The Asylum and You Can't Take a Joke?

I going to start from a place of anger that still grates on me these weeks later: I'm tired of mentally ill people being the puppies that everyone can kick and not feel bad about it. A lot of people are still ableist, but the ablesim against mental disorders is hidden and unconscious. Otherwise enlightened people who are kind-hearted use the term "retarded" to describe the inane or other scenarios. And the way mental illness is seen as a weakness and a spectacle is no less problematic. I would ask that any reader reflect whether his or her views of the mentally ill are not as "less than." Less than human.


I left the hospital to find this meme worming its way through my Facebook contacts:
You're in a mental hospital. Use the first 7 people on your chat list (no cheating).
Your roommate:
Person licking the window:
Person helping you escape:
Person running around naked:
Your doctor:
Person yelling nonsense about clowns:
Person you went crazy with:


Let me inform you of your privilege, if you have never been sick enough to have been admitted to a mental hospital. For those of us who have, it is a badge of pain. It's not something most of us hospital veterans would blithely wish upon a facebook friend even as a joke. The symptoms may or may not be actual symptoms, but they are supposed to be funny. Next time someone tags you on this joke, feel free to link to my blog.


I'm the first to see the funny, the ironic, the bizarre, and the absurd. And all of these happen in a mental ward. Of course, so was one schizophrenic patient who called our psychiatrist "the most vanilla guy, like, ever." I do think that there is humor in my own breaks, too. But running a list of stereotypical symptoms and then tagging them on friends, think if you did that to any other racial, ethnic, or other identifying group. No. Just no. Humor has to be done from the inside of the group experience and with heart. So next time you go to point and laugh at a person in the news, who may have had a break of some kind, I ask that you think with your heart, too. Have a chuckle, if you relate, but don't scorn and make her your harlequin. Harlequins often have the most open hearts.

Holding Pattern

So, the past few days I've been in a funk. It started with my ceiling leaking last Friday night in the monsoon-like rain. A few years ago, the corner of my ceiling collapsed in my bedroom after a bad leak went unnoticed. It was then supposed to have been externally fixed via a major brick-pointing project last summer. Groundhog day: at 1 a.m. the drip-drops began and I scrambled for a large container. I think it hurt because it felt like a metaphor: some deterrence to my moving gracefully into the next, more sunny chapter of life that awaits me, and which I await on pins and needles. A rude shock too, and a parallel event to my manic episode: some problem in my life that I had thought was solved. The brick-pointing was done. I take medicine.

I found myself shaking my fist at the building, at the rain, at my medicine switch failure, at the limits of science, at whatever God is. A good friend of mine who has suffered regularly some extraordinary hardships said to me, "People will tell you that you won't be given more than you can handle, well, guess what, you can be..." I agree with this. Usually I think a defining trait about me is my positive attitude. I busted my knee open this spring and blithely riffed as it was stitched in the emergency room. I can wear the PollyAnna Easter Bonnet quite nicely. But today I feel "negative." I can't tuck away pain into corners where they will politely keep from offending. I am raging, raging because I don't feel like the universe has been very compassionate to me.

After the stoicism, after the euphoria of the mania wears off, here it is: the pity party to which I feel completely entitled. I am complaining. It feels good to let it out: I have not been treated kindly by my own brain or the hospital or this terrible weather. So, please don't ask me to be positive until the figurative weather changes in so many ways for me.

So please let me be grouchy. I will come around when I am ready. I am kicking myself for not being positive which is in turn, not being kind to myself. *That* is where the real negativity lies. I need to bestow upon my own heart the space and kindness that I need to push through. As Sharon Salzberg writes, "We have to find the power in kindness, the confidence in kindness, the release in kindness; the types of kindness that transcends belief systems, allegiances, ideologies, cliques, and tribes. This is the trait that can transform our lives."

Nature

Though I think it's somewhat hilarious now, I have a crystalline memory of the first time art moved me to tears. I was about six years old, and I had a plastic record player on which I was playing the Muppet Movie soundtrack. I was coloring or something and listening to the record. The third song on the album was "Never Before, Never Again," sung by Miss Piggy. This was before VCR had entered my life so I had no recollection of the (somewhat funny) cinematic context of the song, only bittersweet lyrics sung in a poignant but silly voice. A six year old with very little comprehension of romantic love, I was suddenly arrested by those words-- "Never Before, Never Again," as an abstraction. That something would happen once in a present moment and then vanish. I remember mulling over the concept of something beautiful being manifest and then an impossibility, barred from grasp. I had a funny feeling. Then I began to sob.

My mom was upstairs in the kitchen and I remember creeping up the steps to find her, and comfort. "What's wrong?" she asked. I remember withholding that the cause of my tears was a sad song sung by a stuffed pig puppet. I believe I was partly nervous about being told it was nothing to be sad about and felt kind of funny, because the song is somewhat funny. I just answered that "it was a sad song," and remember going stone silent about the details. I couldn't articulate the context being six, but the memory is firm in my mind. I was afraid of my sensitivity.

