All Art Requires Courage – 2/14/10 || 198/365
March 8th, 2010
All ARt Requires Courage – Liz
March 6th, 2010
The Friction In Your Genes
March 1st, 2010It’s not until he mentions it that I realize that he’s funnier than he’s ever been before. I’ve been sitting here, drinking coffee with him—my middle brother, 3.5 years my junior—for an hour, maybe. And I’m just now realizing that I’ve been laughing with him far more than I usually do.
Funnier, yes—and talking fast, loud. I can barely get a word in edgewise as he quips, his words darting faster and all around me. He pulls faces, laughs, then stops.
I feel stupid, because I maybe wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t said anything about it. Quieter, now—“I’m going to go see somebody, one of the counselor’s at school.” He talks about how he’s fucked things up, how he lost his girlfriend of more than a year by being stupid.
He’s the same age I was when I fucked things up. 21 and change. The age where everything starts to come together, when your body feels electric with the burden of the future and the prospects of freedom and responsibility start to wind themselves around your ankles.
And I envy him, if only a twinge, before I am suddenly scared for him.
***
(remember) What it’s like to be told in a room by a man that you have a chronic illness that will never go away. And it’s something that’s inside you—it’s something that you’ve always thought is you. Because it’s in your head—in your brain—it’s hard to separate out the sick part. You start the never-ending data-mining, the perpetual jump through funhouse mirrors—you decide what to keep and what to put away in a box marked “other.”
You are stricken by two dual forces. One. You would never wish this fate on your least favorite person. Think about childhood bullies and mean bosses. You may wish for them to die, but you’d never wish for them to feel this way. Two. There’s a genetic component. A much higher likelihood than you’ll admit that someone you love will do this too.
These forces get inside you and they explode your heart. Pieces of it go everywhere, flying into all of those they love. You understand that quote about your heart walking outside of your body. You live with it every day.
***
And still, I dare to dream about a normal life, ignoring the fact that I took a left turn from normal years ago. Once upon a beautiful time, I had a coherent line of sight. I was engaged, had a wedding planned for June 14th, 2008. I wanted to go to school, get married, start thinking about children.
The words “bipolar disorder” make everything so fucking complicated. When they find out that we’ve been dating for seven years, even casual acquaintances ask about a ring. I laugh it off. I say that we’re taking our time. I don’t mention that we were engaged. I don’t tell them that we’re not engaged now because I contracted a case of the crazies and went about fucking schoolboys while my fiancé worked at 5 AM on Saturdays to pay for my ring. When I think about it, my jaw starts to hurt from the clenching of my teeth. My lungs are filled with air that won’t be pushed out. I take a look at the path at the fucked-up path of burnt-out bridges that lay behind me. How do you explain this? How do you make sense of something that feels so senseless? How do you do anything but move forward, blindly, spouting platitudes and bullshit about taking your time. Taking the long way. Going the whole distance around your ass and still, somewhat improbably, coming out ok.
***
In the review session for my neuroscience final in my first year of medical school, the question is posed: “What is the heritability of Bipolar Disorder?”
The answer I’ve learned to parrot is: “Autosomal dominant, but with partial penetrance.”
In my head, it sounds more like: “You are playing Russian Roulette with your future children’s lives.”
In these moments—among others—I am forced to contemplate the ghost-children who will someday tumble out of my womb, with so much potential for brilliance and pain lying latent their skin.
In the dark, I will whisper to them that my genes do not determine their fate. Then—and now, even now—I will whisper it to myself.
Back to that again
March 1st, 2010I said, “I don’t want to hurt this person, I’ve spend a lot of time trying to deflect their pain”.
“But aren’t you hurting yourself in the process”, he asked.
I said, “In way, yes. But…”
His response, “But what? Isn’t that how it was as a child? You put others before you, you weren’t important. You were made to be responsible for other peoples emotional well being and that’s never the job of a child.”
“Oh” I thought aloud. Back to that. It always goes back to the origin doesn’t it.
If I take care of them, they will at some point take care of me. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? No. That’s how we think it’s supposed to work but it never comes out that way. Not for me anyway. Maybe someone, somewhere (besides Hollywood movies) it’s worked like that. Never for me, yet I keep trying to complete that cycle and I lose myself in the process over and over again.
The source of that thinking, if I can protect the others, take their beatings for them, take the blame, take the spotlight and make it all my fault, I can control it and, somehow make it better.
No one comes out and asks me to do this, it’s one of those wordless agreements that we all make. It’s an entire script, in my head, set on auto pilot.
My therapist suggested (about a year ago) that I needed to have a conversation about that wordless agreement, to tell the other person that I could no longer hold that position. I was losing myself in the process and it wasn’t their fault, but I needed to resign from that job.
Sometimes, I think other people don’t mind that we lose ourselves as long as we serve as a prop for them. (Again, auto pilot behavior.)
Once you’ve established that type of “agreement” it’s hard to move away from it. It takes time, more conversations, discipline. I have discipline to change my behavior, or I’m pretty sure I do. It can be done even if it is like trying to turn a commercial ocean liner.
Funny how it is that I forget this small detail, that I push myself to the side in order to make things better for another person. Not because I’m a martyr, I have ulterior motives (see above “If I take care of them…”).
All this collected crap manifests itself in many ways. Much like plant roots, seeking the water and nutrients it needs to survive all the while hidden underneath the ground never seen by the casual observer.
Until something starts to wilt or die, then the journey begins again to find the source. In order to make it right.
