On Common Ground

I was pushing my cart slowly through Joe's grocery store on Sunday night. I've started going there occasionally after we study on Sundays, mostly because his grocery store has edamame and mine does not.

I was contemplating something [I believe it had to do with black beans] when one of the classmates, one of the men we fondly refer to as "The Who," walked through the sliding doors. I'd never really had a conversation with him, and our relationship was--at this point--completely in my head, the same relationship I have with most of my classmates, that of constant observation leading to general hilarity. However, when he saw me, he waved and marched purposefully over. "I was reading your Facebook profile," he said, "and I saw that you're bipolar. I'm bipolar too."

I was taken aback, and my mind went on autopilot, asking the requisite questions. "When were you diagnosed," my mouth shot off. "What do you take?" We compared stories for a minute or two, then went along with our shopping. I fought the urge to leave everything behind, to contact Joe immediately.

After I finished, I drove the 30 seconds back to his house. In his foyer, we talked for thirty minutes about the implications of this new development. We yelled at each other a lot, me draped across the bottom few stairs, him peeking around a wall. He helped me process the information, and told me that I should invite The Who for coffee or a meal. At first I balked; despite this one huge commonality, I argued, we don't have that much in common. But the more I thought about it, and the more Joe watered the seed he had planted in my head, the more I liked it. One of the best things about Joe is that--as someone who is outside of my head--he is often one step ahead of me in knowing that something is a good idea. Whereas I have to undo all of the misgivings and personal issues with something, he can say, "You know what? This will help." I have learned to trust him implicitly with matters like this one.

So I took the necessary steps, and I asked The Who if he wanted to do lunch. As plans solidified, I realized I was excited about it. I realized that I still have many questions about my own illness. I've learned much about the uniqueness of the experience of bipolar disorder, and I was eager to hear about it in someone who is less like me than any other bipolar person I know.

So, we met over the lunches we packed. Although the first minute or so felt awkward, we soon eased into constant conversation, shared experience. We talked about what's hard about medical school, about our medicines [the good and the bad]. One commonality made it so much easier to talk about everything else, things like family, therapists [he has seen mine once or twice and hated her: we talked about how important it is for personalities to meld], relationships, even religion. He's been diagnosed for longer than me, and he had some insightful things to say about how your thinking about the illness can progress. He agreed with me that you have to have a sense of humor about things, that you have to find it funny. We talked about things that made us laugh; we talked about hard things, the things that make you somber.

All in all, it was a more wonderful experience than I could have imagined. In all of my wildest ruminations, I couldn't have expected the reality of that hour, the easiness that comes when you meet on common ground.

Housekeeping

I am finding that there are many things to say, but not much time in which to say them. This being the dilemma of humanity, perhaps. I have several potential posts swirling around in the primordial soup that is my brain, and hopefully I will post one soon. Tomorrow? Maybe?

I entered the giant world of microblogging, as you can see by my Twitter updates on the sidebar. Posting between posts, "what am I doing" in 150 characters [although if you know me, what I am doing usually is much more than 150 characters could ever explain].

In any case, I found this poem tonight on another blog, and I like it, so I thought I would post it here. Um, it's beautiful. And kind of makes me think about reconsidering my previous tattooing plans.

For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further

Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in the narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped my own head;
it was a glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house,
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
though your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all...
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.

-Anne Sexton

Sprouting From Your Fists and Tongue

I'm sitting in my seat, listening to Joe say something--neither of us remembers what--when two of my classmates saunter by unexpectedly. Before I can do anything, before I can stop myself, my mouth opens. "GOD" I explain, loudly and exasperated. Joe falls apart, completely loses it. I realize what has happened, and I fall apart too.

Later, we're talking on the phone. I'm standing on my bed--there's no room anywhere else--pacing, yelling about the same two people, one of them in particular. Her name is alliterative and rolls off my tongue. Agitation has made me eloquent, and I am good at hating her. There are thousands of reasons--that she's young and slightly immature, that she's self-important and thusly self-appoints herself with titles. Unofficial liaison from our class to the next. The baby, the one who's come here far too fast with too little experience in failure. The prodigy, the one who'll use big words no matter what. She is too eager to offer details, to eager to offer explanations for fatigue, a walking case of constant ailments. One day, muscle aches too strong to walk normally down the stairs; the next, an intractable cold.

