R e a l i t y F i s h

[Note: This post was largely inspired by Princess Nebraska, but it was a long time coming anyway. And there's about a dozen people in my life right now that it applies to.]

In lieu of a Reality Fish this week, I wanted to talk about mental illness in more than just bland allusions. Consider it a longer, more detailed Reality Fish.

I have Bipolar Disorder, and have for most of my life. There are parts that are biological — when it came to my family, it was not a question of whether I’d get a mental disorder, merely a matter of which one. (As it turns out, I got the one that manifests as major anxiety and, if left untreated, leads in fifteen years to paranoid delusions, and in forty years to agoraphobia. It’s fun.) There are other parts that come from not being raised right. The fact is, eventually a circumstantial problem becomes a biological one; when you spend the first fifteen years of your life under a great deal of stress, your neurological system shorts out. It’s not a matter of just “getting over it” and “letting it go”, though you have to go to therapy and do that part too; it’s a matter of rewiring the electrical grid in your brain.

This is all stuff I understand now. I did not understand it for a long time.

When I was seventeen I tried to kill myself, and somehow, this did not strike me as any particular warning sign of my mental health. My parents sent me to therapy (about three years later than they should have), where I had two very polite conversations with the therapist about how yes, I had had a very silly moment, but really I was just overwraught and very tired from senior year stresses, and I know better than that, and of course I’m going to be just fine, I’ve learned my lesson. The therapist let me go. My folks were thrilled that I was fixed. I accepted that being miserable was probably just a part of being informed about life and then moved on.

I didn’t sleep for most of a summer. I didn’t get out of bed for most of a winter. I got As one semester and couldn’t go to class the next. I moved to the Midwest to be with The Wookiee. I moved back to the East Coast to live in my parents’ basement (and thank God The Wookiee came with me). I lost thirty pounds. I gained forty pounds. I wrote 100 pages in a month and then didn’t write for a year. I drank too much. Three months of the year I felt fantastic, six months of the year I felt like hell, and the other three months were the only time in my life I was productive. I knew, absolutely knew in my heart of hearts, that all of my problems were external — if people would just leave me the fuck alone I would be absolutely fine. And so I passed four years.

Then a guy broke into our apartment and tried to engage me in some rather non-consensual activities. I spent a few months being very clingy (which The Wookiee took on without pause), but other than a greater disposition towards checking my door locks, I did not suffer too many ill effects. I was, however, given a card at the hospital for trauma counseling. I called. I talked to a therapist. She gave me the standard PTSD talk, then asked about my mental state otherwise. I told her. She paused. “I think you should keep coming to see me.”

I went for a year, but turned down repeated suggestions to look at medication for what was undeniably Bipolar II. I had no health insurance. I felt lots better with the therapy, though, so medication seemed superfluous. Talking through things out loud is infinitely more helpful than thinking inside your head; when your thoughts actually come out of your mouth and echo in the room, you can finally start to understand how fucked up they are, how illogical. I thought I learned everything I needed to know, and didn’t need anything more.

We moved back to the Midwest. I didn’t find a new therapist. I was okay for a year, then lost almost the entirety of 2007. I took 18 credits in the spring and aced them all, keeping more and more meticulous notes and drinking a lake’s worth of coffee; I stopped answering my cell phone or paying my bills in the summer; I didn’t do the dishes for five months; I drank three glasses of wine and hyperventilated; I rocked on the floor for an hour hitting my head against the wall. I stood in the shower every morning and thought academically about the most sensible methods to kill myself. The Wookiee had no idea what he was going to come home to each day.

I had no excuse for any of it, I thought. I had a loving husband, distance from my family, fantastically supportive and understanding friends. I’d had a year of therapy and understood what was happening in my brain, and since I understood it, it should have stopped. I should have been able to make it stop, but a whole year passed and no matter how much I thought it through, it didn’t stop. So I called a clinic. I got a new therapist, and this time, when she told me to take the meds, I took the meds. And the world, for the first time in my entire life, seemed like something I could face. Medication did not fix things — fall is still a bitch and a half — but it allows for real, honest perspective on life. It’s like removing a kaleidoscope that you didn’t even know was in front of your eyes. It allows the therapy to stick.

It should be mentioned that during this period of time, I met, fell in love with, and married The Wookiee. I became closer to The Chef. I met The Organizer and The Monkey and The Pierogi and so many people that have kept me laughing. I was happy a lot of the time. But moments of happiness do not stop the background panic, the feeling that you’re constantly holding down something with claws. That’s the way it works.

What’s the point of this self-involved post? Almost everyone I know — in real life and through the blogosphere — is suffering right now. Autumn is hard, and it messes up your mind. And I realized that, in spite of everything, in spite of a thousand blog posts and it being acceptable these days to talk about mental illness, people still forget. They forget how many people feel the way they do. They forget that others have been in the exact same place, and that there really is a way out, and there’s a hundred thousand hands ready to help them along the way.

This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out.

A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.”

The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.” –Leo McGarry, “The West Wing”

So there’s your Reality Fish this week. You’re not alone. You’re not.