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.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

I see myself as scatter-brained but loving. And loved.

If I thought you cared and you were listening, I would tell you I have a bipolar depression and anxiety disorder diagnosis. Sometimes I wonder if the drugs are working, or if it’s a misdiagnosis because I feel pretty good these days. Then I forget to eat or take my meds or I drink too much and I fall down the hole again. Some days I want to do so many things, and others I want to do nothing but sleep. I can’t focus on getting good at one thing, or getting one thing done well. Why can some people manage and lead well but other struggle?

I am struggling with so much distraction. And I eat too much to soothe my anger and frustration. I want to get unstuck and feel untrapped.

Something I have been keeping a secret is how upset it makes me that I don’t have a child, and how I am so frustrated with my husband. I would like to adopt a child but he has said that is a deal breaker. I have examined, at length, why I want a child so much. Is it selfish to want a kid? Is it selfish to not want to raise a child? I’m not right with this. I put on a happy face to make my friends feel comfortable, my husband happy, and my parents satisfied.

I am trying to think positive and something I’m good at is connecting people. And I love learning new things and meeting new people. Pretty simple.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

Where do I go from here? Once again I feel my life spiraling out of control and have nothing with which to stop it. I am a logical person. I know what I should do to make myself feel better, however I seem to have no way of stopping myself from doing what I shouldn’t do.

When I get nervous and feel disliked in a situation, I drink. When I am manic and feeling like the world is mine and everyone should bow to my amazingness, I drink. When I drink, I inevitable fail and the all consuming guilt spirals into depression.

This weekend I celebrated my friend’s birthday. Her friends don’t like me. Perhaps the best thing was not for me to point out how one particular friend of hers doesn’t even say hello to me and shoots daggers at me with her eyes. They make me feel uncomfortable and she herself, always seems to want me to act a different way, or be a different way, and I try to tell myself it’s all in my head and than I feel bad, but perhaps maybe it isn’t.

That night, I separated myself from the group. Instead of talking to them, I talked to strangers. People who didn’t make me feel disliked and uncomfortable. People who listened to me and didn’t tell me I was talking too loud or act as if I was embarrassing them. They left me at the restaurant and I had to find my own way to the bar. Then, they left me at the bar and I had to get myself home. No matter how poorly I was behaving, how can that be the way to treat a friend?

Here I go again. One more friend down. When you only have 3 left it’s a sad and lonely place to be.

Being bi-polar is not conducive to friendships, and those you do find generally are engaged in the same self destructive behavior you should avoid like the plague. It gets you nowhere real fast. Yet, no matter how many times I am told “it’s not my fault”, no one else seems to believe it or wants to take the effort to understand that. And sometimes I just don’t believe it.

Whose fault is it if not mine? I’m the one who chose to have sex with strangers, to put things up my nose that shouldn’t go there and to put that glass to my lips over and over again.

Today I made it out of bed, albeit late, and I will drag myself to the gym and remember each hour that passes is another chance to begin again.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

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.”

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

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.”

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

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.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

I know last week I promised to smile this week.  Whatever image you have of me in your head- take it and make it smile… now.  Okay I am currently smiling. 1… 2… 3… and done.  That is about as much I can muster for now but know that I have smiled and laughed and plan to keep trying.  I just can’t seem to translate it into my writing.  Sorry folks, I did try.

One of the harder parts of life now may be remembering how little control I have over the rest of the world.  Man, isn’t that awful.  Why am I not in charge of things?   I could totally handle the rotation of the planets around the sun or the shift changes at the drugstore.  So there is no doubt that I am perfectly able to be the boss of everyone around me.  If I could just make them dance when the music plays and tell them who is out when the music stops my life would be so much better.  Or is that a silly game people play when things don’t go right and they feel helpless?

I am getting tired of the flip of the coin feeling that is becoming my life.  Heads- you win.  Tails- you lose.  Call it in the air but call it right and think hard about what you are playing for because you may or may not want to win.

Currently I am sitting on a four-poster, Ethan Allen canopy bed that I got slightly used but free from an online moms group and that is awesome.  I also found a bug crawling up the sheet trying to get to my pillow and scheming to then eat me.  Not awesome.

