(3 May 2011)
Mary, my sponsor, asked me to make a timeline of my drinking history. That might sound simple, but it’s quite difficult. It’s taken me weeks. At first I sat in front of my computer with a blank stare, even though I knew where to start. Going back and remembering painful and embarrassing events is less than tempting. The temptation is to let all of that information hover about in a hazy fog, much like the fog induced by a good drunk. Somehow though, I managed to wade through it, and complete it today. There may well be more to add, but it feels complete. What seemed like a nearly insurmountable task turned out to be a good learning experience. Interestingly enough, when I sat down with Mary to go through the first draft of my timeline, going through my drinking history brought out some interesting points about my marriage—which I’ll get into later.
I spent all of yesterday writing. Now it’s time to get back to sorting all of the images that will potentially be going into my portrait portfolio. Once I get going on something it can be really hard to change gears. At least tomorrow I have my Photoshop class, which will get me back into my photography gear.
Kahil, one of my lovers, called from Brittany and casually mentioned that he’d just moved there. I was at a loss for words. He’d been talking about moving down south, but I certainly didn’t expect his move to be so sudden and without forewarning. Kahil and I have been friends and lovers for about nine years now. We first met at the psych ward; we were both suffering from depression. I noticed him immediately because he was strikingly handsome, and equally silent. (If I haven’t already mentioned it, I have a weakness for handsome silent men.) We took to sitting next to each other on the balcony mostly in silence. Slowly I learned fragments of his story: he was a horse rancher who’d had to leave Morocco because of the political situation. Lost without his ranch and horses, in a country with a very foreign culture, unsurprisingly, he’d become depressed. It feels odd that he’s not here now, even though he invited me to come and visit, Paris feels a bit emptier. Now I find myself without a lover, and oddly enough without the desire to have one. A boyfriend is out of the question: I don’t see how I could fit a man into my current schedule, but I have yet to figure out why I’m not in the mood to have a lover. Just awhile back I’d told Hervé that I would be too busy to see him until September and that I wasn’t really sure about how I felt about seeing him anyway. We’d been seeing each other once a week for the last eleven years or so, ever since he’d moved in with his girlfriend. Sure it was fabulous sex, but I was tired of not having time to talk and hang out. He’ll stay in touch anyway, that much I know.
The first step in the program is: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” This can be a really hard step. It was blatantly obvious to me that I was powerless over alcohol. I knew that alcohol owned me. And I didn’t even have to take a look around to see that my life was unmanageable. Nevertheless, I’ve had to do this step countless times. Every time I relapse I have to do it again, and I'm still not confident that I’ve really got it. Accepting that you can’t drink at all, is no easy feat. For many people, it’s hard not to wish that you could have “just one” now and then. For me personally, I’ve almost never found myself wishing I could have just one: my fantasy is to be able to get drunk nightly, and get away with it--I have no illusions that one day I’ll be able to become a social drinker.
I find the first step has an interesting parallel with bipolar disorder. I’ve found that it’s much harder to accept than I thought it would be that I’m bipolar, and being bipolar makes my life unmanageable in ways that are virtually identical to the unmanagability due to alcoholism. After the initial relief of having a diagnosis, of having an understanding of what had been going on with me for years, came confusion and denial. Denial seems to rhyme with reconstruction for me. I spent years working as hard as I could, baffled by the fact that I couldn’t work as many hours as my colleagues. Countless times I started a new job and was a star employee, who worked hard, and then sooner or later the battle with symptoms would begin to crop up again. I would push myself harder and harder, relying on massive doses of pain killers when the migraine periods that coincided with depression kicked in. In my line of work you had to call in sick days rarely or lose your job. So I’d push until I collapsed into yet another paralyzing depression. Over the years I learned to reduce my hours more and more, learned to recognize my limits. At my last job I worked ten hour weeks, and it exhausted me to the point that I decided to give up and accept just living on my disability income. I am powerless over bipolar disorder. I can’t control it any more than I can control drinking.
