The Tiger Can Change His Stripes
After decades without a diagnosis, one man's journey through unresolved trauma, memory reconsolidation, and the biblical case for neurological transformation.
After decades without a diagnosis, one man’s journey through unresolved trauma, memory reconsolidation, and the biblical case for neurological transformation.
By Anthony Bixenman — April 9, 2026
There is a saying that gets handed down like inherited furniture, never questioned, always assumed to be load-bearing: a leopard cannot change its spots. The proverb carries the weight of settled science. People are what they are. Brains are what they are. The patterns etched in childhood will play out until the end.
Anthony Bixenman spent the better part of four decades living inside that assumption — not because he believed it, but because no one had ever given him the language to challenge it. A staff technical support engineer by trade, a musician and theologian whose creative life ignited when he started making art with his daughter — and found himself pulled deeper into it than she ever was — and a pattern-recognition savant by neurological design, Bixenman did what no clinician, no therapist, and no prescribing physician had managed to do in over twenty years of intermittent treatment: he diagnosed himself with Bipolar II disorder.
“I was the only one that raked that hard into my own soul,” he said on the night he completed his clinical intake with the Amen Clinics in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Finally I had received enough tools to troubleshoot my own life.”
The Loop
The popular understanding of unresolved trauma is that it sits somewhere in the psyche like an unopened letter — waiting to be processed, waiting to be dealt with. Bixenman rejects that framing. “It’s not unprocessed,” he said. “It’s heavily processed loads stuck in a loop.”
He is referring to a concept well established in neuroscience: memory reconsolidation. Each time a core memory is recalled, it is not played back like a recording. It is reconstructed, neurochemically, and then stored again. The PBS series The Brain documented this phenomenon in detail — when a memory is accessed, the original trace is temporarily destabilized and must be re-encoded. If the re-encoding happens under the same stress conditions, with the same dysregulated chemistry, the memory does not heal. It simply loops.
For Bixenman, those loops have been running since childhood. At six or seven years old, he found himself gripped by a question that most children never encounter: where did God come from? The inquiry, existential and recursive by nature, opened what he describes as a deep black hole — a cognitive abyss that his young brain had no architecture to close.
“That’s the first one I remember,” he said. “And they just accumulate.”
The Accumulation
The accumulation is not metaphorical. Bixenman’s biography reads like a stress-test protocol designed to find the breaking point of the human nervous system. More than twenty-three relocations by the time he graduated high school at sixteen years old. Early parental loss. Chronic instability. A period during which he was certain he had lost custody of his daughter — an event he identifies as the deepest, most devastating low point in his life. And beneath all of it, running undetected for decades, the cycling of Bipolar II: the hypomanic surges of energy and intensity, followed by depressive crashes that the world around him read as personal failure rather than neurological weather.
The final destabilizing event was, by external measures, mundane: a shift change at his employer, Twilio SendGrid. But in the context of Bipolar II, where circadian disruption is one of the most reliable triggers for mood cycling, it was the equivalent of pulling a pin. Sleep architecture collapsed. The system, already carrying decades of re-encoded trauma, lost its last point of stability.
“That was the final blow,” Bixenman said.
The Framework
What distinguishes Bixenman’s account from the standard narrative of late diagnosis is the framework through which he processes it. He is not a man who has always walked in deep faith. For a long time, he didn’t. But recently he found his way back — relearning church, relearning the Bible, rebuilding a relationship with scripture that had gone dormant. He is now anchored by Romans 8:28 — “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God” — which he describes not as a comfort verse but as a structural axiom, the “pattern of patterns” that governs his interpretive lens.
When asked what the Bible has to say about Bipolar II, his answer is immediate and specific: it doesn’t name it, but it shows it. Repeatedly. In the people God chose most deliberately.
King David, he argues, is the clearest portrait. The Psalms, read as a mood map rather than a devotional sequence, reveal pronounced cycling — from the absolute darkness of Psalm 88, the only chapter in the Bible that ends without resolution, to the ecstatic worship energy of Psalm 150. David hid in caves one season and danced with reckless abandon the next. He was, in the biblical record, a man after God’s own heart. He also cycled.
The prophet Elijah follows a textbook trajectory. In 1 Kings 18, he stands on Mount Carmel and calls fire from heaven, confronting 450 prophets in what reads as a hypomanic episode of extraordinary spiritual intensity. One chapter later, he is under a broom tree, asking God to take his life. God’s response, Bixenman notes, was not a rebuke. It was rest: sleep, food, sleep again, and then communication through a still, small voice. The crash was treated as physiological, not as a failure of faith.
Jeremiah oscillates between prophetic fire and suicidal despair within the span of a single chapter. Paul carries a thorn in the flesh that God declines to remove, offering instead the assurance that divine power is made perfect in weakness. The book of Ecclesiastes, with its refrain of “vanity of vanities,” reads as scripture written from the depressive pole — and it is canonical. It is included. The depressive lens made it into the book because it sees something the manic lens cannot.
“The biblical pattern isn’t that God fixes the cycling,” Bixenman said. “It’s that He uses people who cycle. The depth is the qualification, not the disqualification.”
The Audit
Bixenman is now pursuing what amounts to a full neurological audit. His planned evaluation at the Amen Clinics will include SPECT imaging — single-photon emission computed tomography — which maps blood flow patterns in the brain and can reveal functional abnormalities invisible to standard psychiatric assessment. It is the centerpiece of a self-monitoring system he has designed himself, integrating data from an Oura Ring for sleep and physiological tracking, a Muse S headband for EEG meditation data, and a Neurosity Crown for cognitive state measurement.
He calls it the AB Neural Baseline. It is, in essence, the diagnostic infrastructure he wished had existed twenty years ago.
The clinical intake he completed was, by his own account, the most demanding thing he has done. He was the one who brought the depth. He was the one who traced the pattern across decades. And when it was over, his body did what bodies do after sustained neurological exertion: it shut down. He slept.
“I woke up,” he said, with something close to amusement. And then he kept going.
The Distinction
There is a moment in the clinical literature on Bipolar II where prognosis diverges sharply. The condition identified and monitored follows a fundamentally different trajectory than the condition running silent. The research is unambiguous on this point: self-awareness, targeted intervention, and consistent tracking change outcomes.
Bixenman is aware of the names that haunt the public imagination when it comes to mood disorders — Chris Farley, Robin Williams, figures whose conditions ran unchecked until the system failed. He names them directly, and then draws the distinction.
“They didn’t have what I have,” he said. “They didn’t build monitoring systems. They didn’t pursue SPECT imaging. They didn’t have a stable marriage providing a secure base. They didn’t walk into an intake and rake that hard on purpose, with a plan.”
He paused.
“A tiger can change his stripes.”
It is a deliberate inversion, a refusal of the inherited proverb. Not a claim that the condition disappears, but that its meaning can be rewritten. The same pattern-recognition engine that once spiraled into an existential black hole at seven years old is now building neural monitoring dashboards, mapping biblical mood architecture, and producing a memoir he has titled Flying Through the Tornado.
The stripes are not gone. They are morphing — shifting color as he re-schools himself, re-encodes his brain, and learns to run the reconsolidation process under new authority. It is not finished. He would be the first to say so.
In the language of neuroscience, that is reconsolidation working in a new direction. In the language of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, it is a new creation. In the language of a man who has spent his life troubleshooting complex systems and has finally turned the lens on himself, it is the same hardware running better software.
The tiger does not lose its stripes. It grows new ones.