This internal cross-examination is not a character flaw. It is the result of a condition that affects the very instrument you use to assess yourself — your own mind.
Standing in that arena, I wasn't cross-examining anything. I was just listening. And something in the music was answering a question I'd been carrying for a long time. What is Bipolar Disorder, really?
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from constant self-monitoring. When all available mental energy is consumed by the effort of watching yourself, there is nothing left for the actual business of living. The difference between helpful self-awareness and unhelpful hyper-vigilance isn't always obvious in the present moment — and the gap between them is where a lot of the suffering lives.
What genuinely helps, the research consistently shows, is not more sophisticated solo monitoring. It is shared monitoring — distributing the burden of noticing between yourself and people you trust. A partner, a peer, a clinician. A coach. Someone who can sometimes see what you cannot, because they're not using the same instrument under the same strain. And there's something very unique about sharing with people who also have a diagnosis. Something uncanny about sharing with others who seem to get it, when words alone fail us. A mutual empathy and understanding that doesn't need to be explained.
That night at the O2, the sharing was stranger and more one-sided than that. It was a man on a stage saying something true in front of seventeen thousand people, most of whom probably took it as a performance. I took it as recognition. It was a break through the fourth wall — that invisible boundary between the performer and the audience, between the person on stage and the people watching. For a moment, Colson Baker wasn't performing. He was just a person, saying something true about himself, to a room full of strangers. And I wondered how many others felt what I felt. Statistics suggest around 1,700 people in that audience would have some direct experience of a Bipolar Disorder diagnosis, or know someone close to them who does. Maybe more. That's not a small number. That's a crowd within the crowd — people who, in that single unscripted moment, may have felt exactly what I felt. Seen.
Darcy was next to me when he said it. She's my daughter, and she knows my diagnosis, and she was watching the same show I was watching. Without her interest in Machine Gun Kelly, I would not have been there. I wasn't a fan. I am now.
We haven't fully unpicked that moment. But there's something important in the fact that we were there together. That the recognition happened in public, out loud, witnessed — rather than in the silence of a clinical consultation room or the middle of the night.
Many readers will know Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind. I read it shortly after my diagnosis, and it spoke to me — the way this concert did. Recognition, wherever it comes from, matters more than most people realise.
I found it again in Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey, co-founders of 5th Place. They taught me how to manage my emotions through Emotional Fitness and Shape of Emotion. It is through them that I began to use my own Self Nourishing Action Kit. It is through them that I learned to speak my own truth, as I try to support others on their own journeys.
Because the truth is — for me, it isn't about recovery at all. It's about discovery. Discovering what is true for us, as we try to get on with the actual business of living.
Colson Baker didn't cure anything. Didn't explain it. Didn't make it simpler. He just named it, briefly, in front of a crowd.
And for a moment, the distance between the map and the territory closed a little.
If you live with Bipolar Disorder, you are not the map. You are the territory.
Matthew Bushell is a Certified Therapeutic Coach, Peer Support specialist and Emotional Fitness Practitioner specialising in Bipolar Recovery. He uses his own lived experience of Bipolar II to support others navigating the same terrain.
