I go to a party and when I get there I can’t stay in any conversation for more than a few minutes before switching into a new group of people and I drink three drinks in quick succession and I make comments that are slightly too direct, even as I hear myself saying them, but my reactions are fast and people laugh and everyone is fun and funny and I want the party to go on forever I want endless drinks I want to crush everyone with the strength of my loving embrace because I’ve never been happier, even as my leg twitches and my skin itches and the zooming current spins through my body, leaking out through my fingertips to stain the air around me.
As light falls something begins to shift; an internal storm rolls in, anxious and irritable and awkward and edgy. I’ve forgotten how to be fun. I give away my beer and I leave and I cry all the way home, heaving sobs, and when I get inside I crouch on the floor and I’m in pain, so much pain, inside a black cloud, and I don’t think it will ever end, and I’m trying to claw myself out of it
and I write a list on my phone of reasons to die / reasons not to die and
I get in the bath because the water always helps
and I hug my knees and say don’t drown don’t drown don’t drown
and I stand in the kitchen dripping wet
and I eat something, whatever I can find in the fridge and
eventually I’m tired and calm enough to crawl into bed and
the next day I wake up and suddenly, immediately, irrevocably, it occurs to me that this isn’t normal.
I lie in bed and search the words I’ve suspected for a decade or more. This time it’s not a fleeting look, curtailed by my internal voice - don’t be ridiculous don’t be dramatic you’re just a bit tired you’re just a bit stressed. I comb through pages, through papers, and it feels so familiar, knowledge settling into my body. Memories drift up from the depths, clicking neatly into place. The world shifts, imperceptibly, on its axis. Outside it begins to rain.
I briefly consider messaging everyone I’ve ever met to apologise, and perhaps even some people I’ve yet to meet in order to give them a decent forewarning.
Instead I get back in the bath. I wash my hair. I crawl back into bed, exhausted, bone-tired, and I sleep until 5pm then I walk to the park, the park that I sometimes need to walk around four times a day to smooth my thoughts into a coherent line.
I call my mother. I say I’ve been thinking about my moods, about how hard everything is all the time, about how hard everything has always been. I think, maybe, possibly, it might be bipolar. And she says
yes, I think you might be right
and we talk and we talk and she says
well of course if I’m honest ——— and —— probably has it, and —— and ——— and ——— and ——— and I’ve always thought perhaps ——— did too, and as you know ——— was formally diagnosed, and that’s just on my side of the family
and suddenly it’s so funny, this absolute blinding clarity tick tick tick you name it we’ve got it, what else did you expect?
But I didn’t know. Tens of thousands of words and I didn’t know. Twenty years of diary entries and I didn't know. Sometimes you can be so close to something, nose pressed right up against it, inhaling the turpentine and yet all you can see is the colours immediately in front of you rather than the picture scrawled into stretched canvas. The totality of it. I’m thirty four and I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember and I didn’t know. I’ve been writing about it for years. I’ve been writing around it for years. A steady thump in-between the words, growing louder and louder.
I think of the tidal waves of emotion, the crashing, the stupid reckless dangerous shit, tears of joy crossing bridges, tears of pain on the floor, seeing ghosts, late night runs at the gym burning off excess energy, mornings in my teens and early twenties when I’d wake up with red arms and clean scissors by the sink, long low weeks that would end suddenly, like the sun appearing from behind a cloud and I’d bask until it passed once again, all the sad girl memoirs, all the books about death, disordered eating, a thyroid condition, over-identifying with the moon, delusions of grandeur, obsession with god, pills that made me worse, crying all the way through a live performance of Florence & The Machine’s Dance Fever album, suicidal ideation, still being active on Tumblr, disassociating, vibrating, three years of weekly therapy, barely writing then thousands of words in a day, clinging on, wondering if the next bad night might be the last one. You could submit my entire blog to the DSM-5.
It turns out there are many things you can blame a PhD for, including the relentless unpredictable devastating cyclical moods you’ve experienced your entire life. It was being a teenager, it was being a woman, it was being creative, it was being lost, it was being broken. It was the weather, the season, the city, something I ate, something I took, all the things I drank.
