I hate the term ‘Bipolar Disorder’. On the surface it seems faddish and silly, like pink stilleto heels or an herbal weight loss drug. It seems to describe people who are prone to specific behavior: temper tantrums, laziness, drug abuse, self-pity. Excuses.
When the term was manic-depressive, it meant my father’s sister. It meant having scholarships to the University of Texas, and playing harp as a hobby. It meant marrying well. It meant being beautiful. And it meant throwing everything away, creating an endless sea of pain for your mother; it meant decades of denial for your extended family, and it meant promiscuity and failed romantic relationships and just plain old quitting. It meant an early death at your own hand. But mostly, it meant the same thing as the word secret.
I remember my aunt. Her youth, her beauty, her talent. I remember her affection, but mostly I remember how temporary she was. When I was growing up the comparisons between us seemed endless: looks, intelligence, habits, and most of all propensities. The age of her death — 32 — became fixed in my mind. I wondered if I would live longer than that.
Since then, the following people in my family have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or something in the same spectrum: my brother, two of my three first cousins, my uncle, my mother, my mother’s first cousin and her daughter, three second cousins close to my age.
Most of my family survived.
If you don’t immediately associate this diagnosis, this label, with a cultural propensity towards escapism, you may think bipolar disorder means wild, uncontrollable mood swings. You may think it means a few weeks of grandiose fast talking, ending with the belief that the sufferer can fly, followed by a few weeks of disabling depression during which the sufferer can’t leave their bed.
You would be wrong. Saying bipolar disorder means extremes in mood is like saying color means purple.
So, what does ‘Bipolar Disorder’ mean?
You awaken one day and find yourself completely out of synch with the rest of the world. This happens literally overnight. The day before you were normal, not manic, not depressed just… normal. You have a song stuck in your head, and it wakes you up. Any song. Maybe a song you haven’t heard in months. The song continues (silently) in your head and then, in frustration, you turn on your radio, hoping to tune it out. Instead, the first song you hear replaces the song that was stuck in your head, and the songs go on and on and on.
You finish your morning routine, but you’re running late because for some reason, this particular day, you just don’t feel very motivated. It’s hard to focus so you drink some extra coffee on your way to work, and once you get to work you drink cup after cup, as if you’re dying of thirst. This speeds you up and suddenly you’re in the greatest mood. You’re not working, but you are joking with the staff around you. You’re funnier than usual and everybody laughs when you laugh. People you don’t often talk to invite you to lunch.
So you go to lunch. The damn song is still stuck in your head, which is distracting, but lunch sounds good. You sit at your desk, waiting for 11:30 to roll around, getting absolutely nothing done. Every once in awhile you turn to the project you’re working on – the one with the impending deadline you’ve done such a great job on – but you can’t seem to care about it enough to do any work. White noise, like static, joins the song playing in the background of your every thought.
But lunch is great. Your charismatic mood is contagious and soon you’ve led everybody on your team to a three hour drink-fest. You’re finishing your 4th margarita when you realize it’s nearly 3:00 in the afternoon. Once you’re all back at the office, the team hovers around your cube, laughing and joking. A supervisor walks by and the team disperses and begins finishing their work for the day. You turn back to your project and think to yourself that you’re such a fantastic employee, so beloved, so intelligent, that meeting the deadline isn’t really all that important after all. You decide to write a funny poem about work and send it out to your entire company.
And then the voice starts in your head. Your own voice – not something audible but clearly in your thoughts, on top of the song that’s stuck there now, and the white noise: you, deriding every aspect of you. You are lazy. You are unreliable. You are fat, and you have bad coloring. You are weak. You are bad. You are everything terrible you can think of to say to or about anybody you’ve ever met.
Your team has been back at work for a mere 30 minutes and during that time you’ve crashed. You decide to call it a day. It’s too embarrassing to be terrible in public.
You’re restless. You decide to write. “I’ll write a book about myself,” you think, “and it will be a bestseller, and I will write it over the weekend.”
So you head to your favorite restaurant – the one with the patio and the great happy hour and the tasty tamales. And you drink, and you write. The entire time you’re writing you believe that everybody within eyesight is looking at you and thinking, “Look at that! Look at how ugly she is.” As the sun begins to set, more diners show up so you head home. “I shouldn’t be driving,” you think, but you do anyway and nothing terrible happens except that you feel as if every other driver on the road is looking at you and thinking, “Look at that – there’s a drunk driver. Look at how paranoid and ugly she looks. I don’t have to know her to know she’s no good.” Your heart begins to beat wildly in your chest.
And then, finally, you are at home.
You start calling people. Your speech is slurred and you don’t sound like yourself, but it is imperative that you talk. The only person who responds is a horny ex-boyfriend. You figure he’ll do.
Later that night, back at home, your head hurts and your body may hurt and now you have a new voice in your head. This new voice is telling you what a slut you are. You try to sleep but you can’t. You toss and turn and worry. Finally, around 4:00 in the morning, you decide to try to catch up on all the work you missed the day before. And you do. In four hours you do eight hours worth of work and not only that, but the work you do is miraculous and fabulous. You’ve met your deadline and – more than that – you’ve gone way beyond anything you had to do and entered in to the realm of near perfection. You’ll get a bonus for this later.