I don't like her because our personalities clash. We are the opposite poles of magnets and, therefore, repel. She doesn't feel it, because she doesn't want to. Or maybe doesn't want to find herself unlikeable. This last point, at least, I understand. I used to be like that too.

I accept that maybe I just hate her because the feeling is so delicious, that I owe it to myself to feel this one burning emotion. Joe points out that she and her comrade are, essentially, quite wholesome. There is no obvious reason to hate them, no glaring problem, and that makes the hatred better. It feels illicit and beautiful. Joe finds it hilarious because he understands it. He knows what I mean when I say I spend way too much of my time hating her. Because it comes naturally to both of us, and--maybe because we understand each other--we encourage it in each other.

Standing on my bed, jumping against the ancient springs that have felt the weight of so many other bodies, I decide that this feeling is one of the most human. It comes from the deepest part of the brain, that part that is modulated by the newer, higher functioning parts, and in some moments, it is the only thing reminding me that I am, in fact, alive.

On Possible Worlds and Alternate Realities

Despite my general distaste for all things philosophical, I used to love riding in Sak's passenger seat, requesting to hear about possible worlds. He would explain to me that, in all of the possible worlds, the essence of things would have to remain the same. That is, things that define an object--the spherical quality of a sphere, he would say--would have to stay constant. I would search my mind for things that would remain the same in all of the possible mes.

"I would have to be short, no matter what," I said, but he disagreed.

"Your height doesn't define you," he would say, but I would think about how I would be different if I were taller. A bit more "normal" perhaps; less loud and obnoxious. Somehow not me.

But instead of thinking about it that way, my mind would turn to the happenings and circumstances of my life that had propelled me this far and, inevitably, it would explore the possibility that the trajectory of my fragmented spine could have pushed into my spinal cord.

It's something I think about a lot, a subject that comes with the mixed emotions of relief and intrigue. Would I have graduated from college, gone to graduate school? Would I know the people I know now, and in what ways would these relationships be translated?

So, I ride in the car with Joe, who is excited about his overly large 1.6 mm pen. I mention that, with another .4 mms, he would be writing with the distance that stood between me and paralysis. We go through our standard conversation about how things would be if we were like we are now, with the exception of my ability to use my legs. He says he would have, by this point, gotten a handicapped van to drive me around. I have no doubt that this is true, us raising hell and him wrecking me constantly. Like now, people would not understand.

So, I sit in the therapist's office. In her attempts to force me to use the word "bipolar" as a noun and not an adjective [a theory made by people without mental illness to bring some unnecessary political correctness to the table], she asks me what I would call myself if I were paralyzed. I remind her that I came rather close. "If I were paralyzed," I say, "I'm pretty sure I would call myself 'paraplegic.'"

So, I'm lying in Joey's bed in my underwear, watching tv. My legs are curled behind me, my back in a delicate arch. The commercial is for a wheelchair that can do amazing things, including climbing stairs. I recount for him the awful statistics we had learned only two days earlier, that 80% of the partners of men who have spinal cord injuries stay, that 80% of the partners of women who have spinal cord injuries leave. The excuse that women are "more nurturing" and therefore more likely to stay has left me unsatisfied and angry.

His dark eyes look back at me, and I remember spoonfuls of orange sherbet that I eventually threw up on him, his swimsuit sprayed with Curve cologne, the crackers he drove to buy me when the Loritab made everything unpalatable. I speak what turns out to be a hybrid between statement and question. "You wouldn't have left me, right?"

But I know what I've always known. That I'm in the lucky 20%, that if there are other worlds, somewhere, I exist happily with my legs broken and my heart complete.

But When Her Laughter Died, Her Tears Did Not

Therapy disarms me, swiftly and steadily, because it robs me of my ability to laugh. It robs me of my ability to do things on my terms, disables my ability to be stubborn, to demand that things are my way.

