RealMental

It’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 14^th, 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.

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I have recently reconnected with someone from my past.

This someone was the most important person in my life for many years.  He was instrumental in my highest-flying moments of joy, and in the worst, dark depths.  He was my best friend and my worst enemy.  In the end, he fulfilled a pattern that had been present in my life since childhood:  the ones who say that they love you are the ones that hate you most when no one else is looking.

I focused almost all my energy alternately on pleasing him and rebelling against him.  Relative to how I am now, people say that I looked smaller then, more like a ghost.  (Physically I’m the same size as I was.)   I was more of a sidekick than a wife.

I don’t blame him.  I know his past, and how it shaped him.  After the divorce, I read that two only children should never marry.  You’ve both been brought up as the centre of attention.  You never had to learn to share.  We were two only children in a battle to be at the centre.  He was dominant.  All our space was his space.  All our plans were his plans.  All our friends were his friends.

And yet, he was my best friend for twelve years.  He was my high school sweetheart.  He had some wonderful qualities.  After I left him, despite how bad things had gotten, I missed him unspeakably.  I felt as though I had chewed off my own leg to be free.

Time passed.  Close to ten years after I moved out, I have reconnected with him online.  I barely thought of him anymore by then, but it was nice to share some memories together, and catch up on news.  We started writing more often, re-kindling the friendship side of our connection.

At first it was fun and easy.  But it’s been getting more difficult for me.  The more I know him now, the more it feels like he’s a real presence in my life, the more all those unresolved feelings come floating to the surface.  There were so many things we never talked about, near the end.

Sometimes after an e-mail from him, I can’t sleep at night.  I wake at 3 am with a pounding, racing heart.  All the insecurities I thought I had outgrown are being triggered, almost as though no time has passed at all.  I thought I had forgiven him, but I had only forgotten.  Now that I’m reminded, I can time-travel back to my old self instantly.

I have to stop, look around at my new home, my new life.  I remind myself what year it is, how old I am.  I look in the mirror and see that I’m different.  As soon as I stop focusing on the now, the past snaps me back like an elastic band.

Why don’t I just cut him off again?  Same reason why I can’t sleep at night.  There are too many unresolved issues begging to come to light.  I hope that if I can weather the anxiety, we might be able to talk through some of the past, and heal it.  He has changed.  He went through his own personal hell, and it humbled him.  I can’t bear to lose him again.  I’m willing to let it be messy, difficult, and awkward.  The possibilities are worth the risks.

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My mom has an incredibly annoying habit of starting conversations with me with the phrase, “What’s wrong?”

Example:  It is the day after Christmas.  I have been downstairs eating cake for breakfast in my pajamas.  I walk up the stairs and see my mom.  Startled, she looks at me.  “What’s wrong?”

Nothing. I say.  I was just eating cake downstairs.  Everything is perfect.

Example:  My mom calls me on the phone and leaves a voice mail.  I return her call.  She answers the phone—no “hello”—but “What’s wrong?”

It wasn’t always this way.

***

I don’t know what it is, what makes her do this.  It unnerves me to no end, makes me feel like she’s always on edge.  I have my theories, of course—that our relationship is forever changed by the knowledge of my mental illness, that she feels guilty that she didn’t know I had so many problems.  Guilty because she discouraged me from getting treatment the first time around.  Scared that it could happen again, a snap of the crazy finger and everything changed, or gone, again.

Once, when I was 21 and in the middle of the arduous task of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I spent the night at home.  It was Daylight Savings Time, the one where you spring forward and lose an hour, the same lost hour that started everything the year before.  The boy and I were both upset—him with me, and me with myself.  In the middle of the night, I slipped out of my bed and left a note saying I had gone to sleep at his house.  Later, in the early hours of the morning, someone shot a gun outside my house.  My parents awoke, saw I was out of bed, and immediately feared for the worst.  I got my mom’s panicked call on my cell phone, out-of-breath and hysterical.