And those voices and songs, they begin to follow you everywhere.
And now you can actually hear music audibly, from a distance, all the time, as if somebody with a mammoth car stereo has parked his car underneath your apartment window, turned his bass up to full blast, and started playing rap music. It isn’t in time with anything else going on in your head and it irritates you terribly. You walk downstairs to tell the culprit to take his damn music somewhere else, but you never find him. At work, you walk the cubes in your area to see if someone is playing something on their computer, but nobody is. You stare out the windows, looking for a car, but never see one.
You see things out of the corner of your eye. Animals. Bugs. You bump into walls trying to avoid them. You flinch in public and then rub your hands over your eyes so people will think you have something in your contact lens. It’s terrible to be stupid in public, so you stop going out very much.
The sound keeps you awake. You try putting a pillow over your head, but the sound gets louder. So you get up, and you decide to paint. To watercolor. In fact, you decide to take the biggest painting in your apartment – the one your boss gave you when you were 23 – and cover it up with gesso and create a new masterpiece on top of it. You figure you’ll clean the paint spills on the carpet when you move.
Sleep deprivation begins to feel exciting. You almost feel as if you are on drugs, or are gliding through the atmosphere. You believe that you can answer any question, can solve any problem, so long as you don’t sleep.
But you do sleep, eventually, and when you do you dream the entire time. You dream that you are lost in a parking garage and can’t find your car. You dream that your arms and legs don’t work properly and that you can only walk like a cartoon gorilla, with your arms dragging on the ground and your hips swinging your legs from left to right. You dream that you can only move if you are sitting in the lotus position on a skateboard. You dream that someone is trying to kill you and you can’t get away from them. You dream, and all of your dreams are terrible.
Suddenly, getting to work on time seems much less important than simply getting to work whenever. You take a couple of days off here and there in an attempt to mask what’s going on with you, but on the days you are at work you show up later and later. 10:30 becomes your starting time and for some reason, you still have a job. 3:30 becomes your quitting time and still, you have a job. You can’t understand why this company would want to keep you and you become terribly embarrassed. After all, your cubicle is stacked floor to ceiling with books you’ve planned to read and papers you need to analyze, and you’ve worn the same pair of jeans (the ones with the hole in the crotch) every day for two weeks running. Surely they can tell you’re sick, you think, since you know you’ve lost about 15 pounds since you pretty much stopped eating. “Can they tell I’m sick?” you ask yourself, “Can’t they tell I’m sick?”
You sit down with your boss. “I think I’m sick,” you begin, and he stares at you with naked irritation and disgust. “I’m going to a doctor,” you lie, but he says nothing in response. You wonder what he wants you to say. Maybe he actually wants you to say you broke up with your boyfriend, or your mother has terminal cancer. Finally, you simply say, “But I’m getting better. I just wanted you to know I’m fine.” He grunts and nods. Later on you realize nobody ever asked you for an explanation.
At night, the insomnia and nightmares continue. You begin leaving every light on, certain your feeling of impending doom is a premonition, and that a murderer is going to find some way to climb up to your third story balcony, break through your sliding glass door, and attack you. You begin to imagine animals and children being harmed. The thoughts are random and horrifying and frequent, and that’s when you decide to run away.
You pack your bags in the middle of the night and head north, intending to reinvent yourself. Exhaustion hits before you make it to the state line, so you stop at a motel in the middle of nowhere and crash. You feel disoriented and utterly fatigued after sleeping until early evening of the next day, but you do manage to turn your car around and head back home.
You have a weekend of despair. Sobbing. Self-recrimination.
And then you wake up one morning and everything’s back in sync. Suddenly, everything is normal again.
And so you find a new job. You clean the paint out of your carpet. You change pants. You try to rush forward, gain distance.
And two weeks later, it all happens again.
But it isn’t that predictable, really. Because the next time, the symptoms are more intense and more disruptive. You begin thinking about death all the time. The fun lunch, the charisma, the humor – never emerge.
Eventually you do seek help, but it’s six weeks before you can see anyone. When you do, they prescribe an antidepressant and charge you $400. Six weeks later, you attempt suicide or you get arrested or your family has you committed.
This is how a large percentage of people get diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, and it is the story of my road to a diagnosis. I should add that the period prior to the diagnoses can last decades (it did for me). The variety of extremes is endless, really, and the only thing they hold in common is the absolute devastation they wreak on your life, and the lives of the people who love you.
Being bipolar disorder makes you unreliable in every possible way, sometimes. And wise. And vigilant. And, yes, sometimes, crazy.
But it’s a far, far cry from pink stiletto heels.
Bipolar disorder to me, now, at this place in my life means the same thing as pain. It means the same thing as lonely, and it means, something that killed my brother, and of course it means threat. It means survival. And every year that passes I learn something new about myself, and about what it means to have something I can’t ignore or run away from. I think it can also mean triumph, and there have certainly been times I have felt triumphant.
Maybe, in fact, that’s what it means to me most of all.
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