Two weeks after a major episode of mania, I clean up the debris that it left in its wake. Rifts of trusting my own sanity, friends lost, pride wounded-- luckily these things can be healed through moving into the always ready canvas of future. I acknowledge without meaning to impart self-pity, histrionics, or sentimentality-- this process is a painful one. Mania ravages. It feels like an abduction, like bad body-snatching terror when one awakens to it. This has only happened to me a few times-- the mania.
I'm bipolar. Probably like most people, I have friends and acquaintances who will swear their life on my absolute soundness as a person. I'm not sure if it would come as a surprise to most people to hear that I'm bipolar. When I was diagnosed one of my closest friends said, "But... you are straight as an arrow!" What I fear is that many would have an a-ha moment and say-- ahhhh, THAT's what's wrong with her! But that's what's wrong... thinking that it's something that's "wrong" with someone.
On a day-to-day basis my "disorder" might be a strength. My feelings are searingly deep. I often wonder if others without this "affliction" feel as deeply as I do. Those feelings feed my creativity. I weary of answering even those in the medical profession about my supposed "ups and downs." That's not the criteria to be diagnosed with this disorder. The criteria is one manic episode. Or whatever. I don't know. Look it up if you care. I'm not a book definition.
But here's the scary part. When I have gotten manic, I have gotten...psychotic. Before I was diagnosed with having a psychotic experience... Well, lets play a game. Fill in the blank: psychotic ___________. Yeah, if you thought "killer," that's what I thought too. Until I had two, now three psychotic events. When I've had psychotic episodes and it's scared people, some well-intentioned friends have rambled on about "psycho killers." You know the stalk-y types of mentally ill people who then do something bad. This is why when a psychologist said I was having a "psychotic event" in 2009, I gasped and cried-- "No one will let me care for children! Oh my God!" She talked me down carefully from hysteria, "it's not like that, I mean, you probably can't be President of the United States, but I'm not sure that was your career path."
And thankfully as an intellectual and an artist, I'm in good company. But back to psychosis. This is why I bristle when a shooting happens and people ramble on about locking up crazies with guns. You are three times more likely to be struck by lightening than killed by someone with schizophrenia. As someone with an illness, I am more likely to be the victim of a crime by someone who may not have an illness. That doesn't make me more scared of you... And fortunately, as a psychotic manic person, I'm a lovebunny of a delusional psychotic.
But it's the lack of control that scares people, even myself. But from my crazy maenad-ic experiences deep truths have been seared into my being. From the unexpected, unbridled, uncontained and wild, comes the creative, the new. I have truly seen things. Believe me. Real things.
I am the least consistent blogger, but I hope to record some thoughts here as I can. I've debated about whether this is the time and place to publish this truth, but as I'm working on a new audiovisual piece that will reveal some of this, I am putting my faith in truth for now.
