Every once in awhile I realize there’s a part of me that is incredibly private. It often seems to me that I have said too much, shared too much about my inner world. It’s something I’ve agonized over, and because of that I close of a huge part of myself. I know it must seem that I am inside out to the people around me when I am most sick. But times like now I realize that I am the opposite. I feel in touch and protective of these things that make me, that have always made me, me.
Like my deep desire to write. My dreams of being an artist of some kind. My intuition, rare though it is. The comfort I find in the dead of night, and in being utterly alone when someone I love is nearby, and asleep, but I am awake, safe, private. I love, love, love to daydream ridiculous and wonderful things – but I do that much too rarely. How I often wish I could be invisible, but in some kind of soft, pillowed bunker, so that I could be alone, but watch the world — and on the best of days, every few years, I can do that. When I was bald I could, for some reason, do that; walking along Town Lake and free of myself. I don’t indulge in any of this often, in fact. My life, day to day, is enough.
But on nights like this one, towards the end of a very tough menstrual cycle shortly before I start my period, my mind sometimes opens up vividly to a sort of open understanding of where different pieces of me fit in to the puzzle of my history. The day it hits it is painful because it brings up so many of the emotions I felt when I was experiencing whatever it is I am figuring out now. And then, a compassion I was unable to feel for myself at the time.
This week was hard. Yesterday, especially. The door all of this is usually locked behind opened up for a bit and what I saw this time was how outside of my control so many of the things that kept me from soaring at work really were. How extreme the changes in my perception, judgement, impulse control. How terrible my anger and paranoia because of the perception problem. And, even, how deeply I suffered inside in the very, very private part of myself I mention above. Yesterday I realized that I will always be afflicted with this, and that the career I always reached for: management, maybe even the executive chain; I realized that it will not be possible. Not in the way I always imagined it would be. I will never find some key to consistency, I will never wake up cured, I will never conquer this. I realized it isn’t a shameful thing and, in fact, it was such a relief to see where this has all fit in my life. But terribly sad, as well. To know that I can’t control the very thing that has always blocked my good intentions and what I think of as my talents and capabilities. To acknowledge the corrosive effect of what I still don’t want to call a disease or a disorder. To simply say it is what it is, and accept it.
I wondered if I should apply for disability after all, knowing that I will have future breakdowns, knowing that I will have periods of paranoia and misperception and all that goes with it at work. The deep anxiety that has become such a problem in the past few years. The grandiose behavior that sometimes happens. The unbreakable focus on something — well, I say unbreakable, but it always is broken, isn’t it, by depression. And I wondered if I should divorce David, because I wonder if I have ever been or can ever be a normal wife to him. I acknowledge that I will never be the kind of wife I intended to be when we married, and I’m not sure what I have to offer will be enough to sustain and to nurture him. I wondered all of this, and I still don’t have the answers. But I do know that when I am feeling this way — that when that door opens — the worst thing I can do is to make a sudden move, or a decision, or even a blanked statement. I just have to wait for the door to close again, and to even out. And I try, in the meantime, to write about it. As I’m doing right now.
Bipolar Disorder is a comforting label for the afflictions we who have been diagnosed have suffered with for most of our lives. You read online and in books that it is simply characterized by extreme changes in mood — but, while that may be the least common denominator, it is only a percentage of the problem. A side effect, really. I have always maintained that Bipolar Disorder, and other mental illnesses as well, are actually a problem with perception. Think about it. What is it that makes up you world or mine? Perception tells me that I do or do not need sleep, and that I can or cannot run a mile. Perception is a collection of all of our senses working together to tell us what we see, hear, taste, smell. Perception is the Rosetta Stone of our existence. For those of us with mental illness, it is as if the languages continually change, and the translations change with it. I cannot imagine what causes it. Something well beyond the capabilities of our scientific community. I used to think it would take a group of scientists with mental illness all brainstorming together to come up with the answer, but the chances of that happening are about as great as the proverbial monkey with a typewriter coming up with a best-selling novel. That’s my perception right now, at any rate.
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