My last-ditch attempt - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 33: Such Is Life
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Rebecca Epstein

| Print | E-mail

AH, MY LAST-DITCH attempt. I just want to write well. That is what I want most in life. To write the sentence that aches in your molars because it is so, so sweet, and so, so bitter, too. I want to capture the shine off a candy wrapper and the taste lingering on the foil. I want to write the satisfying pop of bubble wrap and the sigh of a dog going to sleep and the smell of just-boiled pasta and all those other disgustingly lovely truisms that we want so much to capture and pin down to the paper, yes, I want that, I want that.

Here’s the thing. My doctor entrusts me with discipline. She tells me to change my life. And I do, I swear it, for two weeks. I walk my dog, Lux, for an hour every day along the bike trail near my house. I eat only nutritious food. I don’t drink, or smoke, or do drugs. I avoid stress. I meditate. I sleep at night. I am good.

And when I see one of my girls at coffee shop and she asks how I am doing with a hand on my shoulder, I pat that hand and I say, ‘I am fine. I am a little manic, but I am okay.’

She says, ‘Are you sure?’ maybe because I am talking fast or something, I don’t know, and I nod and smile my too-big smile and order a Strawberry Sunrise smoothie. But like I was saying, here’s the thing: once I become slightly hypomanic from the lack of meds in my system, all discipline goes out the window. Fuck the smoothies – I get coffee! And I can’t get enough chocolate or fried foods. I grow lazy from all that grease and dairy and I stop walking Lux on the bike path. I start smoking again. There I am, a bipolar with almost no medication, out on a tightrope with no supports and a high wind blowing in from the west.

I remember my sister driving me to the emergency room once because the psychiatrist I had then had put me on something that made my whole body stiffen up. I jerked around my kitchen like a puppet on strings, my mouth a grimace and my tongue coagulated in my throat. I called my sister and slurred my way through ‘Take me to the hothpital.’ Once there, I saw Mickey Mouse wave to me through a privacy curtain and a man gleaming with productive sweat race by in nothing but iridescent blue jogging shorts. It took several starts and stops of cognition before I could make myself understand it wasn’t real.

I remember her taking me again to the hospital because, because, I don’t know why, I don’t know anything about that time except I remember being up on the cot, like up on a stage, and the nurse was on a stool so far below, and my sister was off to the side somewhere, sitting low, talking deliberately to the nurse about my situation, trying to get me admitted. The psychiatrist, this totally inappropriate woman who keeps in her office a Goliath of a dog that makes me sneeze, that makes me edgy, this doctor who gives my mother attitude for asking questions when we have an appointment together in later weeks (‘Well, now, if you’re going to ask questions, I just don’t know how this conversation is going to get anywhere...’), who goes behind my back and tells the hospital to admit me should I appear on their doorstep, had spoken to my sister on the phone and told her to do as much. And all I really remember of that visit is the nurse talking to my sister, while I looked around the small room at the cabinet with the glass front full of medical articles, tongue depressors and gauze, all useless items to a manic, and laughed hysterically at some internal joke only discernible to me. Laughed so hard I almost choked. And I remember being acutely embarrassed, but unable to stop. The nurse and my sister stopped their conversation for a moment to look up at me on my cot, and then continued with their murmurs. Somehow, I was not admitted, but released back into my little sister’s helpless care.

I remember the police taking me to the hospital another time, because I had been calling my best friend Erica over and over again, the phone piercing her night maybe twenty times in an hour, and all I wanted to do was tell her how angry I was at her, and who knows for what. For what, I don’t know. We were bitter friends. And I was manic. So she called the police. The police came, and I pretended I had been asleep, and when the policeman came into my room to wait for me to collect my things so he could take me to the hospital he charitably ignored the open beer bottles on my desk (which weren’t even mine, in fact), even though I was only nineteen or so, and helped me get my things together in what resembled an organised way. ‘I’m fine,’ I said to him, and laughed. ‘I was sleeping! This is really rather ridiculous.’ I think he believed me. I think he believed me when I said that my friend Erica was just a malicious cad. The people in the hospital believed me too, and an hour later, the policeman drove me home. Sometimes, I’m a good pretender.

Most of my visits to the hospital I don’t remember. Sometimes I’m admitted, mostly not. Mostly when I’m admitted, it’s like a holding cell, a place to cool my heels while the bipolar shakes itself loose, unmoors itself, the hinges creak shut and my mind closes itself with a sigh. And then I sleep for a long time, the drugs whispering through my blood-brain barrier and hushing into the folds of my grey matter. And that is what happens now.

