Hello crazy, I didn't see you there...

I always forget to remember how sneaky BPD is. Just when you start thinking, hey, I've been maintaining a pretty healthy speed here....BAM. You're gas pedal sticks to the floor and you run yourself right into a guardrail.

It's so convincing. You really believe you feel the way you believe you feel. There you are, crying and babbling and begging people for things you can't even identify, and then it drops you back in the middle of your life, like the end of some emotional alien abduction. Mostly I just want to send letters to all the people I came in contacts with in the past two weeks.

'Dear Acquaintance,
I'm not really needy, insecure, hypersensitive, and over dramatic. Well, I am, but not REALLY really.

Insanely yours,
N'


Oh well.
Another trip to Wellseley.
Another tweak.
Another circle in the cornfield of my life.

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow?

Sometimes I wonder if I am the greediest person alive. There are so many things I want. My want is desperate and pleading lately, and it keeps me up at night. I constantly want more than I have, and my want tricks me into thinking I'm stuck and stagnant, when really I know I've come so far.

If I stop wanting, and think about it, I have an enormous passion for how far I've come. I'm almost shocked when I remember the things that happened inside of me over the years. I remember particularly painful times with a new fear that was never present at the time. The fear at finally understanding how close to death I was...all the time. The fear at remembering how many times it could have gone so wrong so finally.

The fear my mother still holds.

And now. Now I'm the full time college student I always wanted to want to be. Every object in my room no longer seems weighted down with bitter dissapointment. The mirror reflects a person with worth, instead of someone to be disgusted with. Yes, the truth is, I've gotten almost everything I ever wanted during those years. The Me then would be sorely jealous of the Me now. So I wish I could stop wanting and wishing, and LIVE in the Me I am in this moment. Haven't enough moments gone by already?

It must be summer, 'cause the days are long...

5 years later, there's a part of this entry that still applies to my life. I can feel the fear bubbling up inside of me. Someday the fear will break and the sun will be a relief.





'The summer had always been the cruelest to her. Which, when she thought about, didn't surprise her in the least. The snow, the rain, sat by her bed and stroked her hair. The cold weather had a way of crawling under the covers with her and looking at her with sympathetic clouds. "I know" it would say. "It's such a tragedy" it would say. The sun, however, did not offer comfort. It dried her up and made her go without. While others waited all year long to shed their heavy coats and dawn their drugstore sunglasses, she had to force herself to open her window and let the winter air out. She dreaded the long nights and the lonely thoughts that were brought on by the inability to sleep in hot, tangled linen sheets. The only peace she found came from the long midnight drives she took through the town when everyone had fallen asleep. She weaved in and out down the clustered green roads with her hand out the window, stretched as far as she could reach. She drove until her grip on the steering wheel loosened, until her eyes were stuck open in a zone of exhaustion. She drove until she had listened to the same song so many times she forgot there was music playing at all. Until midnight turned to morning and she could go home knowing she had been somewhere, if only around and around and around. She searched those winding country roads for a sign that her life would someday take on the physical adaptation of the way it played out in her head. That her intense love would someday find it's way into something tangible. She drove the same roads night after night, over and over. It had to be there, she thought. Somewhere in the green hills, down under the trees maybe, where the cows sought shelter from the same unrelenting summer sun. Hidden, presumably lifeless in the great lush of all the June greenery. Or maybe it was waiting to explode with the fireworks in a blast of hot Fourth of July sky. So she searched at night when the stars came out. And in the morning, when she awoke blurry eyed with the birds and the buzzing of another searing August day, she glanced again at the empty spot on her dresser where she was saving a place for her fate. And she did not tell of where she had been, or why she closed her curtains against the blare and hid for another day, from the sun. Because the summer had always been the cruelest to her.'

"You have 'ONE' new shoulder to cry on."

I've noticed an odd, insidious habit that a lot of people have picked up. Most of the time it goes unnoticed because there's rarely an occasion to call someone out on it, but my life has become that occasion...so I am. It's that If there's anything I can do line. Oh, you know how it goes. You're sick, or you're stressed (or your grandmother dies and your mother flies out to AZ and you're left to be the sole food-giver-laundry-doer-picker-up er-of-the-house-until-she-gets-back-along-with-your-regular-academic-duties person) and some truly decent people offer their compassion in the form of the previous sentiment or some variation. Now I'm not saying they don't mean it. I'm not saying any of these people wouldn't bring you a casserole or come right back at you with a really great well meaning platitude. What I am saying is not many of these people would drive to wherever you are and hold your hand while you cry. In an age filled to the brim with non physical communication and contact, the thing that can make the most difference, that can stop The Pain faster than any Valium...is physical communication and contact. All the well worded texts in the world can't hold a candle to a warm body that wants to be there. So is it any wonder we're shutting down? Is it any wonder that it's like prying open a steal lock to get any ounce of emotion out of us? Because what's there for us when we do? A warm and fuzzy 'new message'. And boy, if there's anything that's great to wrap your arms around in the middle of the night....it's a Verizon contract.

