Goodbye sweet dreams.
Hit me with the zap darling,
Break apart the cheek sockets,
Gimme a zing that chews joy,
Spits grit and evaporates misery,
I’d like one for the road,
Splintering that jaw bone,
Forcing the brightside parade of glee,
And even if,
I’ve got tongue sized words to disagree,
They don’t matter much,
When eyes twitch out of touch,
I’m lubricated,
Half insane,
Thank God for magic moments,
Watching sadness drift down a drain.
Motivations interviewed and irrelevant,
I’ll lay my head guilty pressed on insignficant,
For cowards face never the burning sun,
They’ll hide in shadow and deep shades for far,
Too long to justify,
Too short to miss the feelings of defense,
A good name is relative depending on who plays the better game.
I’d settle for naught but honesty,
Review of self with society as whole the juror,
Makes for fearful selling,
That for each wounding action their is a conflict acting.
Were each moment played off the last,
All credit due for manipulations, scheming, mind games,
But each one remaining new,
Pure of outside intrusion more than human,
That would board for explanation.
To the inn keeper who lent a room,
Truth be told I wanted warmth without the price,
For both myself and my wife,
Without money on hand my labor was an easy price,
We left you a story and a poem,
You gave us peaceful hours till we meet again.
The individuals who have given freely and randomly,
Not all your funds went to the gas tanks,
In fact I know,
Aside from coffee and some flowers,
Much has gone to calm the sway of panic,
I regret to say booze to numb the world,
In this turmoil and limbo I’ve fallen to the ease of calling it a moral disease,
Let myself be sold to the desire,
A bottle sits easier sometime when buried in mental wreckage,
Burning in quagmire.
I’ve had bouts with lifting,
Ignoring and getting loud with my wife,
Falling short at jobs and seemingly checked out on life.
Surely by the standard of the world I’m guilt ridden as sinning,
My core personality is crawling back though,
Believe in its honesty or not,
I will sit down with a young woman and try to share her pain,
With my wife, bath tubs and reruns, church and tradition,
Moving Christmas boxes for a hot meal from a kitchen.
I’m finding a stride,
And yes, I am open to denouncement and decry,
I’m a fool touching down,
Getting his head scanned and on meds again,
Trying my best,
Hell, signed up for college and even showed for the test.
I’m far from perfect,
And I’ll sign to the tune of my own recognition,
Of failings I make,
Mistakes or plain fuckery from more rebellious days,
For the first time in long months though,
With eyes clear to the world,
As much as they can be,
I’m on a road to improvement,
On bettering up my awareness,
So that I can be I,
You can be you,
And together bring each other ourselves,
You and I, us and we.
With an image blast and some optimistic love from Twain….this is uncharted water for me and I’m learning as I go.
VERY quick spoken word – pushing for speed to grab the urgency of mania or #bipolar.
Playful polliwog with your legs half formed,
Your tail amuses the bigger frogs you’ll soon learn.
For their tongues are thickly sticky,
Lash out quicker than quick and then more quickly.
Poor little polliwog,
Today is not going to be your day.
Vividly vicious,
Pointedly pernicious,
Real life though through time they are sent.
Soaring sacred,
Helping hot hatred,
Occupying thoughts and blinding sight with recall bent.
Worldly window,
Boldly brittle,
Truncated life in fell cobwebs do they build.
Spindly spiders,
Truthfully totter,
Legs dancing across silk fields.
Memories mine,
Flurries recall and define.
The man that I once was,
Chaos attached to the leg of a dove.
Today I acknowledge the taste,
Confront the facts,
Carve away all the emotional waste.
Pumped up on that chalky sunshine,
The moon is fading to another vicious morning.
Spent my hours beneath the starlight in the wind,
Lovingly hitting repeat on every action I’d begin.
Glassed eyes and withered muscles ache,
Blood thundering past a thirst impossible to slake.
The ride was hot and heavy to the top,
Until we picked up speed enough to never stop.
From a general standpoint, every mental illness (at least in my experience) offers it’s afflicted a slightly varied experience from the next in line. The numbers rattle off to “BiPolar Disorder Type I – Last Manic Episode Severe w/o Psychosis.” Next up is the well beloved Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) rounding out with Borderline Personality Disorder for good measure.
In a world of “medicated everyone” not many people blink an eye when the sack of pills comes out. Though in a strangely uncomfortable way it occasionally strikes me to explain what they’re all for and watch them adjust their demeanor in that so common and anxiously polite manner I’ve come to expect.
Here’s the kicker. When I was running a sales organization with a 150 reps, and quotas, plane travel 5 days a week – outside of the unchecked alcoholism at the time – you would never have known. The counselor that has finally found a checkmark next to his name for me continuously tries to reinforce that the mania can be used as an asset, a tool.
