on being bipolar
Dec 12th 2017, one year after diagnosis
It’s hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it.
It starts with wanting to be somewhere else but you don’t know where – the important thing is just not here.
It’s a pull on your heart but you can’t figure out where it’s pulling you, and the problem becomes no matter where you are it’s still here and there are always a million elsewheres where you can’t be.
Your mind expands across all these endless places until you’re nowhere at all.
It’s like one of those dreams where you try to run but your feet won’t move or you try to hit but your limbs have no force behind them. You want to breast-stroke back to earth but there’s nothing for you to push against.
And you were empty before but now
the entire world pours into you all at once and suddenly you’re a raging river of passion and energy and force and life and EVERYTHING the world can hold and you could never hold it so you rush along with it and you’re swept up in the current and YOU ARE the current and you’re going and going and you don’t know where and when you hit the dam you circle back in a wave and crash against it and CRASH against it again and again but it will never give way and you need to break it but you CAN’T and the river keeps rushing and throwing you into the wall over and over and your brain needs to break out of your skull and you need to break out of yourself but there’s nowhere for you to go and IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE because you don’t fit inside of yourself and you need to go somewhere you’re so engorged with life you need to be lacerated you need to tap your head like a maple tree and spill out into the world and you’re not trapped but you’re not free and you’re not small but you’re not big enough to contain the EVERYTHING that’s inside of you and there’s a fist around your brain and someone is setting firecrackers off inside it and you exist and you don’t and you’re the last flare of a dying star and you’re as big and glorious and ALIVE as you’ll ever be and you get bigger and bigger and bigger until you can’t get any bigger at all and you’re going to pop you’re going to explode but you can’t you can’t you CAN’T –
And then it stops.
And it goes away.
And you see that what’s making you big isn’t you, it’s the world. It fills you up and stretches you out and when it’s gone you’re just the loose, deflated skin of what you used to be.
You come to under a foot of water and you can see the people above you but you can never get to them. And you wouldn’t want to because they’ll never understand.
And somewhere inside you know that this is it, this is what life is – that you’re gone and you’ll never exist on the earth’s surface again. You’ll always be too low or too high, too far away or too deep down.
And somehow you know it’s all your fault.
Because before you’re bipolar, you’re just crazy.
And before it’s mania it’s just you.