"What do you want to accomplish with these sessions?" my therapist prods, trying to tease some sort of answer out of my silence. But what I want is something both intangible and unspeakable. I want a peace I can't afford, some brief silence of mind. I want something I can't have, which is to live my life without worrying. I want all of the good things, the funny things that come with my illness--I want this heightened sense of self, but not at this cost. A cost that is not immediately evident, because I don't want it to be. A cost that erodes at something within me [but that allows me the opportunity to rebuild--on my terms].

I fold my left arm over my right, fold the right forearm up against me. Chin goes on the left shoulder--an immediately defensive pose. I find myself in it in these times, these moments when I feel vulnerable--when asked to be introspective with someone I'm just forming a therapeutic relationship, when I'm alone and don't want to feel judged for my loneliness.

"You're so needy!" Joe exclaims when I throw my notebook and pens down on his or Jacob's desk so I can go somewhere, anywhere. He's joking, at least kind of, but the secret is that we both know it's true. Maybe because we're both needy in the same kind of ways, sometimes.

I need someone to validate my existence. I need someone to laugh with me and at me, someone who will take me seriously without being serious. I need someone to tell me that my mom deserves a break, that when she says "Which one of you am I getting tonight?" she means, "I don't ever want you to be sad; I don't understand your illness, and that scares me." I need someone to fight with, and I need that same person to be on my team, my backup one hundred percent, without being asked. I need someone that will knock me on my ass and pick me right back up.

I think of these things when I am sitting there, arms tangled up in front of me, a complex maze of skin, muscles, nerves and bone that only I understand. I'm crying at this point, and I watch, very carefully, my therapist's face. It is her job to be concerned, to make the obligatory faces. I don't blame her for this--I'm developing that same face. I will use it on patients, use it as a sign to say both "I'm sorry that you're sad" and "I'm sorry that this is a place I cannot go with you." But in this moment, now, I think about how insufficient that face is, how you will never know that as a doctor until you have seen its insufficiencies for yourself. I am crying, and I don't want to be crying. It's out of my control, no parking lot at Publix, no pillows to lean my head back, feel those tears soaking into my hairline. I do not relish them, but I resent them. I resent, if only briefly, myself for crying. She notes that I'm upset. She wants to know why.

I sit in continued silence, and then I'm completely stunned by what happens next.

"It's just so hard," I say. "It's so hard to be bipolar." In this moment, I realize I've never said those words before.

Later, Joe asks how my session went. I had already processed the meeting with Joey, talked about what happened, how I cried, how I often cry in therapy, why I cry in therapy. He worries that I'm having crises that he doesn't know about, but I promise him that this is not so. With Joe, I say, "I had a good session." But, then, I change my mind. "It was probably the best yet," I say definitively.

Because I've finally realized that this is what I want out of my sessions. I want to be disarmed. I want to be pushed and shoved out of my comfort zone. If only for one hour out of every two weeks, I want to admit that it is hard to be diagnosed and treated for a mental illness. I want to acknowledge the struggle and learn how to deal with the extra mental toll that it adds. I want to be recognized for my strength while admitting that it's ok to fall apart. I want to take myself apart.

I've worked with several instruments in the last few years, exquisitely designed instruments that can quantitatively differentiate two compounds with a single hydrogen difference. I've taken them apart, plumbed and wired them up. At first, it is terrifying to take them down, but I find that--if I pay attention--it gets easier and easier to put them back together. Our minds, too, are exquisite machines, running on pure electricity at incredible speeds. They, too, can be taken apart. It's not that hard. But--if the one who takes them apart pays attention--then each time, it gets easier to put them back together.

At least, that's what I'm banking on.

When My Words Aren't Enough

For the past few years, I've been mildly obsessed with the blog Sweet Juniper. It is written by a husband and wife--Dutch and Wood--who moved to Detroit more than a year ago with their daughter Juniper [they have since had another child, Gram]. Dutch is a stay-at-home father, and one of his [what do you call it? a hobby? A passion?] favorite passtimes is photographing the falling-apart city.

