No phone. No internet. No electricity. If I wanted to talk to my dad, I rode my bike 7.5 miles down a dirt road to a pay phone, used a calling card he gave me, and hoped he was home and picked up. My only friend lived ten miles away. I saw him on the school bus and almost nowhere else. I was a kid alone on 53 acres in Bumfuck, Egypt with no way to reach anyone and no way out.
I know what alone is. I have known it since I was a child.
But here is what I did with that loneliness for the decades that followed. I buried it under hundreds of people. I accumulated friends the way some people accumulate debt, compulsively, constantly, always more, always louder, always bigger, because the silence reminded me of that dirt road and I could not stand it. At my peak I had several hundred online friends and followers, dozens and dozens of real life friends, dozens of blood relatives spread across my life in every direction. I was never not surrounded. I was never not performing for someone. I was never not available. I built a crowd around myself so thick that I never had to feel the thing underneath it.
The thing underneath it was that scared kid on the dirt road who didn’t know if his dad would be home to pick up the phone.
That kid didn’t know how to love himself. He didn’t even know that was something he was supposed to do. So he outsourced it. He handed the job to hundreds of people and hoped the volume of their presence would add up to something that felt like enough. It never did. It never does. That is not how it works and I know that now in a way I cannot unknow.
Now I can count my real connections on less than two hands. In a town of 98,000 people. Connected to billions through the internet. More alone, by every measurable external standard, than I have been at any point in my entire adult life. More alone, honestly, than I was on those 53 acres, because at least then I was just a kid and didn’t fully understand yet what I was missing. Now I understand exactly what I am without, and I am choosing it anyway, every single day, with both eyes open.
I am on my own psychological and emotional island. I chose to live on it and call it my new home. I would choose it again tomorrow.
Because here is what I know now that I didn’t know then, and didn’t know for the thirty years of noise that followed: being alone and being lonely are not the same word. They are not even close to the same experience.
Being alone is a condition of your surroundings.
Lonely is a condition of your relationship with yourself.
For most of my life I was surrounded by hundreds of people and profoundly, secretly, devastatingly lonely. Lonely in a crowd. Lonely on a stage. Lonely at the center of every party. Lonely inside every relationship I ever tried to build while running my patterns at full speed. The crowd was never the cure. It was the symptom. It was me trying to out-noise the silence that had lived inside me since I was a kid on a dirt road with nowhere to go and no one coming.
I am more alone now than I have ever been in my entire life.
And I am not lonely. Not even a little bit.
Those two things are living inside me at the same time right now and the coexistence of them is one of the most astonishing things I have ever experienced. There is a specific quality to this silence that I do not have a perfect word for. It is not the silence of that dirt road, which was the silence of abandonment, of being dragged somewhere and left there. This silence is chosen. It is mine. I built it and I live in it and when I sit in it I am not waiting for anyone to rescue me from it. I am just here. Present. Okay. More than okay.
This is what self-love looks like when it is real. Not performing okayness for an audience. Not filling the room with noise so you don’t have to hear yourself. Actually being okay. In the quiet. Alone. Without needing a single person to confirm it. The kid on the dirt road needed someone to pick up the phone. I don’t need that anymore. I am the one who picks up now. I answer for myself. Every time.
If you have never felt the specific relief of genuinely liking who is in the room when the room is just you, I understand why this looks like a crisis from where you’re standing.
It is not a crisis. It is the first time in my life I have not needed to escape myself.
The person who needed hundreds of people around him to drown out his own silence? I do not know him anymore. He was running patterns that were killing him softly and loudly and in every way in between. I am unrecognizable from him. And I did not get here by accident. I got here by choosing, over and over, in the dark, when no one was watching, to love myself more than I loved the noise.
Capisce?
Their Silence Is the Answer.
I’m Not Going Looking For a Different One.
So let’s talk about the people who just quietly disappear.
Someone has been doing a slow fade on me. Response times stretching. Energy thinning out. Presence going quiet in that particular way that communicates everything without saying a single word. I noticed. Of course I noticed. I fucking notice everything.
This is not just anyone. This is someone I have known for their entire life. Someone who shares more of my DNA than almost any other living person outside of my children. Someone I have loved since before they could form sentences. The weight of that does not translate cleanly into language and I am not going to insult it by trying too hard. You either understand what it means to be slowly faded on by someone like that, or you don’t.
And I have said absolutely nothing.
