BipolarLawyerCook

No.  Not Nuprin, but my anti-anxiety drug, a stronger one than I used to take.

It’s been a long sev­eral days, and I shan’t/won’t go into details, other than to say the following.

Crazy peo­ple are liars.

They lie to them­selves about how much they can han­dle, until they just can’t any­more.  In the mean­time, they pre­tend that they’re fine and go through their day, smil­ing and cook­ing and work­ing and doing all the things that make it seem like they function.

At least until they don’t.

Some­times, they rec­og­nize in enough time that they can’t, and they take their anti-anxiety pills (or what­ever it is that tames that roar­ing beast inside their head that threat­ens to kill that last sense of Self.)  Some­times, when all their mul­ti­plic­i­tous stres­sors pile on and smother and threaten to drown their psy­ches at once, they even rec­og­nize through all the sob­bing and feel­ings of com­plete, utter fail­ure, total aban­don­ment and rejec­tion, feel­ings of worth­less­ness and use­less­ness and the bur­den they (think that they) are and they’re con­tem­plat­ing all those lovely pills in the bath­room, the ones that if you just take enough, well, all those wor­ries will just go away– some­times they take just one or two more of those anti-anxiety pills, just enough so they can sleep and wake up in the morn­ing, the drugs like an oil-slick over the panic and worry that threat­ens to drown them.

It lets them bring out into day truths they’ve been too scared to say– for what­ever rea­son.  Because frankly, once you’ve already admit­ted that you might need the hos­pi­tal because you’re afraid you might take all the pills in the cab­i­net, every­thing else seems, well, pretty small in com­par­i­son.  (For the record, I’m fine, or at least work­ing on it.)

So.  If you want to under­stand what your beloved crazy/depressed/bipolar per­son is lying about, I highly rec­om­mend that you read not a med­ical book about the dis­ease that they’re suf­fer­ing some or some gen­eral mag­a­zine arti­cle, but a first-hand account from some­one who’s been there.

Kay Red­field Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is an account by a renowned psy­chol­o­gist of liv­ing with Bipo­lar I.  I’ve never been manic/psychotic like she, but her account of her dis­may of being smart and wor­ry­ing about the loss of her mind, and her accounts of her depres­sion, her sense of loss, sense of self– they are price­less and perfect.

William Styron’s Dark­ness Vis­i­ble is a short, con­cise, utterly accu­rate account of both depres­sion and the black despair that sur­rounds some­one who’s think­ing about killing themselves.

There are oth­ers, like The Noon­day Demon and Lonely which also tell aching, true stories.

None of these will fully explain your loved one’s crazy behav­ior, but they will at least give you some insight into the black depths they can feel, even if you’ve never felt it your­self, never imag­ined feel­ing that way.  It’s inex­plic­a­ble, some­times, why the moods will come on, and other times, it’s com­pletely within rea­son to under­stand why some­one freaks out– and yet the freak­ing out is beyond their con­trol.  The only thing that is in their con­trol is those nice lit­tle pills.

Yel­low and small, an oil slick of calm, cool and col­lected until the cri­sis is past, some­thing to let the crazy one think past all the things that are caus­ing the stress and think, if not this too shall pass, then at least, what next.

What next, indeed?  Some­thing dif­fer­ent, one hopes.