A bit about me

A note: I shared a version of what follows at a local story-telling event a couple years ago. What could be better, I thought, than having a captive audience that has to listen to me for five minutes? Stories are meant to be told, after all. Doubly so for the type of story that burns in your chest. Well, apparently I was so nervous on stage, I made the poor audience squirm. Luckily for all of us, I’m (probably) better at writing.

The topic is a highly personal one, and I share it with some trepidation, but if we don’t share these things, the things that govern how the world appears to us, they only grow more restless and more insistent. Like a thought you try desperately not to think. They become something others fear in us, and they become worthy of that fear. And all the while, they just keep burning in our chests. If we don’t find the courage to tell these stories, how can we expect anyone to ever understand?

Wish me courage then, if you would.

I’m 20, it’s winter of my first year in college, and I’m thrilled to learn I’m depressed.  I’m only depressed. I just called a friend who understands depression because he’s bipolar.  Now that must truly be terrible!  We all live on a seesaw, balancing against the good and bad life piles on the other side; only for him, that seesaw must be monstrous: sometimes he’s in the clouds, sometimes he’s halfway to hell, most of the time he’s happy to be anywhere in between.  Thank goodness I’m not bipolar.

I’m just prone to depression.  I dropped out of high school because of it.  I spent a year working hard, getting my GED, and rebalancing.  Then, through some miracle I still don’t understand, I got into Stanford.

When I show up in the fall, I’m assigned to an all-freshman dorm.  It drives me crazy.  I’m older than the other students, in years and experience.  They’re busy learning life skills like how to boil water for noodles that come in styrofoam cups, how you can’t put styrofoam directly on a stove burner, and how to sneak into a closed dining hall when you melt styrofoam onto your dinner.

Instead, I’m trying to figure out why I feel worse the longer I’m there.  That brings us to the winter.

I tell my psychiatrist I’m depressed.  But I also emphasize I’m not bipolar.  I have a friend who is, I tell her, so I have a point of reference.  Knowing that helps—she tells me how, when you’re bipolar, antidepressants can launch you from the pit of depression to the stratosphere of mania.

“Well, that sounds awful,” I tell her.  “Good thing that’s not me.”

She prescribes a new antidepressant. 

The problems start small.

Suddenly, I can’t sleep more than 4 hours a night.  The funny thing is, I’m also not tired.

But insomnia’s probably a side effect.  It’ll wear off.

A few weeks later, and it still hasn’t.  At bedtime I open my organic chemistry textbook and start reading.  I take Dramamine.  I figure one of those will knock me out.  Only, I read and keep reading.  Midnight comes and goes. 

My psychiatrist prescribes a sleeping pill.  Just in time—see, I have a date the next day, and I don’t want to show up looking like I read organic chemistry until 2 AM.  I swallow a pill before I read the warning label: side effects may include nausea, vomiting, and vivid dreams.  Fine.  It leaves out the bit about how those dreams might be batshit yet so vivid you’d swear they were real.  That night, I have a dream in which my legs come off. 

The next day, I can’t stop reliving the dream.  I pick my date up, and if I don’t look well rested, she’s too sweet to mention it.  We go for a hike and reach this beautiful mountain top.  It’s a gentle afternoon, the hillside is gold, and you can even see the ocean glittering on the horizon. It’s romantic as hell. I hear her breathing close beside me, and I want to put my arm around her. But I’m too distracted.

I don’t know how to tell her what’s so distracting about having legs.  We don’t go on a second date.

I get worse.  I start sitting in trees.  I sit 30 feet off the ground as though some monstrous seesaw launched me there.  I swing my feet in the air and watch afternoon turn to evening.  I learn “I was in a tree” is a poor excuse for missing class.

I still can’t sleep, only now I can’t think either.  But hey, at least I’m not bipolar.

I have a brilliant idea: I’ll do something different for housing in the fall—I’ll really push myself.  I visit the most out there, hippy-dippy co-op on campus.  They have a bonfire to celebrate the spring equinox.  A naked drum circle sprouts from the ground like a fairy ring of giant mushrooms—incidentally, mushrooms are also on offer.  Now, I’m someone so square, you could cut yourself on my corners.  But I look at myself, then I look at the co-op.  I sign up on the spot.

By summer, I can hardly read.  Words are too slow.  My mind leaps from star to star between one word and the next.  But hey, at least I’m not bipolar.

 By then, anyone but me could have seen that I am.  For six months, I’ve been manic. I’ve been a boulder hurtling down a hill. The only way to stop something with so much momentum is to let it crash.

I crash in the wilderness, on a four-day backpacking trip.  I run out of my medications the day we leave.  I called the pharmacy the day before, but I’m out of medication refills, and I can’t get one in time.  Without those pills, I go into withdrawal.  My head throbs like my brain is trying to chisel its way out.  I get dizzy spells so bad, I have to grab a tree to keep from falling.  But I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone what’s wrong.

When I get back, I see a new psychiatrist.  The word bipolar comes up again.  I only realize in hindsight how high I’d been.

When you’re that high on a seesaw, the fall is going to hurt.  For six months I was manic; I spend the next six somewhere underground, feeling idiotic and trying to undo what I’ve done.  I run from the hippy dippy co-op, but that means when school starts again, I’m living in my car and doing everything I can to look like I’m not.  I brush my hair each morning in the rearview mirror.  I fold my clothes in a neat stack so they won’t look rumpled.  I have my books in the trunk.  I try to concentrate on classes, but it’s not easy when every night, you have to find a quiet street to park on so no one sees your fogged-up windows in the morning and calls the cops out of suspicion.

I still can’t get used to thinking of myself as bipolar.

After a few weeks, I finally find an apartment.  After a few months, I start to feel like myself again.  I can read.  I’m no longer barely passing my classes.  My monstrous seesaw is leveling out.

That was 15 years ago.  Since then, I’ve found better medication.  I commiserate now with my bipolar friend.  We go for walks among the juniper and piñon, over the mesas and dry streambeds, and through the yellow grasses of the New Mexico desert.  We walk through the scent of pine sap and arid soil. We talk about life, about good times and bad.  We talk, in short, about our monstrous seesaws.  I’m 34; my friend is in his seventies.  We talk about how both of us are still learning to balance.