Here is the question I want to put on the table: is that my old pattern of avoidance surfacing again? Am I being avoidant by not confronting it, by not sending the message, by letting it happen without naming it out loud?
I have sat with this for a while, examined it from all angles. I’m not repeating avoidant patterns and people-pleasing codependency. Here is why.
There is a version of me that would have chased that. That version would have manufactured a reason to reach out, engineered a situation to surface the dynamic without technically bringing it up directly, twisted himself into a pretzel trying to create space for someone to be honest about something they had already answered through their silence. He called it communication. It was not communication. It was anxiety wearing a trench coat. It was a man who could not tolerate endings reaching for control and calling it connection. It was a man who did not love himself enough to let something go when it was already gone.
I am not that man anymore.
Avoidance is when you refuse to face something true because it hurts. What I am doing is the opposite. I am facing something true. I am looking directly at it, understanding exactly what it means, and choosing not to pour more of myself into a fire that someone else has already decided to let go out.
Their silence is the answer. I don’t need to go looking for a different one.
As one of my therapists says, “No response, is a response.” Yep!
And here is what matters most: when I would have chased clarification before, it was never really about clarity. It was about soothing my own anxiety. Needing to know I hadn’t done something wrong. Needing a version of events that let me off the hook. Needing to keep something alive past its natural end because I could not tolerate the grief of letting it die. Confronting their avoidance with my anxious pursuit was not courage. It was me using someone else’s behavior as an excuse to run my patterns one more time.
Letting this person fade, without chasing, without engineering, without any of the old desperate machinery, is an act of self-love. It is me trusting that I do not need to chase down proof that I matter. I know that I matter. I know it from the inside now, not because someone reflected it back to me. That is new. That is so unrecognizably different from who I was that I sometimes have to stop and just let it be real for a second.
The old me hemorrhaged energy toward people who had already quietly walked out the door. He chased. He engineered. He performed concern to mask his own terror of being left. I am not him anymore. Letting this person fade is part of the same protection. Part of the same promise I made to myself on every one of those brutal, necessary, nobody-watching nights at the pier and the basketball court and the restaurants and the parking lots.
I have stopped hemorrhaging. That is not shutdown. That is survival that finally learned its own name.
Capisce?
No, It’s Not Fucking Mania.
And I’m Tired of Explaining Myself to Armchair-Therapists.
Some people think all of this is mania, some even specifically and ruthlessly calling it “manic bullshit.”
This blog. The thousands of words. The relationship ending. The deleted social media. The annihilated social circle. The medication changes. The emotional intensity. The pace of all of it. From the outside, looking in, I understand how someone lands there. Everything looked big. Everything looked fast. Everything looked like a man either coming apart or flying too close to the sun.
I want to be honest about that read, because it comes from people who love me, and some who don’t, and I am not interested in dismissing them even when it lands completely wrong. There is something genuinely sad about the fact that the people closest to me, and others who never were close, watched the most grounded and intentional season of my life and reached for a diagnosis instead of a conversation. That is worth sitting with. Not with resentment, but with honesty. The version of me who would have collapsed under that characterization, who would have questioned himself, shrunk himself, performed stability for their comfort? I barely recognize him. I have too much love for myself now to let someone else’s narrative replace my own lived experience.
But I also need to say this clearly: that narrative is incorrect. And it is doing something harmful when it gets repeated, because what it actually does is take the hardest and most grounded work of my life and reframe it as a symptom. It takes my healing and calls it an episode. It takes my clarity and calls it a red flag. It takes the most honest I have ever been in my entire life and calls it a warning sign.
Here is what mania actually looks like. Mania is a reduced need for sleep without fatigue. It is grandiosity untethered from reality. It is impulsive decision-making with no regard for consequences. It is a racing mind that cannot slow down or sit with itself. It is the absence of grief, guilt, and self-reflection, because mania does not pause to feel those things.
Mania does not sit in weekly therapy. Mania doesn’t sleep 8 hours a night and take naps. Mania does not voluntarily walk into a psychiatric facility and ask for help. Mania does not do IFS session after IFS session excavating the parts of itself that caused damage. Mania does not eliminate alcohol and then, in the middle of the hardest months of its life, choose to eliminate cannabis too. Mania does not write public amends to people it hurt. Mania does not feel guilt. Mania does not grieve. Mania does not stay, it runs.
I did all of those things. Every single one of them. Documented, witnessed, supported by my treatment team from all angles, sustained across months.
