The confusion hysterical

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before: but I was homeless once. 

It’s true. It was the summer in between semesters in the year 2004. I had wrecked my car the April before the end of the semester and could not return to my moms house, seeing as how I did not have a car to get to any job. She lived in a semi rural area and a car was a must. I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have wanted 21 year old me around all the time either. 

So instead I elected to stay in the New York City area, where I had gotten my first retail job at the Urban Outfitters on 14th and 6th. My father, who lived very close to the city, and I had a very rocky relationship at the time. Looking back on it now I can’t blame him for the way he reacted to me. At the time I was an unpredictable loaded cannon. I hadn’t been diagnosed yet. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me. Yet I spent my nights doing whatever drug I could find with whoever would do them with me. That was a surprising amount of people. Well, maybe not so. I was an attractive twenty something who was featured on the most popular alt porn site on the web. 

Either way, that summer is known as ‘the summer with no home’ for me. 

And I was oddly okay with that.

Maybe it was the invincibility I felt as a 21 year old. Maybe it was the fact that, for some reason, I felt entitled to things. 

Looking back, it was the best summer of my life. I had a job. I had very little bills. And if shit really went down I could quit my job and go to my moms. I had a back up. And I could go to my dads during the week as long as he was home. The crux of the matter is that he didn’t want me there when he wasn’t, which was every weekend when he went away. Again, I don’t blame him. At the time I had an extreme tendency to steal liquor and bottles of champagne that had been lingering since their wedding when I was 17. 

I had couches to sleep on. And when I couldn’t find a couch I found a good looking guy or girl to sleep with for the night. 

I came away unscathed. I acquired neither herpes nor HIV. 

I remember doing heroin in Brooklyn. I remember shooting for the first time simply for the thrill of it. I watched him take the needles from the packages. He had been a paramedic. I guess he stole his needles. I got my own.

At the time I didn’t care.

I threw up in Union Square.

I remember the night before my uncle Lenny’s funeral I had my own distorted Irish wake for him. I drank too much. I did too many drugs.

Because at the time I though that is what he would have wanted.

I know better now.

I like to say that I have lived more than most people my age. And to be honest, I probably have. I have seen more than they have. I have lived more. I have more perspective than they do.

And yet some would say I lay behind.

But,

I do not want to own property.

I do not want a career.

I feel it is all a fleeting thing that means nothing in the end unless you really and truly helped someone or something along the way in a completely altruistic way. 

And now, since I have the time, I look back on that summer and what it meant to me. I look back on it all and wish I could do it over again.

When the low point begins I feel it first in my head as a physical symptom. I feel a sort of heat. A static heat. It does not move into my cold fingers or icy toes. It does not keep me from shivering. It stays in my head and throat. It keeps me from speaking well, it keeps me from self expression. It keeps me on a loop d’loop like a mentally challenged hamster on a wheel. If I do speak, my voice quivers in short waves and I begin to cry a little. So I keep my mouth shut much of the time when I am like this. 

I think of pleasant ways to expire. Jumping from scenic vistas to a soundtrack of Belle and Sebastian and readings from Anne Sexton. Something real pretentious like. Something that would be at the end of a B rated independent film in very limited release. 

My moods are a waveform.

To say I wish I was like everyone else is the understatement of the century. 

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3sd8d4/

Sometimes, that’s the way it is. I wake up and think of things that are new to me, as if I am a child again. I want to write and paint. I want to create. 

And then I think, ‘Is this me? Or am I merely going into a period of mania?’ 

It is at that point that I approach everything with trepidation. Not a moment or a smile or a laugh goes without a second guess. Is this me? Or is this who I would like to be now? Is this mania? Or is the medication doing what the doctors say it will do, the thing that has evaded me all these years?

Perhaps I should go back to sleep. I can fly and tame wild horses in my sleep. I can ride them without bridles before taking off again. 

It is rather contrived, but I feel like Jekyll and Hyde. I am at the end of the story, and he doesn’t know which one is which anymore. Perhaps I will be found in my clothes, but I will be another person, a letter will be in my hand. 

Or maybe I will be found like Poe instead. In another mans clothes, voted in a sinister fashion, drunk, and dying. My face and eyes will yellow. I will stagger. I will murmur strange things. I will leave ravens and plaster busts of Paris. 

Or maybe, like all Americans, the only things I will leave behind are receipts and outstanding debts. 

I haven’t said much about the shootings in Connecticut. I have my opinions, but I haven’t expressed them. 