I’m here. I said.  I’m alive.

But it was eye-opening, having a glimpse into the fears they had about my life and my illness.  The fact that they thought it could have been me has always shaken me to my core.

***

An essay on suicide and its presence in my life:

In 2002, a month before starting my senior year of high school, one of my best friend’s fathers committed suicide in the woods outside their house while no one was home.  Her mother, out of town and worried that she couldn’t contact him, called my friend on the phone and my father, brother and I drove home with her.  While we were in transit, he was found dead.  One of his employees knew me and knew that I was a friend of his daughter.  Trying to track her down, they called me.  We were halfway there.  We pulled over in the rain and I got out of the car.  At the age of 17, I had to tell this girl that her father died, that he’d committed suicide.  And then there, in my arms, were the pieces he’d blown apart with his gun.  I held the one who’d been left behind.

Last week, one of my closest friends called me—after a string of numbed-out half-started words, he finally choked out that he’d lost his college roommate.  I went over to his house and we sat outside as he smoked cigarettes.  He told me about the questionable nature of the death, about the erratic driving and an overcorrection of the steering wheel that flipped a car and left its driver DOA.

“His father told me that he’d been on pills, and I knew that he was having some problems.  But nothing like this.  And he never told me how he was feeling.  He never told me.  Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

He was asking because he knows about my experiences with mental illness, because he knows that I’ve been depressed.

So, I told him the truth.  That sometimes we don’t tell the people who are closest to us because we don’t want to change their perceptions of us.  We don’t tell them because we can’t bear the sideways glances, the frightened looks that make us feel crazier.  That we can’t stand the thought of hurting and worrying the ones we love.  That when we tell the closest ones, that’s when it really hits us.  That’s when it’s real.

It’s easy to tell strangers and people you’ve just met.  They don’t have any emotional investment in you or your well-being.  They don’t worry at night or when you call them on the phone.  They never will have to ask you, “What’s wrong,” and be scared of what the answer might be.

So he’s quiet and drunk and upset—all the things I’ve been before, when someone I knew unexpectedly died.  And he looks at me, and repeats himself.  “I just wish he had told me.”

And here I am, once more—holding in my arms one of the ones who’s been left behind.

***

It’s not my intention to proselytize or blame.  I’ve been on both sides of the matter, flipping back and forth like a metronome from experience to experience.  I know what it’s like to wallow in desperation and sadness that feels like it will never end.  I’ve visualized it in my head a thousand times—what it would look like to rake a razor down my wrist, what my feet would look like hanging from a rope or the moment of clarity I would have just as I jumped.  I’ve wished for cars to hit me in crosswalks, and I’ve thought incessantly on rough days of turning the steering wheel and careening into a tree.

But I know, too, about the ones we leave behind.  Friends, family, teachers and acquaintances.  The ones who will sit in doorways, mouths drooping with cigarettes and veins running with vodka, the ones who will ask “why” and “how” and blame themselves, no matter what anyone else tells them to the contrary.  I’ve been there too many times, and the pressure of these times is always enough to push me back.

But in the light of this most recent experience, I feel guilty for being so frustrated with my mother.  She asks “What’s wrong?” because she worries that the time she doesn’t is the time it will matter.  I want desperately to tell her that she shouldn’t worry.  That the truth is that, if that time came, she wouldn’t be the one to know.  No one would.  Our hearts are full of secrets and lies, of deceit and worry and fear, of questions that have no answers.

But I want to reassure her.  I want to reassure all of them.  “Don’t worry,” I want to whisper.  And even if I can’t guarantee it, I’m pretty sure.  If I could, I’d write them all promises.  “No matter what, no matter how hard it gets—I won’t leave you behind.”

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In the ensuing days since December 31^st, I keep finding new bruises.  One on my shin (darkening, still, as of this morning), a smattering of small ones on my thigh and arm.  A large one on the back of my thigh, two square inches and a deep purple-black.  All self-inflicted, not on purpose—not really—but the result of a few hours of banging around drunk.  Purposefully drunk.

