In the Fog

It doesn't announce itself. One day the world has edges and the next day it doesn't. Colors go flat. Sound pulls back. Everything blurs into a continuous gray, and you can't say when it started.

I lived in that gray for a long time before I knew what it was.

Fifteen years in sales teaches you to keep moving. The fog is invisible if you move fast enough. Coffee handles the mornings. Structure handles the fog. Meetings, calls, targets, the relentless forward momentum. If the operating system glitches, you just run faster. The diagnosis of Bipolar II came late, in my early fifties, after decades of invisible management.

The word diagnosis sounds clean. It isn't. It's an explanation for a thousand small failures that seemed like character flaws. Mornings when getting out of bed felt like pushing a boulder uphill. Weeks where the joy just went missing, not in a dramatic way, but the way fog erases a coastline. And the other thing, the version I understood even less—the periods when my mind would fire on seven cylinders and I could sell anything, close anything, see three moves ahead of everyone else.

I thought that was the good version. Turns out good and bad live closer together than I wanted to know.

What surprised me most wasn't the diagnosis. It was recognizing how much energy I'd spent hiding it. Not lying exactly. Just the years of saying I was fine when I wasn't. Attributing the fog to work stress, poor sleep, not enough exercise. Finding a framework that made it acceptable. In sales culture, you don't say you're struggling. You're executing. You're taking care of it.

The first person I told was my wife. I remember how vulnerable that felt, like confessing something shameful instead of something medical. The fear underneath wasn't about judgment. It was the fear that if I named it out loud, it would become real in a way I couldn't manage.

It was already real. I just had to stop performing around it.

After the diagnosis came the learning curve. Not the medical part, the psychological part. Understanding that the fog isn't a failure of will. That the periods of elevated energy aren't enlightenment or just a good month. That having a condition doesn't mean being the condition. The difference matters more than any other distinction I've had to make in leadership.

A lot of people hear diagnosis and think fate. I have Bipolar II, therefore this is who I am now. The mind locks around it. But having Bipolar II is like having blue eyes or a metabolic condition. It's a thing the system does. It's not the whole system. The question shifts from what I am to how I work with what I work with.

That distinction changed everything.

I started keeping notes. Not journaling, which always felt performative. Just tracking when the fog came in, what the edges of it felt like, when it lifted. After a few months, the pattern emerged. I could see it coming. The sleep would shift first. Then the appetite. Then the fog would settle. There was no stopping it. But I could recognize it.

Recognition is the first power you get back.

The second power was permission. I stopped scheduling the way I used to. Stopped pushing through the fog as proof of capability. There were days I told my team I was taking the morning, and I took the morning. Not hiding in bed, but managing my operating system instead of pretending it was all high performance all the time.

In sales culture, that looks like weakness. Every metric, every incentive structure tells you to be on all the time. The year I stopped believing that narrative was the year my leadership actually improved. Because I showed up differently when I showed up honest instead of performing fine.

I told a close handful of people I trusted. My direct team needed to know. The reality, not the medical details. Some weeks I'm going to be more available than others. I'm managing something underneath. It doesn't affect my ability to do this job. It affects the rhythm of how I do it.

The relief in the room was visible. People started being real too. About their struggles, their patterns, the things they'd been hiding. Once the leader said I'm managing something, the permission rippled out.

Being true to myself meant being honest first to myself, then to the people close to me. Not broadcasting it. Not making it the whole story. Just refusing to pretend anymore.

The fog still comes. It always will. But I know what it is now. I know it's not permanent and I know it's not me. It's a thing that happens in the system, and I have some tools to work with it. The coffee helps. The structure helps. The medication helps. The acceptance that this is how the system works helps most of all.

Leadership looks different from the other side of that acceptance. Less grinding, more attentive. Less about projecting capability and more about actual presence. When you stop performing fine, you have more energy for the things that actually require it.

Some leaders will think this is TMI. That vulnerability is a liability. I used to think that too. The truth is the opposite. The vulnerability costs something upfront. But the performance I was maintaining before cost everything. The person who can't tell the truth about what he's working with is the person who can't be trusted in the room.

The fog is still there. But now I can see. That changes everything.