Normal

(5 May 2011)

I think I felt “normal” today, even though I’m not sure what it is. This much is clear: it was a gorgeous day once again, which maintained my good spirits, I taught two classes which went well, ran some errands, and went to a meeting, which was my home group.  I was asked to do the lead share at the last minute, and felt especially calm and focused.  It turned out to be a great share; there were a lot of things which people could relate to, which led to a great meeting. Still, I must be completely honest and admit that I thought of buying a bottle of vodka on the way home.  Alcohol is “cunning, baffling, and powerful.”

Whenever I feel “normal,” it feels so fantastic compared to being depressed, that I’m not sure if I’m actually just hypo manic, or heading to mania.  I scan the horizons.  Is there mania on the front? Any red flags?  Shortened attention span?  Pressured speech?  Racing thoughts?  Spending sprees?  Poor judgement?  Behaviour which is abnormal for me? (Being anything other than depressed?!)   Increased sexual drive?  Aggressivity?  Grandiosity?  Delusional? And so on.  The weather forecast is: “continued creativity.”  While this reassures me, it scares me because from past experience I know that my creative phases can blow up into grandiose or delusional phases.  Once after emerging from a depression during the early days of the internet, and embarked on creating an interactive arts magazine for the net, which didn’t get very far because I was too fragile.  Another time after emerging from a depression, I worked like long efficient hours on setting up a company, only to hit “poor judgement,” and run myself into a big debt which I’m still paying off. The number of great projects that I’ve set off on is almost as long as the number of years I’ve lived.

I first noticed periods of elation followed by periods of depression in my early twenties, which is typical for manic depression.  Bipolar is the politically correct way to say it now, maybe because it doesn’t scare people off so much, but when you’re going through it, bipolar doesn’t sound as accurate as manic depressive—which is even uglier than it sounds.  I may have become bipolar much earlier. My first clinical depression hit me overnight when I was thirteen.  OnSeptember 8^th, 1976 I was fine; on September 9^th 1976 I was depressed.  The carpet had been pulled from under my feet from one day to the next.  The same day I became depressed, I got terrible migraines and horrible tinnitus (a screeching sound in my ears) that haven’t left me since.  My mother took me to one doctor to the next and one specialist to the next to no avail.  Tinnitus hadn’t been recognized yet, which didn’t help.  Doctors asked me if I heard voices, which really pissed me off, or they insisted that the noise was localized in my ears, and not my head.  I was talking about a physical symptom.  How stupid could they be?  Did they imagine that we see images in our eyes? 

I was required to attend classes since I wasn’t diagnosed as being ill, but generally when I showed up my teachers would say: “You look a bit green today; you should go to the nurse’s office.”  Sometimes I would suddenly become blinded by an opaque black and white checker pattern, and have to grope the walls to find my way around. At other times I became aphasic: my thoughts were clear in my head but when I opened my mouth the words became unscrambled.  I cried buckets of tears daily that year.  I got lost crossing the street, and came to, finding myself surrounded by cars veering away from me.  And so on.  The depression lifted, coincidentally (?) when I took on my first lover, fifteen years older than I.  From then on I went through phases of well being, heightened creativity, and depression. What was under the carpet?  I worked on that for several years with my first psychiatrist, hoping to pierce the mystery of my first depression, and hoping to discover why I drank.  I was convinced that if I could discover why I drank, I could stop.  When he ended up telling me I needed to go to an alcohol support group I wasn’t ready to listen, I was strong in my conviction that understanding why would lead to the solution.

Copyright © 2011