A lovely woman from my son’s school who I thought was sort of my friend begrudgingly has been inviting me places and took a moment out of a conversation to tell me she considers me a close friend.  Yeah me!  Another friend who I adore is consumed by a very demanding job and other responsibilities so despite the fact that I feel like we have buckets in common and could talk endlessly, I must be content with a few hours on a Sunday afternoon every three or four weeks.  Boo.

I have found that I newly enjoy the jewelry making that I left behind several years ago when my second child was big enough to think the beads would make good teethers.  However that craft was one I learned as part of the beginning of a near-clinical breakdown.  I spent $1000.00 on beads.  If you didn’t know- that is a boat load of beads.  But I went on to become pretty good at it and incorporated it into my business years later, making back a chunk of the money.  I love, love, love the new-kid-fun of the jewelry- even in the middle of a depression.  Hazzah to me and my craftiness!  But I am also tempted by the glitter of the sun in the bead store window and have to re-learn to pass it by and also try not to think of the beading as the prelude to intensive therapy.  Not so much with the hearty hazzah.

50% of the time (situations) it seems like all is well and I should kick back and try to let my shoulders drop.  The other 50% I am flailing, getting the raw end of the stick or losing out on something.  So how the hell am I to know if I should be depressed or thrilled?  Maybe I should be constantly riding along the median strip, never crossing into one lane or the other?  Isn’t that the opposite of living?  But depression as it gets deeper is no way to live either so I have to physically and mentally force myself to TRY to get better even when complacency is so much easier.

What matters is not the easy or the hard but the right.  Today I hate the right but I need it and want it in spite if that and so I am doing what I need to do as best as I know how.  I will hydrate, I will try to sleep just enough, I will eat appropriately, take the right medicines.  I will try not to seclude myself from the world even when it is not fun.  I will do all those things people tell you to do.

Here is the secret though: I know that some of you understand what I mean by saying that deep down- 50% of the time I want to be the boss and 50% of the time I am pleading for someone else to be the one to call it in the air.  It always comes down to heads or tail and I am just hoping that I’m not dealing with a trick coin.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

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.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

When I was in middle school or so, we all passed around this book about a girl with bipolar disorder (or “manic depressive” or whatever they were calling it in the early 80s) called “Lisa, Bright and Dark.”  If memory serves me correctly, the chapters had black or white circles as headings, to indicate whether Lisa’s mood was going to be up or down.

Hoss doesn’t come with easy-to-spot headings.  Truth be told, I can’t say for sure he’s bipolar (the latest documentation said “mood disorder NOS”) but he’s certainly got some pretty clear up times and down times.   He’s not nearly so extreme at either end as he used to be (thank you, risperidone!) but his moods do swing a bit more broadly than most people’s do.  All of Hoss’ trusted adults (and he has a myriad- Hubby and myself and grandparents and his aunt and uncles on the home front, teachers and administrators and school psychologists and counselors and special educators and before/aftercare staff in the school building, a panel of mental health professionals…) have learned to recognize the subtle indications.  He gets a bit of a wrinkly forehead when darker moments start to emerge, and a tendency toward cocooning into his hoodie sweatshirt.   We give him his space then, and watch carefully from a comfortable distance.   The corner of his mouth hints at a smirk and starts most of his sentences with “hey, guess what…” when he’s about at risk of getting too hyped up.  Most days fall somewhere in the middle.  More days fall in the middle than they did a year ago, and certainly more than those scary weeks last spring, and for that I am more thankful than I know how to say.

Nights are harder to judge or react to.  Some nights (and mornings), he sleeps so soundly, so deeply, that no amount of the dog barking or bright lights or tickling him causes much of a twitch.  Other times, the dreams that he can’t articulate shake him to the core.  Sometimes I check on him before I turn in, and the bedsheets are twisted tighter than a pretzel from his tossing and turning.  I fix them as best I can, and tuck him back in as comfortably as I can manage.  I was watching the late news one night last week, when I heard a breathy, high pitched moan.  Before I could even move to investigate, Hoss had scurried down the hall and launched himself into my lap, face buried in my shoulder.  Talking made his tearless sobs and breathing more agitated, so I just held on.   He doesn’t always remember the dreams later on, and if he’s anything like his Mama, sometimes he won’t remember the dreams even in the moment.  