Every New Year’s Eve since I turned 21 has been same verse, same as the first.  I have spotty memories of them, woven in and out of drinking games and one final magnum opus, the moment when it all reverses and I vomit until I no longer can.

It’s cleansing, in an exceedingly fucked up way.  I start each new year with an empty stomach and an insidious headache, sleep away that first day.  Sleep away the memories.

That first year—21, the end of 2006, the beginning of 2007—is full of other meaning and connections.  The last time I was completely untethered, the end of the Big Bad Hurt, the almost-end of us.  By the end of the day, January 1^st 2007, I would have lost an engagement.  I would realize, truly, for the first time how close I was to really losing everything.  I would realize that I had lost my mind.

***

My best friend eschews digital cameras, for the most part, sneering at a technology that allows us to have what he refers to as “instant nostalgia.”

This semester, my friend Charlie has dutifully toted his camera around at night, documenting our drinks and the way we sink into each other as the night progresses.  In the mornings after, when I wake up on someone else’s couch [or when he wakes up on mine], I download the pictures into a folder on my hard drive.

I take advantage of this so-called “instant nostalgia,” track all of the pictures he has surreptitiously taken.  Pictures of the side of my head, or my pointed glare into the camera—wielding a smirk, dimples blazing.

And one picture from New Year’s Eve—post-ball drop, at the very edge of my memories.  1/10 of the nights of the year I wore my hair straight and down.  1/3 of the nights of the year I wore high heels.

A genius picture, really—though probably not intentional.  “Serendipity,” as it goes.  “A beautiful mistake.”

On the right side of the picture, I am laughing.  Loud, it would appear.  And on the left side, an expanse of kitchen between us, the same boy who broke an engagement three years ago.  [He’s laughing too].

***

It’s been more than a thousand days since that first year, the first time I ever puked from over-drinking and the day I almost lost everything.  The days since then have seen the biggest changes—I’ve gotten used to nightly meds and psychotheraphy, gotten used to feeling desperate in the grocery store when I’ve forgotten the previous night’s Lamictal.  I’ve gotten used to trying to decipher my moods—and used to sometimes failing.  I’ve gotten used to divulging my bad habits to my best friend and my psychiatrist.  I don’t know if I’ll ever spend a New Year’s Eve without feeling sad, without wanting to empty my stomach or hurt myself crawling up [and falling off] banisters.  And I’ve stopped pretending that I’ll never feel the hard things ever again—I’ll never be done with sadness or frustration or longing.  And I’ve stopped pretending that I’ll ever be 100% ok with the idea that I can’t have a 100% normal life (whatever such a thing is…).

So, on January 1^st of this year, I wrote this:

“At the end of the year, I sometimes feel pretty. And sometimes hurt or overwhelmed. Sometimes filled with soul-shattering longing. Sometimes blessed and fulfilled. Sometimes invincible.”

The most I think about these words, the more I feel the gravity and the truth in them.  The reality of my life is that I have an illness that sparks a shift in emotions, that once swung me in and out of moods that I could barely recognize, much less control.  But now, I get to experience the most beautiful and real emotions—crushing sadness, blossoming anger, the frustration that makes me shake in my shoes.

And happiness.  The kind that leaves you laughing in a kitchen with someone who could have left.  But didn’t.

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[This post is the kind that winds around itself and threatens to lose all who dare to follow.  I apologize, of course—but will try to bring it home.]

It starts—or ends—here, with a yellowing bruise on my hip the size of a half-dollar.  Unintentionally put there, a mistake that he didn’t realize he had caused.  If he had realized at the time, he would have switched his face immediately.  I’ve seen it a few times—a shoulder to the sternum or my hands contorted around my metal back—then the abrupt stop, the gasping gaping mouth.  The hands laid flat across my spine as I catch my breath.