I just reread my last-ditch attempt so far, and it occurs to me that maybe I am totally full of shit, maybe I am as verbose as I wanna be, maybe I am using words like ‘extemporaneous’ and ‘juxtaposition’, and what the fuck do I need with a thesaurus? I’m fine. Maybe this isn’t so much a last-ditch attempt as a reclaiming of what is mine, my ability to write, my proclivity for words, the compulsion that moves me forward in life and forward in this document at the same time.

Well, but I’m not on the kinds of meds I was on for the past three years. I’m off of them mostly, now, and on the rare occasion I have to take one of them I notice the effects in a mighty way. The chemicals tug on my eyelids and flick at my fingertips, yank at my wrists so my hands flail this way and that. They weigh on my heels so I shuffle everywhere I walk, and my mouth hangs open and my puffy tongue threatens to burst out like a worm from a rotten apple.

And everything I am eludes me sometimes, even with all the medicine in this world, or maybe because of all the meds, and I sit down at my computer to write about it, yeah, yeah, and nothing comes out. I won’t go so far as to say it is writer’s block, because it’s not. I’ve never had writer’s block and I never will. I don’t even know what writer’s block is, really, because as long as I love to write, and I do, I will never suffer from that malady. There are times when I sit down at the computer and nothing comes out, as I said, but hell, I just come back a few hours later and the words trickle from my fingers and onto the screen. Trickle is the wrong word. It is more of an onslaught of words assaulting the keyboard. I’ve written in the presence of other people and I’ve gotten funny looks, comments like, ‘My, you type fast, don’t you?’ But, like I was saying, sometimes nothing comes out because I don’t even know who I am anymore. And how can you create something from nothing, if you don’t even know who you are? How can you start from scratch if scratch is you and you are empty?

This is who I am: I am four years old, a colicky, finicky, neurotic four years old, surely pre-bipolar, and I am writing. I am taking coloured pieces of construction paper and gluing them together at the edges so they form a booklet, and I am writing my first novel. It is called Dog Dots. It is about a Dalmatian who loses his dots. The book is complete with an author bio and photo, reviews on the back, and a blurb. All done in crayon.

And this too: I am in eighth grade, and our assignment is simply to write a short story. I write one about a girl who gets lost in a blizzard on her way to school and finds herself at a magical cabin with a magical old man who grants her wishes. My teacher reads it and, aesthetically sated, begins to sob, fat tears rolling down her heavily made-up cheeks. I stare at her, stunned and empowered. Hmm, I think. Writing.

And finally this: I am twenty-one, and I have returned to my parents’ house for a year to convalesce. I have Lyme disease. I have a tube in my left arm that wends its way to my heart, and is attached twice a day to a bag of antibiotics, which drip into me over the course of thirty minutes. There is not much to do while the antibiotics enter my bloodstream, except stare into the blue glow of my laptop and let my fingers flicker over the keys. In the background, someone on television says something snarky about having pizza for breakfast and just like that, my career as a writer begins.

That’s it, I think. Or rather, I don’t even think. I move. I type, ‘In our house we ate pizza for breakfast and painted on the walls when it struck our fancies.’ That becomes the first hundred pages of a novel, which I ultimately trash, but who cares? I wrote it.

Being a writer feels so good that my joints are swollen with joy, blood sloshes thickly through my vesicles; even when I’m absolutely miserable, I grin at awkward moments, I think I’m lucky, I’m blessed, I’m a-okay. And so, when I take stock of my situation in early 2009 and realise that I haven’t written anything exciting in more than three years, in exactly the time that I’ve been diagnosed as bipolar and, more importantly, been medicated for bipolar disorder, my heart twirls around in my chest because I realise that somewhere, hiding deep inside of me and also so far out that it’s lingering where the stars are hot and fiery, so expansive that it is twined around the sun like a lamp cord, is my talent, just waiting for me to remember its existence and call it back to me. So I do. And I’ve told you that part of my story – the grand plan to go off of the meds, the return to the meds, and here I am now, lightly medicated, and writing okay, decently, if I do say so myself.

It will have to do. Because this is the thing of it: I cannot be any less medicated than this, and I cannot bear to write any worse than this. Dearest Universe, I need things to stay exactly like this, please. Okay? Okay.