Having only watched him in the 80’s soap opera Santa Barbara, I was always a fan of Robert Barr the character rather than Roscoe Born the actor, but I wouldn’t be rewriting his storyline if it weren’t for the man himself, his family’s decision to reveal the cause of his suicide and my own bipolar diagnosis in July 2020. Shortly after being diagnosed, I shared the news with a friend who knew me at time when I met the legal standard to be sent to a psychiatric ward against my will, but apparently hid it from him so well, he asked if I was sure I had bipolar disorder. I replied with the link to a song where Roscoe explains and illustrates, more succinctly than I ever could, what it is like to have the form of the disorder that isn’t heralded by a  psychotic break, but rather whispers its arrival with suffocating depression and then waltzes into hypomania that masquerades as charm and charisma to everyone but those few who see the irritability and anxiousness of a mixed state as well. My doctor didn’t even use the word bipolar when telling me my “moods were severely dysregulated.” It was only in googling lamotrigine that I realized what my diagnosis was and then bipolar 2 became my most frequent  search term aside from my habitual self medicating searches on those second class soap operas otherwise known as Real Housewives. If I am completely honest, I have to say that there were quite a few pre medication searches about methods of suicide as well. 

So it is no surprise, really,  that in late October, an article about Roscoe’s death showed up in my google news feed.  Of all the statements made by former castmates, A Martinez wrote most eloquently when he said of  Roscoe “You felt [the] sense of his longing soul – surrendered to it – and let him move you.” That surrender moved me, at 15 and in the midst of my first cycle of creativity and despondency, to rewrite the Robert Barr plotline in my head as an escape during the day and as a way to fall asleep at night. What A describes as longing might be the energy one gives off when caught in a wind tunnel of despair that can turn, overnight, into an ecstatic sense of hope and possibility, an emotional swing that can gain such momentum, the only way to stop feeling terrifyingly ill is to simply jump off. 

Certainly the plot line was a factor when Roscoe abruptly left his job on All My Children, but, in retrospect, it’s possible that bipolar disorder is what drove him off the set that day. When he spoke of that day years later he said, “It was fight or flight…I wanted to go as far away as I could,” that he tried to fly to Australia “but then realized [he] didn’t have [his] passport on [him].”

(Soap Opera Weekly April 22, 2003 pg 32) In a later  interview, entitled Cinderella Man  (zoom in) he said of that impulsive act of “career suicide,”  “It felt like it was the only thing I could do, practically, to save my life.” 

Of the eight major moves I have made in two decades, seven were for exactly that reason. I was in such a state of anxiety and panic, I felt the only way to avoid giving into the desire to die was to be somewhere else, as far away as possible from wherever I was at that moment. When geographical history comes up in conversation and I mention the cities I’ve lived in, people project whatever excitement they assume might come from having traveled from one US coast to the other with a brief stay in the land of kimchi along the way. I smile and say nothing about what really drove me to have such a peripatetic life.

What is most poignant in that later interview is the way Roscoe expresses how he isn’t comfortable talking openly about his struggles. This is especially sad given how  Maurice Bernard’s bipolar disorder was written into his storyline after he experienced a psychotic break. Santa Barbara was likely too tumultuous an environment, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the plot would have been like if bipolar 2 disorder had been written into Robert Barr’s storyline and showed a different experience than that experienced by Bernard’s Sonny Corinthos. 

Nothing I write in this reimagined storyline should be assumed to be what Roscoe Born felt or experienced. Whatever Robert Barr says about his bipolar disorder is what I would say about mine, minus the requisite soapy tropes. However, Robert experiences his depression or hypomania and the methods he uses to cope with it will have a ring of my own truth, not because I want an outlet for all my foibles, but because this disorder is different for everyone and my experience is the only source I have to authentically draw upon. I can’t stress enough that everyone’s experience with the disorder is unique. The only commonality that matters is that we’ve all been on a quest to feel better, whatever methods we’ve tried and the path to awareness and stability is never a straight shot. It’s as individual as the disorder itself and none of us want to walk the road of living with it alone.