***

Winter 2006—I was filling out one of those anonymous surveys on my stupid MySpace page.  I was supposed to be finishing a medical school application but was distracted.  By everything.

One of the questions asked, “What are you not?”  I was insanely jealous of the answer my friend Allison had put—it was so self-assured, so positive.  I thought for a few minutes before I answered.

A strong person, I wrote.

***

I was a feisty child, surrounded by rough-and-tumble brothers and built of a certain solid stock.  My body accumulated bruises and scars over the years—the gouge on my hand from a fight with my brother, the scars on my knees from rock climbing and dog bites, the permanently swollen knuckle and swan-necked finger that resulted from one memorable wrestling match, age 20, that required an entire month of PT to resolve.

But somewhere along the way, I lost that sense of fierceness.  I gave in to pushing touches and piercing glances.  Sucker-punched by words that were supposed to be compliments.  I felt so out-of-control.  So fucking weak.

“What are you not?”

“A strong person.”

***

I don’t know if he’ll ever fully realize how much he’s given to me.  There was just something about his constant challenges, the purposeful pokes that incite me.  There’s nothing like the feeling of an impending spar, the first things that make me stop and ball up my tiny fists.  I know I’ll never win—he’s much bigger and much stronger—but there’s something in the fight that thrills me.  There’s something about being pushed back and attacking again—raising my fists after hitting the floor, arching my back down and charging or kicking as I’m held above the floor.

I never had an older brother, but I imagine that this is what a childhood with one looks like.  There’s something brilliantly beautiful in the futility of it all.  There’s a certain passion that blushes up through me, that warms me up and makes me feel alive.  Alive and strong.

***

Sometimes, on Tuesday afternoons, I go to pilates class.  I’m not terribly good at it, but I am always inspired by the instructor.  She’s bubbly and thin, uses weird phrases for different muscles, and is unfailingly supportive.

So, one week, I push myself into a plank, and I hold there for a minute.  And she squats down beside me and places her hand on my back to steady me.

“Look!” she says.  “See how strong you are?”

And it hurts, but I nod and smile.

***

I will never feel invincible.  There is always something else, pushing and testing me.  There’s always a hurt or a need or an aching longing for something else.  There is perpetual stress, constant working and chronic exhaustion.  But on a Monday night, I spar in the living room of my best friend’s house, the room where I’ve been tossed to the floor and spear tackled onto the ottoman and dragged across carpet and picked up until I screamed in frustration.

It’s not until later that I notice my hip is in acute pain, throbbing from the force of being thrown sideways into a couch.  I realize that I didn’t notice it before because I was so engrossed in the fight, obsessed with picking myself back up and throwing myself back into a losing battle.  Over the next few days, a bruise blooms into the most lovely battle scar, a sore memento that I fawn and fret over.  That I’m proud of.

There are so many fights, you know—I fight to be treated fairly, I fight to get what’s mine.  I fight over silly things and important things, and I fight the world and myself equally.  And at the end of the day, worn out from fighting, I go to bed tired but filled.  Filled with a certain feeling of strength.

***

“What are you not?”

“A weak person.”

“Look at how strong you are.”

“I know.”

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In that period of time I mentally call the Big Bad Hurt—April 2, 2006-December 2, 2007—I found myself in bed with a series of boys.  Always in bed, often through the night—but never sleeping.

Even after they would fall asleep—as they inevitably would—curled around me and snoozing like infants, I would lie awake for hours.  Crunched up in their arms, suffocating and guilty.  Hours and hours of staring at the ceiling, thinking too fast.

The mania didn’t help, as it never does.  It was an amalgam of factors, the natural loss of sleep I’d be getting when I was manic, added to the guilt and the suffocation.  I hate to be touched in my sleep and hate, even more, being cuddled when I’m tired.  A lifelong and unapologetic thumbsucker, I need to lie in a certain position to drift off.  But they never cared, never paid attention.  Just wrapped me up too tightly in their arms and dropped off, never caring if I joined them on that other side.

