Taking Back What's Mine

Ye Be Warned: This is a long post. I promise they'll be shorter after this- but this, and the last few, I've just kind of had to write as they had to be written- they're something I need to 'get through' and I hope you'll bear with me.

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My mother still tells a story about when I was two years old and riding in a cart in the grocery store, swinging my feet and happily singing softly to myself. For once in her life she just let me be as I was- and let me amuse myself with the song.

 Me, three months before my third birthday

An elderly woman walking past heard what I was singing and stopped, backed her cart up, and looked at my mother sideways. "Is she singing what I think she's singing?"

"Yes," my mother answered. "She has a thing for Fred and Ginger."

I was singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Not exactly your usual standard in a two year old's repertoire. Thanks, George and Ira!

No matter what has happened in my life, music has always been my constant- my safe place when there was no other. I don't just hear music, I see it in colors, I feel it as a physical sensation. I dissect the tracks of each song in my mind, isolating each instrument, each harmony and therefore never hear the same song the same way twice.

I can't read sheet music- teaching me has been tried many times, but I can hear a song and often sit down and fake it pretty well. This was discovered when I was three, and I'd hear my sisters practicing for their piano lessons and then sit down and play what they'd just played the moment they left the piano. Then I'd get up, pick up my baby doll and go give her a bottle.

I don't love music- I live music.

So, it was when I lost music entirely for the first time in my life a few months back that everyone who really knows me best knew something was terribly wrong.

'Writer's block'? She's been there many times, they said.


Lack of desire or inability to create visual art? Just a phase, it'll pass.


February without music?


Undeniable proof something had gone very, very wrong.

The two people on this planet who know me better than anyone else concurred: they had never seen me this way before, and it was something beyond my ability to control.

They'd seen the depression, always. But the mania had always hidden, lurking in my 'work' as an artist- in writing, in music. I turned it inward- and created at an incredible rate. But then the stress of the rest of my life got to be too much after the past few years of events, and my brain seized. A car revving while stuck in park with the pedal to the floor- smoking, melting, and ready to burst into flame.

When the mania flipped and took all those things I love most away, including my most precious joy of all- music- it could not be ignored, not even by me.

Yeah, I'd tried to ignore the shaking that never left me, for weeks. I was used to going without sleep. In truth I don't think I've ever slept through a single night in my life or gotten 'normal' amounts of sleep before the past two weeks. It's an utterly new experience.

Is this how people deal with life? They sleep soundly, then they can face another day?

Boy howdy, what a concept.

Anyway, for awhile even before I went away on my trip in July, I found music too emotionally difficult to handle. I had intended to listen all the way to my destination- more than 20 hours on planes during the 27 hour total journey in which I lost an entire day crossing the dateline- but found I couldn't stand to listen to a single song.

By the time I got back from Australia (yes, I said Australia- and I was sadly only there about four days and never actually saw the place. Initially I had intended to stay three months but I got really (physically) sick within hours of arrival and never left the apartment where I was staying. That's only one piece of a very complicated puzzle. This is not an easy story to tell, and it will take time.)

It got so bad that I couldn't even hear part of a song in the grocery store without bursting into tears (sorry, random people at Kroger- I couldn't help it and it really had nothing to do with the soap aisle- I love the soap aisle.)

I distinctly remember that happening- I'd only been back a few days and had to get something important at the store. Bluer Than Blue by Michael Johnson was playing- a song I remember really well from my early childhood because my mother and sisters loved the LP it was on- and I just lost it. Beautiful song and sad to be sure, but my reaction was way over the top, even for me.

No more music for me- that's what I declared at the airport upon my return to the States.

No more music.

No more art.

No more writing.

I wanted to be normal, damn it, and if giving up those things could do it then, small price to pay. I didn't want to be an artist of any kind anymore if this was the cost.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize at the time that the art is not the problem, it is my salvation. It is a safe harbor from the storm happening in my brain all the time. Without it, I will surely run aground or worse, I'll quietly slip beneath the surface and drown.

This is a storm that we know now that I've battled since childhood- and always been misdiagnosed because I did not understand the severity of the mania. I didn't realize myself that the thing has a name, this 'way' that I've just always been.

That, and you know, I really resent not having the 'euphoria' that everyone talks about with this thing. Totally. False. Advertising. (in my case. Your mileage may vary- and I have to wonder if other temperaments are more prone to euphoric mania than INFJ are...)

For me, the 'mania' means panic attacks that never stop, inability to stop thinking to sleep, can't eat, can't hold still, needing to run though there's nowhere in the world left to go after you've gone all the way to Australia and back in five days time.

