Highs & Lows

I have been watching the World Cup the way the whole world watches it. On the edge of the sofa, heart going, shouting at a television that cannot hear me. There was a night we went down to ten men with half an hour left. That specific, sickening tightness in the chest. The certainty it was all about to fall apart. And then we won, and the room went up, and for about four seconds I felt something close to weightless.

That is a high and a low, back to back, inside one evening. Millions of people felt the exact same arc at the exact same time. And here is the thing that matters for this whole issue. It was chosen. I turned it on. It was shared. Everyone rode it with me. And it ended. The whistle went, and the feeling was allowed to drain away, and by morning I was level again.

That is what a natural high and low is. Big, real, sometimes overwhelming, but bounded. It has an off switch and a full-time whistle. Keep hold of that idea. In a moment I am going to take all three of those things away.

Bipolar disorder is, at its simplest, a condition of the swing itself. Not sadness, not moodiness. A brain that travels between two poles: periods of depression that can flatten you for weeks, and periods of mania or its quieter cousin hypomania, where mood, energy and speed are pushed far above the line. The person did not turn it on. There is no match on the television to explain it. It just arrives.

In England it is thought to affect around one in fifty adults, and it tends to arrive young. Almost half of the people who develop it do so before they are twenty one. It is a lifelong condition. It is also, and this matters, a manageable one, with the right medication and the right talking therapy and the right people. Managed is not the same as cured. It means learning to live alongside a weather system that lives inside you.

And left untreated, the weather is slow. A manic episode can run for three to six months. A depressive one, for six to twelve. Read that again. Not the ninety minutes of a football match. Months. That is the whole difference in one number. There is no whistle.

I want to be careful and honest here. I have not been handed that particular diagnosis. But I have watched the swing up close, in people I love and lead, and I have felt versions of it move through my own weeks with a mind of their own. You do not need the full clinical picture to know the feeling of a mood that arrives uninvited and refuses to leave when the evening is over.

Let me give you the highs in full, because they are real and I am grateful for them. A private equity firm in Zurich approached us, offering a million pounds for eight and a half per cent of the company. New work keeps arriving. The business carries a ten million pound valuation. And after a lifetime of other people's addresses, I moved into a place that is mine.

Any one of those should be a fortnight of feeling ten feet tall. Together they should be the highlight reel of a life. And standing in my new flat, holding all of it, the feeling was quieter than the moment deserved. The million, by the way: we were approached, we discussed it properly, and we turned it down. Right number, wrong partner, and a company like ours only sells a piece of itself once. Saying no to seven figures was a high and a low in the same breath, which rather proves the point of this issue.

There is a word for when joy goes quieter than it should. Doctors call it anhedonia, the reduced ability to take pleasure from things that used to give it. It is worth knowing the word, because for many people it is the first signal worth acting on, and it is cruel in a specific way. It does not take the good things away. It takes away the volume on them. If your wins have gone quiet lately, that is not ingratitude. It is information.

A long illness leaves a paper trail. When I was unwell for a long stretch, I had to consolidate debt to stay afloat, and that decision followed me. It left me with adverse credit, which is a polite phrase for the fact that I moved into my first home and could not get the electricity or the broadband switched on in my own name. I am building a company valued in the millions, and I have been sitting in it in the dark. That is the kind of joke the illness plays on you.

There is a heavier low, and I am going to be deliberate about how little I say. I am currently having to walk back through the worst thing that was ever done to me, inside a formal legal process. Let me be precise about the direction of that sentence, because it matters. It was done to me. I am in that process as the person it happened to, the one it should never have happened to, and the failures under examination belong to others, including people whose job it was to keep a young person safe. I will not describe it further. I will only tell you that holding something like that at the front of your mind, every day, for months, is its own kind of weather, and it has worn a groove in me. A trauma loop, running quietly under everything else.

Let me go one layer deeper, because the phrase trauma loop is too tidy for what it describes. A trigger is not a memory arriving politely. It is the body answering before the mind has been consulted. A date on a letter, a turn of phrase, a corridor that smells wrong, and the hands have a tremor in them, the chest tightens, the room is suddenly the wrong temperature. Clinicians call it re experiencing, the nervous system treating then as if it were now. And this is the part I want you to keep: the tremor is not weakness. It is a body that learned to survive something doing the job it was taught, years after the lesson should have ended. You do not talk yourself out of it. You breathe it down, you let it pass, and you go to the next meeting, and nobody in that room ever knows.

And my body has been quietly paying the bill my mind ran up. I will leave it there, except to say that the physical cost of carrying all of this is real, and it is the part people never see, because it does not show up in a valuation or a press release.

I will be honest about how that felt, because pretending otherwise would betray the whole point of this magazine. It felt like a kick in the teeth. It made me feel heavy, and rejected, and about two feet tall. I had finally done the brave thing, the thing everyone tells you to do, walked into a room and asked for help, and the answer was that I was too much.

Here is what I have decided that means, once the sting came down. It was not a verdict on me. It was her telling me the truth about the size of her toolkit. And she is not unusual. The front door of NHS Talking Therapies is built for the common, treatable presentations of anxiety and depression, and it does good work for over a million people a year. But it says so itself: it is not designed for the severe, and it names bipolar disorder, psychosis and eating disorders among the things it does not treat. When your history is complicated, you get pointed toward specialist care, and that queue is long and thin. The Royal College of Psychiatrists estimates around 1.6 million people are waiting for mental health care that the headline NHS figures do not even count.

So this page is not really about me. It is for every person who did the brave thing and got told they were too much. You are not too much. The room was too small. We are going to keep saying that until the rooms get bigger.

You hear it from coaches and therapists near the end of their careers. That some of the most driven, most successful people they ever worked with were also the most wounded. Two truths in one person. So capable that no one thinks to check on them. So unwell that no one would believe it. And a quiet, awful question underneath: is the success growing out of the wound?

People use phrases like high functioning depression and smiling depression for this. I want to be accurate, because accuracy is the point of Momentum. Those are informal, everyday terms, not formal medical diagnoses. But they point at something real and under-discussed. You can hit every deadline, close every deal, look completely fine, and be seriously unwell at the same time. Visible achievement is not proof of wellness. Sometimes it is the mask that hides the opposite.

Whether any one founder is the exception or the rule is the wrong question. The right one is simpler. The mask is heavy for everyone who wears one, and putting it down, even for the length of a page like this, is rest of a kind most driven people never give themselves.

Let me put the ledger in one place. A million pound offer we chose to turn down. A ten million pound company. A first home with the lights off. A legal process, where I am the wronged party, dragging me back through the worst of my past. A therapist who sent me away on the day I finally asked. Highs and lows, stacked so close together I could not always tell which was which.

And here is the only line in this whole issue that I need you to keep. I am still here. I helped disabled people through their whole working day. I did four hours of client work in the evening. I am writing this. Plenty of people would have been broken by a lighter version of this year, and that is not me being hard on them, it is me being honest about the weight. I carried it, badly some days, and I am still standing under it.

That is the difference between the natural swing and the unnatural one. The natural line comes back to the middle on its own. The unnatural line does not, so you have to bring it back yourself, by hand, every single day, and getting up is the act of doing that. It is not nothing. On the hard days it is the whole heroic thing.