The Easter Bunny looks different this year

In honor of Easter, and Christ rising again, I've been making an effort all day to try to remember what I'm supposed to remember, and then feel. I've been trying to thank God that our house is dry and safe as I go around vacuuming and dusting. Trying to thank God for my family's relative health, and the blessing that we are all still here, together. Trying to thank God for the chance to see my grandparents in AZ last fall, now that my grandmother's health is rapidly declining. I've been trying to go over and over my blessings, hoping if I say them like some sort of chant then I will feel blessed. I think the opposite is happening. I feel cursed. Thrown out and unimportant. Instead of being filled with warmth and light, I feel like there's a crack in me that's letting all the garbage in. I truly do not want to pity myself, and I truly DO want to FEEL my blessings. The soul must be smarter than I thought though. It knows when you're bs-ing it.

Temporary loss of my infrequent faith...

I find I have an inability to pray during the times I should be begging for God the most. Somehwere in between the torture my heart is raging at Him. Damning Him? For the Pain that rips through my soul like a freshly sharpened knife.

Let me make one thing clear: I do not cherish this in myself.

In my calmer moments I have great faith in Him. Thank Him, even, for thinking so much of me that he would put me in the honor class of life. And I find comfort in the thought that all that has happened has given me some saintly glimmer, and I'll be able to draw on my memories of despair in whatever great career of life I'm destined to achieve.

But when I'm crumpled on the floor (as I so often am), bent in two with Pain, I do not know this God. I don't know who He is. So I don't pray in those moments. In those moments it would be like begging my stuffed animal for a drink of water. Useless, and slightly insane.

I wait until my heart has put down the knife. And then I let myself get near Him.

Letting out the Beast

I wish I didn't feel such an instinctive burst of rage and jealousy whenever I hear of someone's good fortune. I know there has to be part of me that feels happiness on their behalf. I just can't seem to bring it out of hiding. Maybe I could hear that happiness if it wasn't for the roar of my own lost time. I can't help thinking of where I would be if it weren't for the time that was taken from me. Sometimes I wake up at night from a dead sleep with a feeling of uncontrolled panic welling inside me. If only I could spin around the earth like Superman, I would be able to go back and tell everyone what to do. I'd be able to tell my doctor's how to fix me faster, and I could say "pass" to all the medications that never worked, but took a year here or 6 months there. Suddenly I'm going to be 25, and more than anything, I don't want to be 25. I don't look in the mirror trying to spot tiny wrinkles. Or peer at my hairline trying to find a premature gray hair. I don't even compare the size jeans I used to wear. All I can see when I look in the mirror are the stuck years. The feeling of how terribley unfair it is to have worked so hard, fought so long, and still not have even a little of a what I want. And then the anger boils inside me, and my fists tighten when I think of the people who blindly stumbled into happiness without the slightest effort or the merest whiff of self awareness. And I ask no one in particular, why not me? Don't I deserve it twofold? If there is anyone on Gods green earth that DESERVES what she wants, what she needs, isn't that person me? Dear God in heaven, isn't that person me??

But there are no answers to those kinds of questions. Just an exhausting feeling of self responsibility. I make sure to tell myself that I'm not a bad person because I hear of Susie's engagement and wish public humiliation on her. I'm not a bad person because I see the sonograms of Trixie's accidental baby that came in between nights of drinking, and imagine with satisfaction the day she realizes she's afraid. I make sure to tell myself that Tommy's happy college graduation and framed degree will not neccessarily get him a job.

I make sure to find every hole I can....and I fill them up with a little of the pain that I have felt. Because I have had more than my share, and I am nothing if not generous.

I'm in repair, I'm not together but I'm getting there...

Reality.....is relative. Sometimes my reality one day is not my reality the next. For example, my last entry does not continue to be my reality. That's one of the very strange experiences bipolar has to offer. What if you had to make decisions based on a reality that was always changing? Which part of yourself would you listen to, which part would get a vote? And would that part carry the same weight the next time the tables turn?

A complicated business.

Not a few times I've thought of giving into the crazy. Just letting go of this ships wheel. Because it gets so heavy during the storms.