One of the subjects that he has most prolifically photographed is the Detroit Public School Book Depository, a huge warehouse that holds old materials from the public schools. A fire broke on in the building 20 years ago, and the warehouse is now filled with drug dealers, prostitutes, and trees that grow out of the ashes of burnt pages. His pictures incited quite an outcry about the state of things--whether it be the government or some handful of shitty individuals that caused it--and he did further research into the depository, posting a beautiful vignette about it today.

I think the thing that connects me most to this post is, surprisingly, not how it makes the book-lover in me feel. Instead, it is the amount of connection I feel to his place in a city that is falling apart. The difference between our homes is that my city works unbelievably hard to take care of its old buildings. In fact, I constantly find myself wanting to do what he does, to peruse through old buildings in the city. But the truth is, they are hard to find. I can't think of any that give me the ease of access with which he has been able to enter the buildings in Detroit. Here, houses are bought and "flipped," and the city keeps gentrifying and pushing out. What we once referred to five years ago as "dangerous" has now become upscale, a street full of beautiful shops, expensive restaurants and bakeries for dogs. Regardless of anyone's feelings on the morality of gentrification, Dutch gives a glimpse into what happens when things aren't this way:

"Here we get to see what the world will look like when we're gone. We see that the world will indeed go on, and there is a certain beauty to nature's indifference. Someday the books will tumble from the shelves at the Bodleian and there will be no one to replace them."

Indeed. Go read it--it's worth the time.

Candle, Lamp, Octopus

Today, Joe and I had to go visit our senior mentor to administer a mental status exam. This, we decided, was fairly hilarious, as there was a better chance of our senior mentor being able to pass the exam than we did. As expected, he passed with flying colors, and we went on to have more than an hour of conversation.

Our conversations with Mr. B usually go in the same direction. One, he regales us with tales [that may or may not be true] from his time in the service. Two, he recounts fights he has been in, reminding us that he is a gentle man, but that he will defend himself if provoked. Three, he and Joe talk about neuroscience.

The last in the sequence of events is my favorite. It usually requires little to no input from me. Mr. B has lost the part of his hearing that allows him to hear the female register of sounds; therefore, if any real conversation is to be had, it must come from Joe. Second, Joe is the neuroscience guy, and though I am in the class right now, I'm not breaking any amazing records as far as academic achievement goes.

Part of the fun in watching stems from the coincidence that they both enjoy the same parts of neuro: the part where you take brain physiology and chemistry and extrapolate it to human behavior. Why we smile and why we get angry and why people like me exist.

Mr. B has the basics down--axons and neurons and synapses and chemicals. "Why do you suppose," he'll say, "this thing happens?" Joe will launch into some explanation, starts gesticulating with a look on his face. It's a look I don't get to see often, because we're in medical school, and there's not always time for it: the look you get on your face when you are talking about the thing you are most interested in, the thing you could do for the rest of your life without getting bored, the one place where you aren't out of your depth.

I recognize this face because I get it every once in a while--when I return to my lab, and Ryan wants me to hash something over with him or when my dad calls me and tells me that he is getting two free GCs for me to hack apart and rebuild. The look on my face when I know what I'm doing, when I can explain what I want to explain without searching for and losing the words
.
Mr. B hangs onto every word, and this is a place where I cannot follow the two of them. I am becoming increasingly interested in neuro and in the possibilities of neuro-psych in my future professional life, but in this case, it's better to sit back. To watch Mr. B lean in and to watch Joe light up, to catch his eye every once in a while, as if to say, "I know. I understand. I know."

Sleeping Is Giving In, No Matter What the Time Is

I'm feeling especially "grown-up" today, this week. I have grown-up problems [taxes, insurance, therapy], grown-up responsibilities [apartment hunting, price comparing, budgeting], and grown-up events to attend [Salman Rushdie followed by a wine and cheese get-together].

I put a reserve deposit down on an apartment after a morning of shopping around different complexes. The apartment I chose is a really cute one bedroom with a nice little sunroom that will make a great dining room/study area. I have a move-in date and a bevy of people to help me move. I have some furniture, and I'm now in search of more furniture [a new bed, more bookcases, a sofa, etc]. I'm really excited about moving out of my tiny bedroom and moving into a real home with real space, a place where I can do what I waaaaant.

