So, I'm the type of guy who can switch from chilling in bed with a beer at sunset to pancakes and coffee before settling in to watch Thursday Night Football—the Icy Hot Bowl, they're calling it—with two old geezers, i.e., Flacco vs. Rodgers. Gee, if they're old, I think to myself, what does that make me? I'm no spring chicken. Hell, I'm not even autumn poultry, come to think of it.

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I was thinking of that—or something along those lines—when I pulled the comforter and felt the heavy fabric snag a hangnail on the big toe of my left foot. I yelped in pain, not in the least bit comforted. Neither by the fabric nor the score of the game. But it made me think of a saying I’ve got tucked away somewhere in the back of my mental—one for occasions like this: "Life is a blanket too short..."

​It’s an old sentiment, but true: no matter how you pull it, you either expose your feet to the cold air or your chest to the draft. You can never cover both. That uncomfortable gap is where I live, and it’s why I came up with my own third maxim. I already had the two I’d picked up along the way—love is for someone and trust is for self—but I needed one to describe my perpetual state of spiritual and chemical limbo. My third maxim is this: It's for single men dealing with bipolar, trying to live in the divine joy of being a Nobody in his daily Life.

​Defining the Divine "Nobody"

​The concept of the Nobody isn't a badge of failure; it’s a form of profound spiritual peace. It is the ego-release. A Nobody is a man who doesn’t need to be seen, validated, or celebrated. He is content to simply be present, unburdened by the pressure to achieve "Somebody" status—to write the great American novel or run a startup or be the life of the party. The joy I speak of is found in small, ordinary moments: a good cup of coffee, the warmth of the sun, or a brief, uncomplicated thought.

​But aspiring to this humble, quiet peace is a uniquely grueling task when your own mind is chemically committed to chaos. The blanket of life is not just too short; it’s perpetually on fire at one end and frozen solid at the other.

​The Bipolar Friction

​The cycles of my illness are a direct, powerful resistance to the quiet stability required of a Nobody.

​Mania is the ultimate, loud, and confident rejection of humility. It demands I be Somebody. It’s a rush of grand ideas, obsessive projects, and an intense, almost alarming need for external validation. It’s the ego amplified to an unbearable volume, convinced of its own brilliance and destined for glory. You can't be a Nobody when your mind is convinced you’re one thought away from solving the world’s great mysteries.

​Conversely, depression does make you a nobody, but only in the worst possible way. It’s a state of hollow, empty insignificance, where the self is nullified not by conscious, spiritual choice, but by chemical drainage. The world fades to grey, and I am rendered irrelevant not because I chose peace, but because the ability to feel any joy—divine or otherwise—is gone. The struggle, then, is the inability to simply choose the modest middle ground; the brain mandates the dramatic swings.

​The Unreliable Self

​This tension connects directly back to my other maxims, specifically the challenge of "trust is for self." How can one place trust in a self that is chemically unreliable, a narrator prone to radical swings in confidence and judgment? The illness makes the self a stranger, and being a single man only intensifies this lonely battle. When self-reliance is mandatory, but the self is unstable, the simple act of living becomes an act of high-wire maintenance.

​The journey of the "Nobody" with bipolar disorder is not about eliminating the condition—that is often outside my control. Instead, the real victory is in managing the chemical noise just long enough to aspire to that quiet, ordinary state. The profound spiritual peace is not the starting point; it is the ultimate goal of the struggle. The true win is finding a single, ordinary day where the small, uncomplicated joy of being a Nobody—just a man watching football with a hangnail—can be felt.