September 12, 2005
Reagan Airport, D.C.
Seems like the bipolar diagnosis merits a new journal. The BP journal. Covered with dizzying, what, flowers? Brain cells? Scrambled and chaotic.
I hear someone paging Christopher Crapps. Christopher Crapps. Christopher Crapps, please come to the courtesy counter.
I am self-conscious, as if I am Christopher Crapps, of the unfortunate name.
Is that the thing a bipolar person hears? Wants to hear? Always looking for the twist, the punchline, the unexpected. It’s unpleasant. The second-guessing was bad enough always before this, and now, it nears comic proportions.
Is this a bipolar hand? A bipolar face? Okay. Perhaps. The relief is there too—the ‘yes’ of it, the recognition in the descriptions. Is it possible as they say that this—all of my this-es—is an illness? It seems indulgent to say so, to clamor for a definitive diagnosis, to join the ranks of the medicated, the ‘mentally ill.’ Because that is what I am agreeing to. I am shaking that hand if I fill the prescriptions offered.
“You understand, you will need to stay on these medications for life. This is not the sort of thing you go off of.”
A life sentence, in a way, although of course, I am not so naïve to think this is the grimmest of circumstance. But still, something has been shattered, and I found myself choking back tears on the plane ride down here to VA. Because now I’m at a loss, a bit more than before, to tell you what is real, what is core, what is me, and what is illusion. I don’t want to be any hazier than I already am to the people who love me (or are trying to).
I’m laughing, too: Oh, what? Not everyone is consumed by shame and regret? Not everyone is “haunted”—the word that disturbed A. the most: “Haunted. Haunted. You are using the word haunted.”
As if I didn’t—can’t—hear myself.
“Yes. Haunted.”
She does not wake up from dreams sobbing. It is not something I can explain. It would be like explaining garish color to a content blind friend. There are surely better similes and metaphors but I can’t find them now. I can only sit in my shallow stew of embarrassed, oh-so-THAT’s-what-my-brain’s-been-up-to, and wonder what comes next.
To whom does one reveal this sort of thing? There are already folks who don’t know what to make of me, so how would it help to tell them I don’t know what to make of myself?
I’m stumped; they’re stumped. A fine mute standoff, plenty of embarrassed glances down at shuffling feet. Bipolar feet pointed at “normal” feet. And here I thought it was loveliness, even in its horror. A loveliness my antennae seemed to pick up that others’ did not, or didn’t want to, not so much. But…no? The loveliness part of life is pathology? Loveliness too acute? Too scorching?
I’m not sure I buy it, but then I buy it, I buy it, there is sense.
Another relief: the devastating insomnia, the symptom I can report most confidently, most surely, has been with me for so long. Who could deny this? I know that I do not sleep—no one can tell me otherwise. If I could only sleep. But my not sleeping, they say, is beyond my control. There is no stupidity, no stubborness to it, not on my part. It’s my brain to blame—wearing its mysterious, ghostly paths over and over. Haunted. Yes. There is no better word I can find.
My brain has ruts, grooves, depression-roads like deep wagon tracks in mud. I think of mud—wet slop—rather than the airy “kindling” I am now reading about. So much to read, dear God. Kindling, in bipolar disorder, happens when the brain burns brighter and bigger unless tamped down, snuffed out. Left unchecked, the raging bipolar brain goes higher and lower all the time. Left unchecked, will this ‘kindling’ burn me to a crisp?
And what, exactly, is it claiming as its own? Is the soul tucked safely away somewhere else, perhaps behind my ear like chewing gum, or curved quiet and low under my heart or spleen, trying to save itself from the drugs designed to keep it all sensible, sensible, in check. “Look how she repeats herself,” they will say someday, reading this. “TWO ‘sensible’s!”
No! I wanted two! I did! There will be much of this, I can see, much inane mental protest and tug-of-warring. I wonder if my inner dialogue, already so noisy and noisome, will only increase in protest—wanting to be less easily explained away, wanting to come from the right place, and not the wrong.
I am wrong, all wrong? No right happening up there? It cannot be true. Cannot. Suddenly my brain needs a safety gate for the stairs, outlet covers, window locks, and screens I can’t push out. My brain is not to be trusted. Left to its own devices, it will steal the matches in the kitchen drawer. Plays with matches. Unruly. And here I thought—when the beauty would sear me and send me soaring—that I was rich in something most did not seem to have, or were not willing to talk about. I still think it, but now there’s the new voice, the babysitter, to remind me that the thought is grandiose and I’d better settle down. A warning sign.
I am trying to operate on my head by looking in a funhouse scramble of mirrors. Who can think clearly in that environment?
Ah, it’s all self-indulgence. I am going to get some airport food. THIS is easy: I like that, I want that, I buy that.
I eat that, and I am full.
If I write about this, I am writing about this to see what I have to say about this. The only way.
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