Oh, and, uh...Salman Rushdie.

Well, he was amazing. I was as excited to see him as I was to see JCO, but for very different reasons. It was interesting, having already seen her, but they definitely had their own flavors.

Part of the difference is in where the featured book fell in each one's success. Oates's talk was on The Falls, which is her 4000th [ok, probably somewhere around 30th] novel. It didn't get any particular type of awesome acclaim--I think it was chosen because it was relatively new, and because she really seemed tied to the main character. Rushdie's book, on the other hand, was Midnight's Children. His second book, which followed a first book that was widely panned, from how he spoke about it.

With Rushdie, we got to hear about his creative process, about how much work went into this novel. How he changed point-of-view in the middle of the novel, and how much history he had to put into it to make the character he had in his head. Which is a perfect point, and one that I've made before--my characters live in my head before they ever live on paper. It often is more like listening to a story than writing one--the character's actions progress out of their personalities, and never the other way around. My favorite writing professor always said that our characters should be so well defined in our heads, their personalities so specific, that we could answer any question about what they would do in any situation. Rushdie, it seems, believes this too.

It was interesting hearing this widely acclaimed author speak of the frustration of this book. When he finished, he said, he read through it and thought it was a pretty good book. If it was panned, he decided, he obviously did not know what a good book looked like and should stop writing [how tragic that would have been!]

Alas, Midnight's Children went on to win the Booker Prize [Britian's top writing accolade], and then won the "Booker of Bookers"--the best Booker-winning book in the first twenty-five years of the prize. Rushdie went on to be sued by Indira Gandhi for libel for one sentence in the book; by settling, she inadvertently admitted to the other accusations of corruption, a point that did not escape India's media. Rushdie went on to write other novels, including The Satanic Verses, a book so intense that a fatwa was put on Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

So, Salman Rushdie is decidedly a badass. But my favorite part, by far, was his reading. I absolutely love being read to; so much, in fact, that the last two times I have slept at Allison's apartment, I have forced her to read to me until I fell asleep. In her bed. Forcing her to sleep on the couch.

Rushdie's work is less accessible to me than Oates, because he writes about a place I've never been, a culture in which I've never been immersed, with religious and political problems unlike with which I've been surrounded. The simple reading he gave, with slightly different voices for characters and the lilt of his accent--it made the words much more accessible, much more sensible. They made more sense, that is.

But, my favorite part by far, was when he addressed one of my favorite qualities of his work. For about a year, I've been a bit obsessed about magic realism. [A lot of the modern magic realists--Morrison, Marquez, Singer--have been Nobelists!] Rushdie definitely fits the bill, with scalps coming off and men growing horns, and I find all of it absolutely delightful.

To paraphrase:

Someone decided to take a sort of census of all of the gods in India--not just the well-known Hindu gods, but also the local gods of each village. When he was done, the total came to 300 million gods in India. He compared that to the population: at 1 billion people, the ratio of humans to gods in India is currently 3.3:1. In the time in which the book is set, the ratio was 2:1. Following the population curve and assuming the population of the gods is constant [as is their nature], the human population surpassed the divine population around 1940. This is a good place to start understanding why Indians are more likely to accept the magic of his realism than their western counterparts.

Rushdie made my week bright in the midst of Failing two out of four exams! Putting myself in even more jeopardy with the program! Being totally unsure of the future! All of these things, these terribly disheartening disappointing things of which I am sure I will soon speak. But Salman Rushdie is a bad-ass, unrepentant, magic realist amazing writer. I'm sure he will win the Nobel in the next ten years [after Philip Roth, of course], and when he does, I'll be cheering him all the way, clutching my signed hardback copy of The Satanic Verses to my chest.

That Kind of Day

Shortly after my convenient single pack of granola explodes all over my body:

"Why am I even listening to you? How am I supposed to believe the one with the cranberry on her chest?"

You Prayed for Rain; I Prayed for Blindness

The Crazy is gone--it dribbled out like water from my broken faucet, ran down the drain, fled the armies of invading chemicals.