I thought about not naming it, borrowing the idea from a noveI I love, a novel about a woman with devastating cyclical moods who keeps ruining her life and doesn’t understand why. I read it years ago and kept telling everyone how brilliant and relatable it was. If this was fiction, that would be considered ‘excessive foreshadowing’. I reread it on a plane recently and started crying so hard that my tears pooled into a little puddle on my jacket, but I didn’t have a tissue, and I couldn’t ask the nice woman in the aisle seat because we’d had a friendly conversation before take-off and she would now inevitably ask me why I was sobbing, and I couldn’t bear to explain, so instead I turned towards the window and tried to pour the little tear pool onto my jeans instead until it soaked all the way through to my skin.
What does it feel like? Drugs you haven’t consented to, followed by a heavy, listless low. Flashes of suicidal thoughts as you crash from one to the other. When it’s good, it’s so good - ideas rush in faster and faster, bright lights and noises of a screaming pinball machine in my brain. When it’s bad it’s catastrophic, catatonic. And then the rest of the time, it’s just your normal life.
My therapist tells me we had to stretch the cycles out and unpick everything else before I could know, before I was ready to know. Without even realising I’d found my ways to mostly-often manage it, learning to read my body like the weather; feeling the weight shift in my hands, recognising the acceleration of a feeling that rises and rises, starts spinning and coursing through you - fingers stretching, hand flexing - and there are colours in the corners of your eyes and all you can picture is the absolute relief of plunging your head through a stained glass window. I walked a lot. I exercised. I stayed home when it was too raw, I wrote, I let my ideas run loose in this cocoon I built for myself. I tried to not let anyone close enough to see me in the crash, or the immediate aftermath. I didn’t want to frighten anyone.
It’s such a relief, to have all the things you always suspected about yourself turn out to be true. It was real, all along. All this time I thought I was doing a bad job of being a normal person, rather than perhaps a good job of being a person with an illness I didn’t know I had. Is it an illness? A disorder? A condition? I’m not sure how to reconcile it, this pattern that has always been inside of me; some stain of colour that seeped into my brain and my heart and my body, lines of luminescence creeping around my synapses, pulsing through my veins, twisting around my toes. I’m not mad about it or sad about it or ashamed. I feel clean, exorcised; cool shower after a day of sun.
But I don’t want to hide myself in a web of metaphor, anymore. I want to walk directly into the dark. I always felt like I was running out of time, trying to escape something before it finally caught up with me. Perhaps that was true, too. The internet tells me I’ve got a lower than average life expectancy, but I don’t know if the slightly elevated chance of shooting yourself in the head or cutting your ear off or going to sleep in the oven is skewing the average. I read this on my phone while walking around the park smoking a cigarette.
I begin to tell my friends. Everyone keeps telling me how proud they are of me. I cry a lot, but I laugh a lot too. It’s very funny. I need it to be funny because otherwise some of it is unbearable. The gulf of grief that opens in me for all the days and nights spent in agony, trying to stay alive, unaware that so many people would have been there if I’d just asked, if I’d been able to ask, if I’d known how to ask.
You were there! I didn’t know. Forgive me, I didn’t know. I couldn’t hear you, I wasn’t listening. I didn’t know how. I thought this was my burden alone to bear. I was afraid to let you sit in the dark with me. I didn’t trust in the love, the magnitude of it. How foolish; I did not know I was beloved. So much of these last four years have been an exercise in falling and letting myself be caught.
One summer we took acid and walked through an empty Paris after dark and all the trees shivered and I knew it was the drugs but it was so real at the same time. Straddling two worlds at once, flitting between them. And so it is and so it begins, once again; the cycle, never ending. It will always be this way, ebbing and flowing. It will always be this way. I will always be this way, trying to hold onto myself in the days and weeks when it’s too much or too little. Nothing has changed but everything is different, now. What space do I have for cynicism? I’m still alive.
If I ever have a child, the odds are not in their favour. I know this; it is a different type of inheritance. But it will not be a surprise, the way it was for all of us, the way it crept in, insidious and destructive and unspoken, always unspoken, left to fester in the dark. It will be different. I will make it different. I will say - welcome to the club. Perhaps you’ll be a writer, too.
Optional soundtrack: James Vincent McMorrow- Rising Water.