When the Silence Trembles: Chapter 3

The Naming

The word came in a sterile office with soft gray walls.
“Bipolar.”
It echoed.
Mara stared at the psychiatrist, then at Alex, then back at the floor.
She wanted to scream. To run. To ask if there had been a mistake.
Instead, she nodded.
Diagnosis felt like confirmation and betrayal at once.
At home, she sat in the bathtub and whispered the word to herself.
“Bipolar.”
She didn’t cry.
Not yet.
The tears would come later—when the medication side effects hit, when the stigma whispered through family conversations, when the loneliness became louder than the label.
But for now, she simply held the word.
And let it begin to shape her truth.