The subtle difference between this 25 mgs seems like the leap between oceans, the distance between Earth and, appropriately, Mars. A difference that I, perhaps, am only aware of--the difference between merely thinking casually about razors and holding myself back from driving to get them. The difference between feeling a bit down and wanting to throw myself into that sadness. A different quality in sleep, a minute change in the timbre of colors I see.

Sounds are different; the nuances of words are not static. What one person said last week, I could read one way, but a new way now. Things are more clear, more as they seem. That hint of sarcasm does not escape me, and yet it doesn't speak to me [only me] either. The words in graffiti are meant for everyone, I now see, no matter how much I would have thought that I was the only one paying attention.

The secrets of the world--their pieces have once again flown out of place. I am now more still, more at rest, less kinetic with [perhaps] more potential: my energy has been conserved, but redistributed. I can lie in bed and breathe--I, once again, find peace in this stillness. I read the aches of my body like a well-worn page, stop pushing and remember to listen. The sound of my breath in my lungs is a symphony--I do not hyperventilate, and I do not think--too long, at least--about what would happen if that breath was to stop. Although it does not pulsate at the back of my eyelids, sleep comes when invited, with the slip of thumb in mouth, lids pressed together. I am aware of myself--that I am happy. In the street, when I'm trying to talk on the phone through well-played interruptions, I laugh my laugh.

The come-down feels like it should be disappointing. But it's not.

Finally You Have Found Yourself...With Me

On Friday morning, as I was packing up to leave for the test, I realized that I didn't have a pencil. I asked Joe if I could borrow one, and as he pulled one out of his bag, he said, "You know, the last time I let Mike borrow a pencil, the clip was gone in two seconds."

"Well," I countered, "I prefer for the clip to stay on. I promise I will return your pencil whole."

After lunch, I plodded back into the auditorium and plopped back into my seat, slumping down, preparing to be owned. I pulled the pencil out of my pocket. I put my finger at the end of the clip, and--with no warning, no SNAP or any other onomatopoeic sound--the clip just flopped off of the pencil. Stunned, I simply stared at my hands. The proctor announced "The testing session has now begun."

"This can't be good," I thought. After Joe came and picked me up, I returned his pencil. "I've never broken a promise to you," I said, after explaining the bizarre circumstances of the detachment of the clip. "I hate that this is the first one. I was stunned... devastated, almost."

I'm sure there's an allegory there somewhere.

After the test and a nap on the Fetal Couch, I drove home to see the boy. We had one of our wonderful spectacular weekends of NOTHING. We had both had hard weeks, and all we wanted to do was lie in bed or play on the computer or watch tv. We slept and snuggled and slept and then ate and then slept some more. After sleeping in on Saturday and eating lunch with his parents, we disappeared back into his bedroom. He played Warcraft and I read a play and then started rereading a book I love. Occasionally, one of us would stop what he or she was doing, look at the other, and mumble a quick "I love you," or "You're so cute."

These are the moments when we are best, the times when I can see our future so clearly. The moments when "togetherness" means more than doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.

In the winding minutes before I had to get in my car and drive away, he let me abuse him like I sometimes do, lying on his back when he was lying on his stomach, the back of my head pushed perfectly into the space between his shoulder blades, the curve of my lower back arching over his ass. Although that's a place where I can comfortably sleep, it's fairly uncomfortable for him, so before long we shifted, and I laid halfway down the bed, my head on his inner thigh [I've fallen asleep there, too]. He put his hands in my hair. I didn't want to leave, of course. But, as always, I must play the "This is what you've always wanted to do, isn't it?" card.

There are sometimes when it all seems so unfair. When I say all, I mean all. I mean the 900 dollars in taxes I just paid. I mean the insurance denial [number two, same bill]. My illness and all the shit it cost me, the beautiful ring hidden in a closet, the certainty of love and the future. The distance between my hair and his hands.

As he walked me to my car, he asked about my classes, "Will it get easier?"

"No," I said. "It won't." Which is maybe the first time I have admitted this to myself. The entire time I've been in medical school, I've thought, "The next test block will be easier." Or the next semester, or the next year. But it won't--it will always be a challenge. And in the end, isn't that what brought me to medicine, to medical research? The idea that it won't always be the same, that things will change, that there will always be a challenge.

