My last-ditch attempt
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 33: Such Is Life
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rebecca Epstein
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Rebecca Epstein’s biography and other articles by this writer
MY psychiatrist is this pert petite pixie. Excuse me: when I’m manic, and I am manic at the moment, I’m drawn to alliteration like a moth to a flame. Also, to tired analogies. She has a corona of taut blonde curls, perfect teeth, and these clunky brown German-looking Mary Janes that belie her otherwise professional demeanor and let the patient know, let me know, that she engages in hippie activities in her free time: burns sage incense, wears hemp, perhaps dons a patchwork vest. I don’t know why this matters, why she matters at all. Because, despite the fact that I could fold her along her creases, this little doctor of mine, tuck her into a corner of her office behind the red chairs with Nordic names and then take over her life, prescribe my own medications, dictate my own future, I can no longer function as a thinking person on medication.
I will tell you how I came to be medicated, how I came to be unmedicated, and how I came to once again, finally, be medicated. This is my last attempt at writing while medicated: yes, my last attempt to write, because I’m bipolar, and it’s fucking everything up.
IT ALL BEGAN – let’s do it this way – when I was eleven. I’d been festering with Lyme disease for a year by then, but I didn’t know it. But that is another essay I’ve already written, a good one, back when I could write. When I was eleven, jangly joints and supplicating palms, I tended to have these...episodes...wherein my mind would become a starburst of neurotransmitters and dendrites, and I would yammer and tap my feet and clench my fists to my temples, and curl up at the top of the stairwell that led to my attic bedroom. My parents would stand at the bottom of it, craning upward, Dad’s eyes bugging, Mum’s narrowed, and they would, well, yell. Because what else could they do? Bec, if you don’t stop, you’re grounded! my dad said. I remember that. The words twittered into my ear canals and sluiced through my temporal lobes, and around and around they went, parsing into their letters and then into smaller pieces, the sticks and curves that made up the letters, which lodged into my synapses and made shrill siren sounds, and I screamed.
That’s how the bipolar first manifested.
And now I’m twenty-seven, and I have this doctor who urges me to take pills that happen to make me fat, because what does she care she’s itsy, and other pills that make me sludgy: that is, my mind is sludge, my thoughts are sludge, I cannot think, I cannot find the words, the words I want to use to traverse the distance between you and me, and I am stopped in my tracks.
I am struggling in graduate school. I mean, really struggling, in a way I never have before in my education. The words people say are fibrous and twilled and catch in my throat when I try to say them, too. Words like ‘iconoclasm’ and ‘exegetical’ chap my lips. My dearest friends turn to hulking threats when they tease out codified meanings from dense texts and expound on them extemporaneously, while there I am juxtaposed with my lower lip glistening with saliva, my tongue dry with panic, my eyelashes bristling. My thoughts going around and around, as they always do these days.
I am in the doctor’s Ikea-inspired office, the sun licking our respective hippie shoes, and I begin to cry. I never cry in front of the doctor. I am a stoic sufferer, standing on a cliff face, squinting against the winds of my malady with true bravado. She tells me where my life will go, and I go there. But the other day in my readings course, I went under. There’s this chick in that class with trendy bangs and slim arms, and she spouts hyperbole like it’s her fucking job, except she gets away with it, because she’s verbose as hell, and her sentences are striated, and getting to the meaning of them is like digging down to the Precambrian era and finding a hominid skull. It’s just...killer. And it was like that with everyone. Everyone had a schtick. Except me. I hunched over in my wobbling plastic chair that threatened to crack under my new Zyprexa weight and looked from one mouth to the next like a spectator at a tennis match and I might as well have been lipreading, it was all so inscrutable. I was silent. This was surely Afrikaans or Tagalog, not English. The words were meaningless to me. I am not exaggerating for the sake of this last-ditch attempt. I was lost.
So I bend over double in my doctor’s office and cry until droplets of black mascara tears lob onto the carpet fibres, and I toe over them with my moccasins, embarrassed. ‘You know there is another option,’ the doctor says. I look up mid-sniff. ‘We could reduce or remove your medications,’ she says. ‘You would have to completely change your lifestyle, but there are a lot of bipolar people who live this way.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘There’s no way.’ I am still in the old mindset, for another five minutes. The must-be-medicated mindset.
