The Third Brightest Object

When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can reach an apparent magnitude of −2.94, making it on average the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. (Mars can briefly match Jupiter's brightness at certain points in its orbit.) ~Wikipedia

A few months ago, the primary care doctor who has had the misfortune of calling me one of his patients for the past dozen or so years looked at me and sighed.
Aside from the day he informed me that he believed I was in the process of having a stroke, so many years ago, I don't think I've ever seen him look so worried.

"You scare the hell out of me, you know," he announced, as he assessed the swelling that had ballooned me up into something that looked like the ill-begotten offspring of a marshmallow and the Michelin Man. We didn't realize yet it was the first sign that serious side effects to new medications was setting in.

I told him the medications scared me. That I didn't like them, didn't want them.

"You're bipolar. You don't get to be afraid of medicine anymore," he said. "You've been up there, on Jupiter, for a very long time now, February, and it's time for you to join the rest of us down here on Earth. You're not going to like it. But it has to be done."

I don't like it.

After my body went toxic mid-November from that first medication and I had to stop taking it immediately (which is not recommended but was necessary) I was sick, really sick, for about two weeks. Then the immediate slam of the new med; which has slowed my brain down so much that I don't feel that I recognize its workings anymore.

One day I woke up (literally) and looked around my house as if it was somewhere I'd been before, a very long time ago, but that in no way could ever be called home.

Nowhere in this world feels like home.

The closest thing I can compare the experience to is the way it feels when you come back to your house after a long vacation; you observe things about it that you didn't realize about it in your day to day life before you left.

How long has that pile of (clean) socks been on the armrest of the couch? Why does he always leave them there until they accumulate? When did I paint that painting? I don't remember using those colors.  Why is everything so blurry?

Why is my head so quiet? Where is the music? Where is the flying, continual stream of words and thoughts that rush through my head under such pressure, like water from the end of a garden hose when you press your thumb down over it? Where is the sound? Where is the spark?

Where am I? Who am I?

I spoke about the fact that I don't know who I am anymore to my therapist. About the fact that, since I began taking the lithium that I don't--can't-- write the same way--except for poetry and in very short bursts.  That I am not the same person that I was and I do not know who I am and it scares me.

She said, "You're going to be someone different now, but someone better. Someone healthier."

Healthier? Maybe, if you define health as eating, sleeping, and staying alive.

Better?

As I stare at the open draft of my still unfinished, beloved novel--I am entirely uncertain that's so.

She told me to go ahead and call the doctor, about perhaps reducing the dose. I'm waiting for a phone call..

I am, it seems, forever waiting.

And I'm tearfully homesick for Jupiter, though I know I can't ever go back.