What looked impulsive from the outside was the result of finally making decisions from my actual values instead of my fear. Deleting my online presence was not an episode. It was removing the performance stage. Dismantling my social circle was not impulsivity. It was finally being honest about which relationships were real and which ones were me people-pleasing my way through life so I never had to be alone with myself. The blog is not a symptom. It is a man processing the most significant internal transformation of his life in the only language he has ever fully trusted.
I have been sober through all of it. Present through all of it. Feeling every single thing, the grief and the guilt and the fear and the loss and the disorientation and the relief and the love, without numbing any of it. That is not what mania looks like. That is what doing the work looks like. That is what self-love looks like when it is unglamorous and grinding and costs you everything you thought you needed. Those two things are not the same and I will not pretend otherwise to make someone else more comfortable with my recovery.
And now I need to say the loud part.
I’m not dysregulating anymore. I’m self-regulating. I’m not spiraling anymore. I’m stabilizing. I can be asymptomatic, regulated, grounded, and still say no with my whole chest. I will say no with a loud enough voice to ensure attention and to be taken seriously. That is not mania. That is a man who finally loves himself enough to hold a boundary without apologizing for it. That is what unrecognizable looks like from the inside. I used to crumble when people questioned my stability. I don’t crumble anymore.
Because that is what this is really about, isn’t it. When someone pathologizes your growth, ask yourself what they are avoiding in themselves. Accountability, usually. The discomfort of watching someone refuse to stay small. The inconvenience of a person who no longer performs for them. Calling it mania is cleaner than admitting that my changes implicate them somehow.
I am no longer tolerating armchair-therapists who weaponize my mental health diagnoses against me. If an unqualified, uncredentialed person, a friend, a family member, a foe, a whoever, tries to pathologize my growth, tells others their diagnosis of me, or goes so far as to use AI to analyze and pathologize me, all to avoid their own accountability, that is their coping mechanism. It is destructive. It is hurtful. It is stigmatizing. It is not my truth, my experience, or my reality.
Me setting boundaries, speaking my truth, ending performances, aborting rescue missions, cutting off unhealthy relationships, ending patterns, stating problems, and refusing chaos is not “mental whatever” or manic bullshit. It is self-respect. It is recovery. It is love. It is what I look like now.
I always giggle when an armchair-therapist seems to know more about bipolar disorder and mania than someone who has lived with it for over twenty years. If I claimed to be some super-expert on something that I am not credentialed in, I would be considered by my psychiatrist to be delusional and acting with grandiosity. But when you do it, you aren’t? Ironic isn’t it. Try again, assholes.
Asserting authority over my mental health experience outside of your scope of practice, if you even have one, is unethical, often illegal, dangerous, and harmful.
And fuck anyone who tries this shit with me. Twice.
Capisce?
I Am Love.
I Am Unrecognizable.
And I Am Cementing It Into Place.
I have arrived somewhere. I want to be clear about that.
It cost me almost everything to get here. The people. The relationships. The identity. The version of myself I performed for thirty-plus years. The crowd I built around myself so I never had to hear the silence. The patterns I ran on autopilot for decades, the ones that were killing me and everyone I touched. All of it, gone. Some of it I chose. Some of it chose for me. All of it was necessary.
What I arrived at, on the other side of all of that loss and work and bleeding and falling and bleeding again and getting back up again, is this: I am love. Not I am trying to be love. Not I am working toward love. I am love. It is not a destination I am still driving toward. It is what I am made of now, what I move from, what I protect every single time I remove something incompatible with it. It is cemented. It is not negotiable. It is not up for debate and it is not a symptom and it is not a phase. It is the most unshakeable thing about me and I built it from scratch in the ruins of everything I used to be.
And I am unrecognizable. Not to everyone, not yet, but to the person who matters most. I passed that guy with the bloody knees and the headphones ten-feet away and four and a half miles still to go, and I do not know him anymore. I passed the guy screaming into the ocean at the pier and I love him and I am not him. I passed the guy who built hundreds of people around himself so he never had to sit with his own silence, and I have so much compassion for him, and I am not going back to him. Not one percent. Not for anything. Not ever.
The people worried about my isolation are worried about someone who no longer exists.
I am not isolating. I am not in a manic episode. I am not shutting down. I am not lonely. I am not going back.
I am Tukayote.
I am love.
I am unrecognizable.
And I am cementing it every single day so nothing and no one can ever take it from me again.
Capisce?