Well, to say it that way, yes. Even if reminding myself of that does, sometimes, get old, it remains--and rings--true.

Becoming Us

In lecture, one of our professors refers to something as a pharmaceutical situation. He leans over to me, and whispers "I have a pharmaceutical situation. It's you."

This isn't unusual--we designate each other all the time with various ideas and titles. We've been, in each other's minds, the missing twin we never knew we had. I have no problem reminding him that he's an asshole--in all the best ways and for all the right reasons. That's he's not wrong, no--but that he is, sometimes, an asshole.

I've never made any point in hiding the fact that I lost a lot of friends in the past year. It's something I am constantly remind of, and I can never pretend that losing them didn't hurt. It hurt then, and it still hurts. It's something I have to talk about in therapy, because a lot of the reasons that we are no longer friends relates, in some way or another, to my illness, especially in its untreated state.

Somewhere along the way, I fell into the habit of assuming I deserved to be treated like dirt. I had been a bad person, I thought, and so this was the universe's way of correcting itself. "You have been an asshole, a liar, a shitty friend," I told myself, "So you deserve nothing better. In fact, you don't deserve anything at all."

Sometimes, when we are feeling particularly pensive, we play the what-if game or the how-did-we-meet game, recognizing always that we could have easily slipped through each others cracks, failed to register on each other's radar, which is something that always manages--if only for a second--to silence us, which is a rare occurrence indeed. He likes to talk about how life flows, how hard it is to imagine the once-potent possibilities after you chose one path. It's hard to imagine a life different than this one.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I feel like I am living a totally uncompromised life, as far as relationships go. School is the gigantic compromise, the daily attack that threatens to undo me, but my relationships have the perfect balance. They are well-balanced because they are well delineated. My relationship with my boyfriend is the most important, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I don't have to fight for that.

This newest friendship, this deep uncompromising friendship, is a perfect fit into the theme of my blog [and the theme of my life], that treatment for my illness is another chance to get it right. After feeling as if I didn't deserve any friends--especially not the type of friends who are reliable, who go out of their way to ensure my comfort, happiness, or ease of existence--I somehow managed to find this one, through some voodoo combination of serendipity and, perhaps, blessedness. This is not to say that I don't have any friends remaining from before my diagnosis, because I do. Those friends worked hard with me to restore our friendships, and that dedication means the world to me. But this friendship is different in that it represented a chance to make a friend on these new, somewhat uneasy terms, as someone with a diagnosed illness that wrecked previous relationships. Just some kind of chance--not to prove anything, just to do something new and positive in my life.

It has worked out beautifully.

So, he yells across the room, "That song that just played is called 'Rx Queen'. And you are the Rx Queen--in my world anyway."

So, we stagnate over dinner decisions until one of us--trained in weapons martial arts--wields an umbrella against the other one--who sometimes falls off of curbs on the way to school--until a decision is made. A willing observer, our trusty and ever-patient third, watches us from the couch. He also watches us, at various times, making scopes with our hands. Pretending to be optic radiations or Robot Man or the slow-moving icons on our physiology notes. Quoting the "micturation" line from the Big Lebowski whenever the word comes up in the notes. Telling people, from the safety of his car, to "Get a job, sir." Deciding what would be in our Pinata Surprises--anything from baby squid to butter pecan-flavored Ensure.

So, we standing in line at lunch, after a set of misunderstandings led both of us to believe we were waiting, politely, for the other to finish working. So politely, even, that we didn't realize that we were both waiting to go, until he finally mentioned something about it. He looks at me and says, "It's funny, that two people who understand each other so well sometimes don't understand each other at all."

I nod. "But it feels right," I say.

And it does. Always.

The Hues and Overtones of Manic Depression

Being an Art Star is about struggling to remember.
[Rev Jen]

So, the experiment is over. But I still haven't finishing processing the experience. I've been mulling over it in my head for a few days, now, turning it over and over. Last night, as I drove home, I had a series of small revelations.