It's all fear, and pain, and wanting it all to just stop and be quiet so desperately you don't know what to do. That is how it feels for me.

Not "I'm king of the world." Not delusions of grandeur.

It just hurts, so much. All of it.

Still I wasn't ready to accept the truth.

Then there was a chain of events that led up to my walking into that emergency department and telling them I needed to talk to someone. I'd tried a few weeks before, but my primary care doctor said it would take (and I verified) six weeks to get an appointment with a 'good psych doctor'.

I feel like that's kind of ridiculous that a person in crisis is told to try to 'hang on' that long. To me that's like a person who has been shot in the chest walking into the ER and being told "Hold on, here's a band-aid, we'll be with you when we can. Try not to bleed on the floor."

I sure as hell was in crisis, and I was lucky this time to have some very nice people on duty that night- who talked to me, made sure I'd be safe if I went back home, and set me up with a plan to get through the weekend until I could start the day-program on Monday.

That ER visit led to them telling me what in my heart I already knew. What I am about to tell you now.

My friends, I apologize for not individually emailing you to tell you all this- but it's something I just can't write again and again. It's something so intensely personal that I had considered telling no one, but something so misunderstood, so stigmatized and yet so key to who I am, that I have to just put it out there in order to accept myself for the first time in my life.

I know some people feel it impersonal to be told such a major thing on a blog and I apologize if any of you do. Unfortunately this is the only way I can handle it right now as I struggle still to accept the label they've so appropriately affixed to me. So I hope you can forgive me and know that it doesn't mean I didn't think enough of you to write you individually.

It just means I'm dog paddling as fast as I can right now, and this is the only way I can do this. I've thought long and hard about saying it- but it's the truth- and I don't want to hide anymore.

Some of you I know will not be shocked by this. But to those who are, just remember I've 'been this way' all my life. All the time you've known me, seen the rushes and crashes here on this very blog (and that's part of the reason I am leaving them all up as is. Because maybe seeing it later might help somebody, even one person, and if it does it's worth it) this is who I've been and who I am.

I am not just suffering from depression.

I have bipolar disorder.

This new diagnosis replaces the MDD one to stand alongside the existing OCD and anxiety disorders (more than one).

I am waiting for them to write down on paper whether or not it's 'Mixed bipolar' or 'bipolar one' with my last/current situation classified a 'mixed state'. I've been in this so-called mixed state most of my life- hell, I thought everyone felt this way.

Much like I didn't realize that not everyone saw halos around light bulbs all their lives like I did until my eye surgeries, I didn't realize until just recently how differently my brain makes me view the world.

So.

I was talking about music at the outset, and that's where I'll leave this, too.

After months of not being able to even listen to music- and only having sung once (I sang along with the congregation to Amazing Grace at my friend's funeral- not to do so would have felt too disrespectful)recently I wrestled music back from the clutches of the Darkness, thanks to a particular song.

You know I have a 'thing' about Ireland due to my favorite character I've ever created/written for. So how fitting that this song, Isle of Innisfree, opened up the floodgates for me and music is returning, slowly to my life.



Singing A Capella is kind of like leaving the house without make-up.

Okay, so it feels more like leaving the house without clothing.

But it's honest, all embellishment stripped away. It's pure, and it's the very essence of singing- one voice, reaching out, to try to connect souls with the people who hear. So that's why I chose to do it here.

I hope you'll feel something when you hear this and even if it's not to your liking, that you'll celebrate with me this not so small victory that I can sing again, even if only sometimes.

There is a huge stigma that goes with this diagnosis.

I'm determined to fight it, because it's just a label for the way I have always already been. Still, accepting that label is going to take time.

Truthfully I'd still give it all up- music, art, writing, all of it, in a heartbeat if I could just be granted lasting internal peace.

But since I can't, I am grateful for them, because I have seen people with BPD spectrum disorders who don't have a creative outlet and I feel for them. They have such a difficult time finding anything to distract themselves, to put themselves and their souls into. So I am very grateful, now more than ever, for those arts.

And as I said the other day, at least now we know where to direct the blows at the beast. And music is still one of the best weapons in my arsenal to battle it.

With my shield, or on it. . .

love to all
bru

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*Photo attribution in 'video': Pasture Near Ballyieragh, by Pam Brophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pasture_near_Ballyieragh_-_geograph.org.uk_-_15185.jpg

via Wikipedia (sharing rights allowed with attribution)