 I guess that’s all I can do when the nights get rough- hold on to Hoss and try to smooth things out.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what we have to do every day, too.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

It’s starting to be autumn here—creeping, slowly but surely, through the windows and the trees.  Each morning is a little cooler, and it’s almost unnecessary to keep the air on at night.  I’ve picked back up the habit of leaving my car windows open when it’s too cold, blowing the heat on my feet so I don’t freeze up.  I remember starting this, in the almost-autumn of 2006.  A lot of things were starting then.  I was about to go completely crazy, and I didn’t know it yet.  I wouldn’t know until after the fact.

So the autumn brings the memories, brings them in viscerally.  As it gets colder, I will keep remembering.  I won’t stop.  I will try to, sometimes.  But they get stuck inside me, stuck on repeat.  They are skipping records, spinning in my abdomen.  The echo is enough to drive you crazy.

Or, at least, crazier than you are already.

They get exacerbated by new memories, by the phrases tossed around by friends.  One of my closest friends from medical school is on her psych rotation, and she had the distinct pleasure of doing a home visit for a man in an acute manic phrase.

“I know he’s sick,” she said, “but I couldn’t help thinking ‘This is someone I’d want to hang out with.’  He made us mix cds, and he was wearing these huge glasses.  He was…fun.”

I don’t want to be sarcastic, because I love her and, anyway, her perceptions give me new perceptions.  It’s like looking at someone looking into my past and describing me.  But still, in my head, I want to quip, real sardonic, like I am these days: “Fun…yeah, that’s one word to describe it.”

On bad bad days, when I’m beaten down and feeling miserable, I worry that I will never feel that euphoric again.  People want to be that, don’t they?  Euphoric?

[Hey all you bipolar people—let’s tell the world our secret.  Euphoria is unnatural.  The kind of happiness that shouldn’t exist, the kind that is only possible with spazzed-out neurons and illegal drugs.  It’s a dangerous feeling, in that you will always want to chase it.  Don’t you want to be happy?  What’s wrong with being happy?]

Not to leave out all the normal people.  Hey normal people, over here!  Welcome to my Mind Fuck.

Every day, I make the conscious choice to file my memories into piles and folders.  Memories of cheating, of lying and manipulating, of sleepless nights spent pounding coffee and writing plays, short stories, poetry—collate into folder marked “BAD.”  Memories of time spent getting out of that hole I’d dug myself, memories of therapy breakthroughs and the first time he said “I’m sorry,” after all that—pile overflowing the “GOOD” box.

But there’s always the shadow of everything that was.  Where do you file the memory of someone else putting on your motorcycle helmet because you always fuck it up, the conjoined memory of your hands in the air, 70 MPH on city streets at 4 AM [File it BAD, Jenny.  File it BAD.].  When you think about winding red ribbon around your favorite book and giving it to someone else—this book is about love, you think.  When you are crazy, you think you have the power to make everyone see everything—you think you can make people love you [FILE IT BAD, GODDAMMIT—DON’T THINK ABOUT IT—JUST DO IT].  Every moment when you felt beautiful or brilliant or sexy, every moment when you thought you were spinning the world with the electricity in your heart [BAD—BAD—BAD].  Everything you worry you will never feel again.

I put those things in the BAD folder, sure.  But the Shadow keeps wanting to pull them out.  So I re-file them, once or twice or a hundred times a day.  But sometimes I worry that the Shadow will pull them out, and that they’ll sit on the desk in the sorting pile while I stare at them.  That I won’t remember why they’re so bad in the first place.  That I’ll drop them somewhere else, or just pick them up and inhale their dusty pages.  That I’ll tumble into them, like some movie for children.  Except it’s not a game.  It’s my life.  It’s the life that I’ve put everything too.  It’s the whole life, everything I have to lose.

So, I focus on generating more memories, to hang on the wall over the GOOD box.  So I’ll remember:

-That I feel beautiful when I catch a glimpse of my eyes in my rearview mirror

-That I feel brilliant when I finally work out a mechanism, when I take something apart with my hands and put it back together, better than it was

-That I feel sexy when my boyfriend picks me up in the kitchen [though I’m wearing glasses and a pair of umbrella-print underwear, and I’ve got morning hair] and throws me onto our bed

-That every day, I get the chance to spin the world with the electricity in my heart.

Tweet This! Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post