Bipolar disorder gives me colors, hues that "normal" people can't understand. My mania is the color behind your eyelids when you look at the sun with your eyes closed. It burns brightly and strongly, and it is hard [so hard] to turn away. You can't move--it's just there.

My depression is the black-blue in the center of bruises, the color that sits dully, the one that makes you cringe when you press it. It reminds you of pain. It is tender to the slightest touch.

I told Joe that I wanted to stop feeling the feelings the other day, and most of that is true. But a small part of me, the smallest part per billionth aches for the feelings. It's the part that relished their return, the part that wanted to get out of bed and drive around the city, the part that wanted to drape itself down a staircase and cry. It's the part that feels most alive when it feels sick, the part that wants to smile at the cars that drive by. The part that wants to break itself into pieces, the part that wants to fuck and fight and talk shit and sleep and cut. It is self-destructive and can be [was once] all-consuming.

So we talk about why I want to take more medicine. Yesterday, I had some depressed moments. I thought of driving to the lab, stealing one of the razor blades. The fantasies expanded, more than they ever have [I've never cut]. I thought of which one I would chose, the one least likely to have chemicals on it. I would boil a pot of water and drop the razor in. I would wait, slowly, patiently. When it was done, I would lift it up. When it cooled down, enough to use but still warm with the memory of water, I would press it in. Where? Somewhere less noticeable. Not the flashy, needy, begging wrists, no matter how much that vein shines and pulsates out. No. The ankle, perhaps. The upper shoulder.

The upper shoulder--when I first started treatment, I would write on my left shoulder in brown thin line Sharpie. I would remind myself that there were four things that were important, that I wanted, that I needed: prayer, honesty, fidelity, love. The things you turn to when razors cut across your mind, the things you turn to when you are stuck.

So I remember that the only thing that can fight a broken mind is that same mind, wanting to be fixed. That same mind, that same ache for things to be ok. It's the aching yearning mind that reaches out for help. That mind compels you to talk when you don't want to. That mind helps you remember that the palette you have in your mind is beautiful but poisonous. Bright things usually are.

So, with one part relishing the darkness, wanting desperately to succumb to the heaviness of depressed eyelids, the other parts push back, open the mouth, and say--to whoever is listening, but mostly to that one rogue part--"I want to stop feeling that being human is an irrevocable injustice."

This is why you keep living. This is why you keep shaking the pills into your hand. This is why you torture yourself with therapy, why you eventually give up all of the bad thoughts you've been hoarding. For true happiness and true sadness, for human emotion that your human peers can relate to and comfort. For this, you give up being a superhuman. For this, you finally become what you're meant to be. Yourself.

About the Header

Every two weeks, or so, my class has nearly-compulsatory attendance at Careers in Medicine seminars. In these seminars, doctors representing one or two fields in medicine come during lunch and tell us about their specialties. This information includes residency requirements ["We prefer the top 10% of the class, which I'm sure you all are...], average salary, information about lifestyle, etc.

Last week, one of the seminars was Psychiatry. It was a really interesting seminar, for various reasons, but my favorite part was the end. The speaker ended his presentation with a few interesting images, one of which was an advertisement for some psychiatric drug [unfortunately, I can't remember which]. The image in the advertisement was a head--inside the head, there was nothing but a circle filled with sunshines, smiley faces and thumbs up. My friends and I got a huge kick out of it, and since then, we have been joking that my medicine has replaced my brain with smiley faces and sunshine.

Cue today, when I went to see my psychiatrist. We agreed that the best thing to do about my swings--whether they are caused by stress or by the addition of the birth control pills--would be to titrate up 25 mgs, which brings me from 75 mg to 100 mg. This is convenient, too, because it actually decreases the number of Lamictal pills I have to take from 3 to 1. I came back to the house, and as I was walking up the steps, I thought of the new 100 mg Lamictal pill, and I started giggling. On this, the very first day of April, I start filling my head with more sunshine and smiley faces. Thus, the header. The pink, as happy horseshit and overly bubbly as I find it, seemed like a perfect match.

I thought people might think all the pink is an April Fool's day thing. But it's not. We'll all deal with it together.