For a long time I felt like a cheat, a faker, someone who was taking advantage of the system. “If only I tried harder….” That feeling was in part related to my experiences with psychiatrists. When I was diagnosed in 1997, it was during a stay in the US. The hospital there called the psychiatrist that I’d been working with here. Afterwards, they told me to find a new psychiatrist when I got back, because he’d denied vehemently that I was bipolar. Upon my return to Paris I found a new psychiatrist in the free clinic, who also denied I was bipolar. I stuck with him because I was too poor to go anywhere else. Typical of many French psychiatrists, he expressed cynicism about the American psychiatric approach. Eventually when the topic came up again, he admitted that he really hoped for my sake that I wasn’t bipolar, but eventually became convinced of it. I finally knew he was really convinced when, some years back I tried to get into a rehab here, which is really difficult. It was a 12 step rehab that imposed a strict rule of no medications during the two month stay, not even aspirin. They had to call my psychiatrist for his permission, and he said it was out of the question for me to go off my medications. (And he knew how serious my alcohol problem was.) I’m laughing now, remembering how hard it was to get him to accept my being on medications. It feels like I’m digressing. Oh, I know what I wanted to get to, back to the first step, to unmanageability which also has a parallel with bipolar. One of my ex sponsors who was trying to get a better understanding of bipolar during a discussion with me, so she’d know how it would effect our work together, ended up suggesting that I do a first step on unmanageability with both bipolar and alcoholism. I made a list with a column for each, and they turned out to be virtually identical, which was discouraging for me. With accumulated sobriety I can expect my life to become more manageable. That can be an expectation for bipolars as well, as long as you take your meds regularly, and make sure to eat well, keep a regular sleep schedule, work with a therapist as well as your prescribing psychiatrist, and so forth. But expecting manageability with a bipolar life still seems like a chimera.
I find the first step has an interesting parallel with bipolar disorder. I’ve found that it’s much harder to accept than I thought it would be that I’m bipolar, and being bipolar makes my life unmanageable in ways that are virtually identical to the unmanagability due to alcoholism. After the initial relief of having a diagnosis, of having an understanding of what had been going on with me for years, came confusion and denial. Denial seems to rhyme with reconstruction for me. I spent years working as hard as I could, baffled by the fact that I couldn’t work as many hours as my colleagues. Countless times I started a new job and was a star employee, who worked hard, and then sooner or later the battle with symptoms would begin to crop up again. I would push myself harder and harder, relying on massive doses of pain killers when the migraine periods that coincided with depression kicked in. In my line of work you had to call in sick days rarely or lose your job. So I’d push until I collapsed into yet another paralyzing depression. Over the years I learned to reduce my hours more and more, learned to recognize my limits. At my last job I worked ten hour weeks, and it exhausted me to the point that I decided to give up and accept just living on my disability income. I am powerless over bipolar disorder. I can’t control it any more than I can control drinking.
For a long time I felt like a cheat, a faker, someone who was taking advantage of the system. “If only I tried harder….” That feeling was in part related to my experiences with psychiatrists. When I was diagnosed in 1997, it was during a stay in the US. The hospital there called the psychiatrist that I’d been working with here. Afterwards, they told me to find a new psychiatrist when I got back, because he’d denied vehemently that I was bipolar. Upon my return to Paris I found a new psychiatrist in the free clinic, who also denied I was bipolar. I stuck with him because I was too poor to go anywhere else. Typical of many French psychiatrists, he expressed cynicism about the American psychiatric approach. Eventually when the topic came up again, he admitted that he really hoped for my sake that I wasn’t bipolar, but eventually became convinced of it. I finally knew he was really convinced when, some years back I tried to get into a rehab here, which is really difficult. It was a 12 step rehab that imposed a strict rule of no medications during the two month stay, not even aspirin. They had to call my psychiatrist for his permission, and he said it was out of the question for me to go off my medications. (And he knew how serious my alcohol problem was.) I’m laughing now, remembering how hard it was to get him to accept my being on medications. It feels like I’m digressing. Oh, I know what I wanted to get to, back to the first step, to unmanageability which also has a parallel with bipolar. One of my ex sponsors who was trying to get a better understanding of bipolar during a discussion with me, so she’d know how it would effect our work together, ended up suggesting that I do a first step on unmanageability with both bipolar and alcoholism. I made a list with a column for each, and they turned out to be virtually identical, which was discouraging for me. With accumulated sobriety I can expect my life to become more manageable. That can be an expectation for bipolars as well, as long as you take your meds regularly, and make sure to eat well, keep a regular sleep schedule, work with a therapist as well as your prescribing psychiatrist, and so forth. But expecting manageability with a bipolar life still seems like a chimera.
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