But I could never let this ship go adrift. I could never bare to see it's polished wood broken and splintered against some ocean floor.

That's why it's so important to remember that reality is relative. I remember this everytime I stand at my helm, wind-battered and weary. I remember all I have to do is hold the wheel. Because every storm will pass.

'I'm alright, don't I seem to be?'

It's difficult to get sympathy from people for a thing no one is really sure exists. No doctor can point to an x-ray and say "there, that, it needs to come out." I have no test results to show my condition, to hand to someone so they can making clucking noises and hug me and say "we'll get through this together". Indeed, what exactly am I going through? This disappearing act called "Bipolar 1,2, or 3" or simply "mood disorder". The latter which conjures up images of a blond house wife in flowing robes throwing her bonbons across the room and collapsing on a fainting couch with a tear-stained face.

No, it's nothing like that.

But it's always there, you see. And I can't get rid of it.

Oh god, if I could just rip it out. If I could pry it's claws away from my soul...they dig so deep, and The Pain brings me to my knees and stops my breath. I squeeze my hands together to stop from screaming. But it's swallowed my voice, so I let go my grip. I stare ahead in horror, alone on the floor, soaking my space in tears. The Pain, please God, The Pain is too much, I won't make it this time. I shake my head and rock back and forth like a mother over the body of her dead child. All at once I am mourning and dying and falling into the pit of Hell here in my very room. Suddenly my skin is so heavy on my bones, it's so heavy and my bones are breaking and I have to get out of my skin before I crumble into pieces. My clothes are covered in Pain and I can't stand them and my skin is crushing my bones. I can hear it now, my soul is giving away I can feel it tearing...The Pain, I can't stand it I've got to rip it out I tell you I've got to get it out oh God......


And then my memory is gone until the next day. I know I am still alive because I can hear the noises of my home. I know it must have all been in my head, because no one has rushed me to the hospital. This realization amazes me. How did I survive The Pain then? Didn't anyone look on in fear and desperation? Didn't anyone cry at the sight of me in Pain? Did no one lift me from the floor and carry me to help? No. No one did. No one heard. No one saw.

So I move carefully out of bed, naively expecting a wound to bleed, and bones to crack. Nothing happens, I'm together with no flesh missing. Slowly the memory of The Pain fades as I make my way back to life. But it will be back. I know it will be back. It always is. And I can't get rid of it.

I get by with a little help from....

It's a scientific fact that loneliness does as much damage to a person as heart disease or diabetes. Whether we want to accept it or not, as humans we are wired to long for physical contact. When we do not receive it our brains send out a signal that something crucial to our survival is missing. It is the same signal that is sent out for food and water. In fact, given the choice between physical contact and comfort over food and water, we will choose the first. It is also true that one can be completely alone in a crowd. I do not have to be shipwrecked on a desert island to feel that my soul has no mate. I do not have to be secluded in an isolation cell to feel that my words will never be heard. In fact, I'm usually quite cramped with people. But my soul is the only echo in a very empty room. And if you do not feel love, if you cannot pour it into your heart so that it overflows and you leave marks of happiness wherever you go....then love does not exist for you. Words can be an immense comfort. They can make us feel connected....until you realize that words are all you have. Words cannot help you stand when you are bent in half by emotion. Words cannot warm you with embrace.

Just as words won't fill a hungry belly, words won't fill an empty room. And there aren't words enough to express The Pain.

Dream sweet dreams for you, dream sweet dreams for me.

It always seems it's easier for the things we're most vulnerable to, to get to us at night. Things that have ceased to be seem to come alive again and memory becomes a hole to fall into, instead of a place to visit and leave when we wish.

When I say "we" I mean "me" of course, but I hope and mostly know I'm not the only one.

As soon as the sun goes down we're stripped of anything that can't follow us to the next life, and left with only the things that determine our judgment. It's no wonder so many people have trouble sleeping. It's no wonder we look for ways to dislodge our burdens and places to store them, out of sight but safely secured. I long for the day I could take off my memories before bed like I take off my jewelry. I would place them on my bedside table, and be able to sleep unabashed, knowing I wouldn't be jilted awake from the stab of a sterling silver feather in my neck. Or the scratch of desperation on my arm. How many of our wounds do we contract while we're sleeping? How many times have we forgotten to put away our fears, and left untamed, have sliced holes in our hopes when we roll over? How many times do we check our locked front doors, our ovens and heaters, but think nothing of letting our regrets and animosities roam the night streets? Getting into God knows what.


I long for the day it would be like flipping a switch. After all, I never forget to turn my light out.