But I am going to say now that perhaps mental health care should be more readily available and that perhaps mental illness should not be as stigmatized as it is. But of course we won’t tread in those murky waters. Instead, we as a society will swim the Olympic size swimming pool that is gun control.

Honestly though if someone wants to go on a rampage they’re going to do it; gun or no gun. There are knives. There are moltov cocktails. There is fertilizer that one can make bombs out of. You can make your own mustard gas by mixing bleach and ammonia. You don’t need guns to hurt a lot of people and when you’re mentally ill you can think of a million different ways to hurt yourself and people around you. Trust me, I know. 

You don’t need guns. 

So that being said: let us stop doing those exhausting laps about gun control and let us start addressing the elephant in the room for most people. That elephant is mental illness. 

I have insurance. I have pretty damn good insurance. And it is still like running laps around a lake of fire to get good mental health care. It takes months to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. When you go to pysch ward you see a doctor for all of five minutes a day, the therapy you get is in group form. There are no in depth one on one sessions with a doctor or therapist. In fact, the best help I got from the psych wards I have been in was from other patients. That’s like the blind leading the blind. Psych wards are groups of people in their jammies zombied out in front of the television, the programming decided by the most outspoken, violent, or psychotic of the group. Needless to say, I didn’t get to watch animal planet for very long before the other patients woke up. There were people strapped to chairs in the hallway of one hospital. People threw food at each other in another. 

No. I don’t live in a third world country. I am mentally ill in the United States.

(God help you if you’re mentally ill and uninsured. Yeah, sure there are clinics out there that charge on a sliding scale, but the wait to get into these clinics is timed in months and the time they use to actually see you is minuscule.)

Doctors prescribe cocktails of drugs. A lot of the time it takes years to find a combination of drugs that actually works. Years. In those years people who are suffering end up in jail or committing suicide or going off the deep end of addiction. I have been on and off medication since I was 11. I haven’t found a combination that makes the suicidal thoughts go away. I still wake up every day wishing I was dead. 

And these drugs aren’t cheap. Many of them haven’t been on the market long enough for there to be generics. With insurance I spend $65 a month on medication. That’s my cell phone payment. Again, I can’t imagine what it would be like without insurance. 

And on top of all this mental illness is still incredibly stigmatized. I tell people I am mentally ill and they look at me in horror, as if I am to be ashamed, as if I have control over it. There are people out there, good people, who tell me it’s all in my head and that I just have to change my way of thinking. They think it’s that simple. If it was that simple I would have changed it years ago. These sorts of people, as pure as their intentions are, are grossly mislead.

So what we should be discussing is mental illness, access to mental healthcare, and about de-stigmatizing mental illness in America. Not about gun control. Not about keeping people armed. No. Mass shootings are not perpetrated by the mentally sound. 

But gun control is so cut and dry, and Americans like when things are done not right but fast. So gun control we will keep debating. And the mentally ill will continue to take a back seat. 

I feel like a loaded gun pointed in the wrong direction. There is an emptiness that exists in me. That causes me to do stupid things. I think the only other people that could understand this emptiness are other people with Borderline Personality Disorder, which I have along with Bipolar disorder type I. Bipolar is inherited. It’s genetic. Borderline is something you’re genetically predisposed to, but is something that happens in your formative years. 

In some ways, the Borderline has ripped me in two more than the Bipolar has. 

It’s the emptiness that plagues me. It plagues everyone I know. And suddenly I feel like a whirlpool, a sinking ship; taking every single soul I know with me along for the ride. And I feel guilty for it, as the iceberg should feel guilty. 

I honestly don’t know where this emptiness originates from. There are plenty of places in my psyche that it could originate from. I have tried to fill this emptiness with drugs and booze and lots of sex and none of that has worked and has made me a worse person in the process. And now I feel like an empty and selfish shell of a human being, incapable of love. 

And all because I needed to alleviate the utter emptiness that surrounded me. This thing that ate my soul whole. 

Again. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBfgQvM7wtE

Today is one of those days that just zaps the heat right out of you. I poured myself that cup of tea not five minutes ago and already it’s lukewarm. Something about the cold and the rain together, the utter lack of sunshine, it just absorbs whatever heat I’m producing. 

My toes are like ice.

I down cup after cup of tea. This will not help my current manic state.

Last night, Rob thought I was in a good mood. I was making jokes, singing along to the radio. But in reality I wanted to strangle the nearest person that pissed me off. And when I am in such a state pissing me off is not hard to do. Sometimes, I relish this feeling. I never really strangle anyone, but I do tend to speak my mind more when I am manic. There was a young girl at Starbucks the other day who was complaining that her dad bought her an Audi instead of a Benz and I turned around and basically, in a civilized way, called her a spoiled little brat. Yes. That is how I am when I am manic. When I am depressed or when I am ‘normal’ I would simply ignore her, but not in states of mania. 