‘What you would have to do is change everything,’ she continues. She ticks things off on her small fingers. ‘You would have to take omega-3 fatty acids and B-complex vitamins, you would have to exercise every day, you would have to get at least seven hours of sleep every night, at the same time every night, you would have to follow a routine every single day, you would have to follow a healthy diet, you would have to avoid stress and employ stress management, and, most importantly, you would have to bring your friends and family in on the plan. You would have them as a support system. You need to tell them what you are doing, Becca: you need to tell them you are going off of medication and ask them to know the warning signs of mania and what to do in case it happens.’
I stare out the window as she talks, at the sun shimmering off windshields in the parking lot, which make these ephemeral nimbuses that rise up and hover there, a few feet above the ground, waiting for me to make my decision. Although it seems I already have. I think about telling Jenny and Amy and Annie and Jess and Sara, my girls, about the dark depths of my bipolar, which we have only really touched on in a delicate way since there has been no need – the medications have kept me rather stable. And once I tell them how bad it really could be, I would have to tell them that I need them to watch for it to get that bad, and take care of me if it did.
‘Fine,’ I say, like a sulking child. But really, I am beyond excited. ‘Let’s do it.’
LET ME GO backwards again.
I was ecstatic about turning thirteen. From what I understood, thirteen was the year I would become a teenager. And teenager meant that I would be driving a car, staying out late and going into Manhattan to crawl the clubs, and having sex. Essentially, I would be turning into the version of my mother from family lore: young but not too young, with long tangled hair, smooth skin, a sad scowl, bellbottoms. Thirteen would be the year of my Bat Mitzvah, which was going to include a party with a DJ and two hundred guests.
But my transition to the land of adolescence was not the fairytale I had been anticipating. On my thirteenth birthday I had a cold that roped my limbs and dripped through my sinuses. The shivers wouldn’t let up. A celebration had been planned: my family was going to go into the city to see Blue Man Group perform their wily intertwining cobalt dance. We had been planning it for weeks, maybe months; it is difficult to remember these details, especially considering what happened afterwards.
So we went. On the dark drive into Manhattan we stopped at a Duane Reade drugstore, at a corner where two overdressed black men screamed at each other, and while the car idled my mother ran in and got some cough mixture – the red, bitter kind.
At the time, the only real damage the syrup seemed able to inflict on my body was its sinister taste, which pricked my taste buds and inspired the greatest gag reflex I’d ever experienced. Everything inside me rushed up toward the surface, through my narrow throat, gag said my body, and I spat the medicine back out into the vicinity of the plastic cup. My little sister cackled next to me, totally unsympathetic only because she knew exactly what I was going through, having been sick before.
‘Drink it!’ said my mother, who had purchased tickets to Blue Man Group and god help her we were going to see Blue Man Group at seven o’clock if it meant parting the seas, realigning the stars or merely curing my fucking cold.
Somehow I got the medicine down my throat, and that is when its true assault on my body began. I went mad. And let me tell you: the last place you want to go mad is in a dark room where bald blue men dance around and beat on drums filled with brightly coloured paint that splashes up and splatters everywhere. The world swirled. Sounds screeched. My brain spun on its axis. At the end of the show the Blue Men decided it would be a good idea to throw rolls of toilet paper out onto the audience, roll after roll, so that we were covered in haloes of translucent white paper, peering up into the spotlights, which seemed like suns. I screamed – but no one heard me because everyone was hooting in delight, and applauding – and I grabbed my mother’s arm, hard. I remember that.
Later, we were pulling out of the parking garage when my father slammed on the brakes to avoid running over a man who I now realise must have been drunk. I screamed, shrill and singsong, and began to heave and cry and accuse my father of terrible driving, and from there the ride home dissolved. There was yelling, and there were tears, and no one understood at the time that my behaviour couldn’t be helped. But late that night, maybe at one in the morning, I stumbled downstairs, still unable to sleep, and found my father on the couch in the den. ‘You had a bad reaction to the medicine, I think,’ he said. ‘No more
for you.’