That’s where the differentiations come in for all of us.
In the early stages, mania feels like the beginning of fearless adrenaline rush without any edge. Endless possibilities are all within easy reach potentially. The stacks of chaotic problems encroaching all around are not only solvable but nearly laughable in their simplicity. With a blossoming confidence that transcends arrogance to simply become conviction that ANYTHING that I want to do right now I could do. Usually, I start walking, headphones in, my face will become unable to hold onto anything but a ear splitting toothed smile as I laugh out loud looking at the oncoming traffic. Air crisps or whistles across my skin. It’s the first moment you meet a new woman, it’s the first cigarette in the morning, it’s a tank of gas in the car and a world to explore, and it’s far to exquisitely perfect to be sustainable.
For me, this is where it starts. To the reader, if you felt as though there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish, the world was your oyster for a day – would you find it tempting to hold onto that?
Challenge #1 with comorbidity and dually diagnosed:
The logical outcome is the circular pattern of up, down, feel bad, look for other options. Recovering from addiction is reliant almost entirely on the willingness to simply hand in the weapons and stop fighting. Surrender to the reality it is a losing fight, and if you stay away from using, you are on your way to brighter things.
Mania is deceitful though. Sure, it’s easy to throw an ungodly sum of anti-psychotics down someone’s throat until the pattern may well be nearly impossible to repeat. It could be argued on some level, that while a Thorazine shuffle isn’t a high quality of life, if it’s sufficient to overcome the initial hurdles of early sobriety without a high flying manic swing knocking you off the tracks, I don’t know how hard I’d argue against it.
That said, I’m a stubborn and foolish individual who continues to bolster the thought that, “If we just edge down the manic swings a touch so that I don’t feel like me I bet it would work…”
The reality is that I’m trying to stay high without thinking of it that way directly. My brain will pull magnificently orchestrated rationalizations out of the neurons they were stuffed for a rainy day until I’m willing to concede, that maybe, just maybe, this time everything will balance out. This is where the big kicker comes into play.
Challenge #2 deals with facts:
I had written something try and put it in perspective for my poor parents who have watched this for 15+ years. Mania tried to capture all the blended excitement and frustration attendant with the feeling.
In essence, as everything builds up further and further, I force myself into a corner where the only outcome is going to be using my own self prescribed medication, or face another hospital which in the throes of mania seems completely ludicrous.
I recognize that the world looks at the series of insane adventures that have certainly occurred, the days without sleep, the spontaneous flights of fancy and even actual flights as something only a “crazy” person would do. Certainly, there is an element out of the norm, that’s why I’m taking medication and working on counseling in the first place. But for all the oddness, I delude myself with imagining that there is an element of jealousy beneath the demeaning words tossed around.
When things fade down, I’m always certain to get right back into the cycle with meds, visits, check-ups, retrospection. Invariably when the cycle completes I’ve lost my job, money is gone, probably overdosed once, and I’m homeless and coming back to family with my hand out. There is an absolutely bittersweet element to everything related to the upswings in BPD (much as I’m sure there are to the down as well).
This is not a life that I want to lead. I am working to follow the directions and accept the help of those still willing to offer it. So often though – just like with drugs and alcohol – all the progress fades away when the world takes on that special hue, sharpens up, and the rush comes on. I’ve lost homes, my wife, family, my life 6x (god bless Narcan), and even access to see my children for fear I’ll disappear again and leave them devastated. In the same breath, I left my pregnant wife nearly bankrupt and verging on foreclosure before she divorced me, and since, there are wide oceans of wreckage that spill against the happy homes of those that dared to care.
If you happen to see someone else having the time of their life while they pour gasoline on everything they’ve worked so hard for – speaking from experience – the smile is masking a far greater pain and frustration then is easily seen.
Tears from laughter and tears from misery both look the same.
This was originally written as an awareness building essay for another site that didn’t use it, so I’ll feed myself (and anyone who cares to listen to me prattle) the leftovers. Thank you for reading, and I really would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. ~S
Living like a cat last summer,
Couldn’t afford sheets or real food,
But the room was a soft pink,
And the lumpy mattress felt softer than the bricks.
Living like a cat I was,
Crawling under piles of clothes to nap,
Eating cans of tuna (pocket sized),
Basking in the sun so the shade felt cooler.
Cat life is great for those critters,
But at 6’+ and a bundle of seething “more,”
It’s feline for some but didn’t sit right on me,
So I’ll gladly hand it back this time around.
Feeling a bit more canine today.
Though cans of tuna still roll free,
I have a forever human to lick,
Hopefully I’ll get older than a pup –
— goddamn pet control still wants to lock me up.
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 