Does everyone have those pivotal moments in life when something that happened in real-life history echoes familiarly with the rumblings of their own, internal gravity? Points in life where the concrete buckles and you either jump and learn to fly or trip, fall flat on your face, and sprain your ankle? Well, I've been thinking about these moments of personal significance, perhaps because some unseen power is guiding my musings or maybe just because I've set this blog as a goal for myself and I'm really trying to live up to it. It's funny that I should be someone that is rarely at a loss for words, yet when I face the blank page my mind is wiped clean. Anyway, perhaps I am awakening to a new interpretation of some parts of my own life experience,or perhaps, in my case, my brain synapses are misfiring and little dendrites aren't making friends. I'm apparently still avoiding the beginning, because after I decide I'm gonna try to fly over that chasm in the asphalt and get a good bird's-eye view, I tend to get leary of the fact that it's too easy to to fly too close to the sun and fall for what feels like forever. Especially for me.
September 11, 2001 was the day I wrote on my calendar "the day the world crashed down". This event I refer to as 9/11, usually, because that simple phrase somehow bears the significant weight that can be borne on the human spirit while carrying simultaneously the painful rebirth of a nation that happened that day. Self-preservation is a bitch that sticks around long after the immediate threat has gone away. She clamps her mangy maws into the psychological jugular and flops you around like a slobbery old chew toy that's lost its squeaker.
As our post-terrorism-on-U.S.-soil phase of national identity was inaugurated, so too was a new personal phase of existence. I found myself defined with a new label which I had to integrate into my perception of myself. Once I arrived home to rebuild my life in Georgia, I started to lose focus and became overwhelmed by the choice I had made (leaving NYC and my life there). I didn't regret the choice, but I felt torn between two vivid realities: the one I was living in and the one I had just left. It was still so real to me it was palpable, tangible. Living in my new reality became difficult and I retreated into my own mind, trying to figure out answers to questions I hadn't even formulated yet. I had temporary work, and even that seemed oppressive. I became depressed, although I had no idea this was a clinical reality. I just thought I didn't deal with life as well as other people. I had downward spiraled before, visiting the abyss, and always I had returned and moved on. I had no idea this was not normal. It didn't register as anything that would come to define me. I had yet to incorporate the notion of this cycle of ups and downs as particular to me.
That's when I was diagnosed with a major depression and shortly thereafter Bipolar Disorder. BPD for short. This diagnosis in and of itself may not seem too significant; however, there are many other aspects of this disorder that complicate the understanding of it. First and foremost, I had to deal with what it means to have a mental illness. That term has such negative connotations that I skirted around it for, oh, well, years, I guess. I raged against it first. I remember that. But what I was really raging against were my own previous notions of what mental illness meant to me. I had always thought myself open-minded, but for some reason I rebelled against this label with a ferocity of a she-wolf protecting her cubs. There are boundaries by which we define ourselves, and learning to accept that this was no longer a boundary I had a stake on was destabilizing in and of itself. Not a great place to be when you've just been told you're not predisposed to psychological balance. Then there was term mood disorder with which I had to contend. Mood does not create our personalities, but it certainly affects them. So I had to learn how not to "be" my disorder. There is a vast difference, psychologically, between saying "I'm bipolar" and saying " I have bipolar disorder." Moving from the first instance to the second requires intense soul-searching and, quite frankly, a cocktail of elixirs manufactured by multiple pharmaceutical conglomerates. My personality in a bottle. That's another aspect of the disorder that I had to integrate into my daily life. It's a strange feeling to know that you live with a chronic, potentially fatal disorder. I don't say that with self-pity or angst, mind you, it's simply a fact that I've had to accept and learn to live with. I have to take medicine every day for the rest of my life. I have had to make that commitment to myself in order to be healthy. Quite frankly, even after 7 years I still find it to be a pain in the ass. Every time I reach for one of my prescription bottles I am reminded that there are some choices that aren't really choices at all. I could refuse to take medicine. And I could wind up as a statistic. You see, untreated bipolar disorder is a progressive disease. This simply means that the cycles between highs and lows become more intense, the lows getting worse each time, same with the highs. And on and on until I die by my own had or have a psychotic break. I'm not a fan of either option.
When I was first diagnosed and medicated, I was speaking one night to my sister about my treatment. "How are you feeling?" she asked. Thinking about it for a moment, I responded, "We all have 5 senses. I feel as though I have lost one." It's still the same, really, time has just made the phantom perception of my lost sense less vivid most of the time. Perhaps I have not yet fully learned to integrate this loss. My life is defined by cycles and red flags, by constant self-analysis and spectrum checks. I have to live my life as if I know the location of the pendulum because if I don't, I can't move at all.
I don't quite know any longer where I'm going with this, so I'll wrap it up. I believe I began this post by asking questions, so I'll end as I began. Does everyone feel the rumblings of their own internal gravity? Does everyone else soar over the chasms? Does everyone else fall through the pavement when falling on their faces? If so, I'd certainly like to know that's the human being part of me, too, and not just the BPD.
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2 comments:
BPD is something that I personally don't talk about, because of my mother and the phantoms that chase me as I have hit middle agedom. As a child, I had to learn to read moods like a sailor had to read the sky for impending danger. Were storms approaching or would the calm prevail? The untreated or self-medicated sufferers of BPD can prove to be hazardous to the health of themselves and/or others. As in my mother's case (before lithium and its effective siblings were employed), she was guilty of both accounts. After she committed suicide during the summer between my junior and senior years, I struggled with the guilt of being relieved that she could no longer harm me physically. However, the emotional and pyschological damage that was inflicted by her actions in response to her disorder still haunt me to this day. Not that I am cowering and playing the victim, but as a pragmatist that is afraid of the genetic predisposition that may or may not yeild frightening consequences at a later point in my life. In all the time that I have known you, I was never worried about me and my safety. Not to say that I have not worried about you, for if I were to say that I would be a liar and the truth would not be in me. I has seen you courageously deal with a disorder that is responsible for leaving my children without a living grandmother. You are entitled to soar over the chasm of emotional instability and view it realistically. Apprehension is healthy and gravity is a universal principle that we all have to deal with. At this point, celebrate your sanity and embrace your fragility. It is what makes you the strong, bold, and quirky woman that we have grown to love and admire. My life has been a little more adventurous and exciting since you came into it! Thank you for being a friend that will share and reciprocate as we journey through the land of the living.
Please correct the "I has seen you" to "I have seen you". Thanks!
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