Except once, in the middle of the Big Bad Hurt—I got drunk in my house when my parents were away.  Joey and I weren’t “together”—we were on the break that would last from my birthday and for a little less than two weeks.  The same night I fell out of bed and he helped me back in.  Then let me turn on my side, like I prefer.  He didn’t wrap me up in octopus arms, but just let me be.  And calmly fell asleep beside me.

I woke up next to him the next morning, and I knew.  I knew that he was the one.  I knew that he was the person I was supposed to be with—after all, I’d fallen asleep with him.  Of all the boys I’d ended up in bed with, he was the only one who I could actually sleep with.

It takes a great deal of comfort, I guess, and a level of trust to fall asleep with someone.  With him, it was so natural, so unmanufactured.  I didn’t have to fake it with him. I never had to fake anything with him.

I was lucky, you know.  I was lucky that we made it through the Big Bad Hurt.  Truth be told, I’m lucky that he had the dedication to make it through.  That he stayed.

Every night, now, I get to drift off beside him, perfectly calm and sleepy.

And sometimes, when he’s staying at a friend’s house until late or staying up to play games on the computer, I fall asleep on his side of the bed, just so he’ll have to wake me up and move me over.  He wakes me up to move, and then I drop right back to sleep.  Just like then.  Just like always.  Perfectly calm.  Or, simply put, just perfect.

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People don’t understand the ways that a chronic illness is different from an acute one.  It’s hard, until you’ve experienced it, to grasp the nature of the flux of day-to-day symptoms and management.  People don’t understand how well we have to know ourselves, how we have to track our changes.

We’re expected to be our own mind-readers, to know when things are moving up or down.  We keep journals and calendars and second-guess our feelings.  I try to stay ahead of myself, but sometimes it is only through the worn-out glasses of hindsight that I am able to say, man, I was crazy last week.

But even harder than keeping track of my own moods, I find, is knowing what to do when I realize that I am flailing or sinking or rising too quickly.  I can see that I need help, but I don’t know how to ask for it.  I never know how to ask for it.  I’ve tried, once or twice.  But I’m bad at being explicit—it always comes out jumbled and obtuse.  I can’t find the right words, even when I’m with my best friend or my psychiatrist.  I don’t know how to tell people that I’m hurting, that I need a rescue.

***

I’ve been at a conference all week.  On Monday, we arranged ourselves to have a picture taken.  Because I am short, I naturally got punted from the third row into the first.  There, I was placed beside an older man.  He turned to me and spoke with a European lilt, asked if our weather is always this nice in November.  I told him that is generally is, and we chatted further for a few minutes.  After the pictures were done, we started to walk away—he asked my name, and I looked down and commented, “Oh yes, I forgot to put on my name tag today.”

And he replied, “Oh, I couldn’t have seen it if you did.”  Then, he reassembled his cane, grasped the arm of a nearby man and walked off, yelling behind him, “Oh, I’m speaking tonight!”

***

He was amazing to watch; he started out his presentation by commenting on his blindness.  He has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic degenerative disease.  He was diagnosed in his thirties with degenerating sight, and now can see almost nothing.

But more amazing to me than his adaptations and obvious intelligence—which were nothing less than incredible—was the ease with which he asked for aid.  He was unobtrusive and unapologetic—if he needed guidance, he simply asked for it.  I watched as he passed himself between colleagues, grasping for their arms with an ease that was simple and beautiful.

I wish for this ease; I covet it with the most jealous and evil parts of my soul.  I wish for the grace to ask for help, I wish for the suspension of ego that would allow me to say, “Here I am, lost.  Please take me somewhere else.  I need you to guide me.”

I yearn to someday be able to take someone’s arm and say “Please help.”  But more than that, I worry I will never be able to.  And that, I think, scares me more than anything else about my disorder.

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