There are some good points about mania and sometimes when I am in depressive states I miss it like I miss my best friend. When I am manic I paint and write and make things, but when I am depressed I do none of that. And when I am normal I do a lot less of it. Mania is like being high. It’s like speed without grinding my teeth. 

But it’s also frustrating. I have so much energy I get annoyed easily. I interrupt people when they’re speaking. I can’t control the volume of my voice. I drink more.  The worst of it is that I can see myself doing all of these things and hate myself for it. 

Again, it’s like being high on drugs. Eventually, you hate yourself for it.

They say that I’m no good to anyone if I’m dead. But am I good to anyone alive? 

These are things I ask myself.

I’ve been told that one third of people with bipolar disorder will die from it; whether it’s from suicide, or an accidental overdose, or an accident. Sometimes I wonder if I will survive this disease at all, or if I will succumb to it, perhaps quietly, perhaps not. It is like crawling up a hill. There is dirt under my fingernails and grass stains on my knees. And when I look up all I see is a steeper incline and a patch of sky. No plateau, no summit, no king of the mountain. Just more and more mountain to climb. Like a treadmill, only more sadistic, if that’s even possible. 

Vultures circle in the sky, waiting for me to drop. I can’t help but admire their tenacity. 

There are knives. There are pills.  

And yet I keep climbing. Ever onward and upward, waiting for something to happen. 

I wait with trepidation. I sit here, causally observing my pulse, my brainwaves, my neurochemicals going to and fro and I begin to think that perhaps I am in a good mood. 

But am I in a good mood, despite everything stressful going on in my life, or am I simply manic? Or is the medication beginning to work? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference. And that is really fucking disheartening. I thought I was managing my symptoms very well over the summer sans medication only to be told that it was highly likely that I was just in an extended period of mania. 

It’s like I am putting a puzzle together, only I am blindfolded, and can only tell which pieces go with which by touch alone. I have to feel every round edge and sharp corner and every concave dip. Then I have to match the pieces, to feel what goes with what. To make it even more interesting, the puzzle is double sided. A two for one. Much like my mental illness. Two for the price of one. If only I could remove the blindfold and see clearly what I was doing. 

If only I could walk away from the dense forest that I feel I am navigating. A forest of nerve endings so thick every piece of clothing I wear gets caught on something. And soon I am struggling, my clothing rips and tears and soon I am bare. Alone. Naked. And no closer to reaching some sort of accord with myself.  

They say that the mentally ill are ‘touched by God’. This means I am special. When God made me he actually touched me and examined me and my awesomeness and declared, “Man I did a great job with this one!!” Meanwhile, he ignored the normal people on the people assembly line, passing them off as mere mortals. They never felt the touch of his fingers on their skin. 

The bipolar is a side effect of Gods lingering fingerprints on my head. If you part my hair the right way you can still see the indentations and fine lines left by him before I was placed in the storks swaddle. 

Sometimes I can only laugh at myself. I make jokes. ‘Hi. I’m Mary. I put the ‘bi’ in bipolar’ is my personal favorite.

But most of the time I wish my illness manifested itself physically instead of mentally. I have an ‘invisible disease’. I am robust and strong and healthy on the outside but on the inside my brain misfires. It points and shoots but forgot to aim in the first place. 

See the brain on the right that is lit up like Baghdad in 2003? That’s what a happy brain looks like. See the one on the left? That’s what my brain looks like. It looks like Homer Simpsons house when he tried to decorate for Christmas. 

To reiterate: This is a normal brain-

and this is my brain-

I wish I could carry around a picture of my very own brain scan versus the scan of a comparatively normal person so I can show people that yes, I am sick, and no, it’s not all in my head. No, I am not using it as an excuse not to go to work. I am not lazy or a layabout or a big whiny baby. I don’t need to merely ‘grow a thicker skin’ or ‘just get over it’. Because when you have a massive chemical imbalance in your head you can’t just ‘get over it’. 

When someone has cancer, or Lyme’s disease, or even just a case of the flu you wouldn’t tell them to just ‘get over it.’ So why do people tell me that? Why must people scrutinize me when I tell them I am ill? Perhaps God should have included an innocuous yet physical symptom of bipolar disorder. Something nice even. Maybe my hair could turn bright pink when I am manic and blue when I am depressed. But, sigh, God is imperfect in his ways.

But imperfections make the soul more beautiful.