Because I was not diagnosed until I was approximately thirty (in 2008) the question remains as to whether I was bipolar before that. One doctor referred to my life's events at that time as a "perfect storm"-- precipitating the condition of mania. I was working full time as a professor in a library, and going to school full time for my Masters in Fine Art and neither environment accounted for the immersing stress of the other. One doctor said that once bipolar patterns are introduced, it's like a marble in a groove in the brain-- the brain knows how to get there and given stress, will. Other doctors have expressed mistrust of the "perfect storm" assessment of the onset. All have thought most say the stresses I was under, both those I have written here, compounded with others in my life, were significant enough to induce a break of some kind.

I can't say, having only lived as myself in this life, whether my emotional or mood experiences are different or not. I do feel an imperative to make art. That has been with me since I was a child, a toddler, a baby even. When I am not creative, the pain locates itself physically within my body, so being an artist is less of a choice for me, if I am to be happy and whole. Less particular to although maybe more acute or someone with bipolar disorder, listening to ourselves is a sometimes difficult but truly necessary action. Planting my experience of life through art, through writing, through exercise, or a walk or conversation with a friend, this insistence on honoring my feelings is what brings relief and pleasure.

Halo

"Remember those walls I built?
Well, baby they're tumbling down
And they didn't even put up a fight
They didn't even make a sound
I found a way to let you in
But, I never really had a doubt
Standing in the light of your halo
I got my angel now

It's like I've been awakened
Every rule I had you breakin'
It's the risk that I'm taking
I ain't never gonna shut you out!" -"Halo"(Writer(s): Ramon Owen, Beyonce Knowles, Evan Bogart)

Returning to my routine after a major break is hard: it's less about a dearth of energy or actual depression and more about having had all defenses, walls and filters ripped away. In a porous state, everything saturates me. During the episode, I usually have some understanding with the powers that be that everything that I perceive is happening to me is happening to raze walls. Walls that I have constructed between my emotional life or truth usually to manage reality.

Everyone constructs barriers for protection--against things that don't feed who we are in whatever way, against threats to happiness, against the frightening, against change, against the mundane, against the regular, against the "holy"... Obviously, some boundaries construct ourselves: our predilections, identities, beliefs, etc. The walls that usually get razed in my episodes are those that are somehow lacking use for me creatively, especially those that numb me to certain realities in my life that are problematic.

So, I spent a little over a week in the hospital in May. One thing that many don't realize is that in "that" ward of the hospital where I stayed-- one can have NOTHING. No electronics, no strings, no pencils, no phones, nothing plastic... it goes on. There's a blaring TV and no place to sit where I was so reading is also a challenge. But my parents pulled some random art books from my shelves. The environment was ugly with mint walls and bad wallpaper borders. So I studied the books. I made a few drawings from this book and others during the few hours a day that the art room was open.

I was mystified by the contents of the book and relished doing some figurative work after years of intimating figure through abstraction and material and seashell and landscape. Very satisfying. The neon colors from the dollar store paint set that my parents thankfully delivered were a happy accident in making something different of the Pre-Raphaelite content. So, one of my walls of definition of ego, of what I make in my studio was leveled in that coincidence.

Though I feel way more fragile than my usual self, I am also feeling this kind of "in tune" state of grace-- of change, of new presence, of freshness, of redefined borders. Writing in this blog is part of this experience. Letting go of my boundaries of private reality and answering to the truth of "how I am" extends the halo of the transcendental that graces me in an episode into the rigor of the daily.

Trial

"I hate going through this again, starting all over..."
"What?" my mom asked.
"Separating the wheat from the chaff."


She knew what I meant. When I'm manic everything is a puzzle, a joke, a rebus, and I often think that people are teasing me in a conspiracy or providing insights about me, (for example, that I am pregnant) through a maze of allusions. I respond accordingly. Unfortunately in some ways, I am often coy about it and people are not attuned to it until I get way into the stratospheres of manic delusion, dangerous territory. Then I do things, act out in public, write things on social media, all kinds of "crazy" behavior" that has no grounding in that shared agreement that we call reality.

By the time I'm actually vocalizing the weird stuff, I am beyond not being o.k. I need a hospital. It's painful because I can't explain the social anxiety it produces to have harbored the crazy behavior and then have to look people in the eye. I am never sure whether to own this "alter ego", parts of her, or none of her. If my brain was lying to me and my faculties hijacked, how can I truly apologize? I do to some because it was some part of me that did that stuff, just one I can't control.

I have pride though, and I struggle not to get annoyed with people asking if I'm "o.k." I understand the intention, but how would you feel? My brain recently and publicly robbed me of my sanity. Time will provide comfort. Time and art. With restoring relationships, trust takes time. I have to restore myself before I can genuinely be available to people, not pasting a smile on a cardboard self as you must in the therapy-less hospital to be released.

This part is the trial- of my ability to pick myself up with my battle wounds and show kindness and understanding, first to myself. Then, frankly, I observe. Who won't care. Who will let it fall away. Sometimes things can't be fixed. And that's understandable too. Unfettering can be freedom. My impulse is true-- I'll see who helps me pick up when I'm ready and I already have an idea who those wonderful people are.

But first I have to be compassionate enough to myself: to forgive myself so I can accept the good intentions of others.

Selvaging

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.