"Trying to manage his symptoms gets a bit complicated, as we first must peel back the layers of denial, slowly and as painlessly as possible: No, bipolar disorder is a real illness. You know this. We wish it wasn’t so, but it’s here and will always be. There are no magic cures, and there are no missed diagnoses. There are ways to make it tolerable, but it is impossible to make it go away...Some people would call my dips into denial naivety or even stupidity. I sometimes call it hope. But, really, it’s neither. It’s wishing that what’s real isn’t so. It’s looking for a quick fix that doesn’t exist but hoping that we missed something along the way. Is it stigma? I don’t think so, because I do the same sort of denial thing with my own health issues. Rather, I believe it’s one of those steps in the grieving process – I’m mourning what I wanted my life, his life, our life, to be."
--Denial, an Ever-Present TEmptation
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