I Am (not) A Rock

Part of the life of most bipolar people is regretting not living the life they could have lived. In most respects this is caused by the illness – the inability to make a keep friends, jobs, other social contacts.

But environment plays a part too. If one has strong ties to neighborhoods, friends, parent’s friends and school mates, that can go a long way towards ameliorating the effects of bipolar behavior. In short – they already know you’re kinda weird and they accept the good with the bad.

I recently felt this little sting of regret when I saw a reunion of the eighth-grade class of one of the Catholic schools that fed into Lake Catholic where I went to high school.

They aren’t the only Catholic grade school to hold such reunions. There were a lot of Catholic grade schools in the 70s that had large classes (it was the height of the enrollment boom) that sent the majority of their students on to Lake. Now, many of them are struggling to hold on and some have had to close.

My elementary school I attended beginning in November of my kindergarten year, still exists. It grew a little and became more exclusive and expensive than it was. The nuns have pretty much disappeared, giving way to lay teachers. It is in many way, a shadow of its former self. Which is a good thing.

About six miles to the north is St. Mary’s Chardon where most of the people I rode the buses with went to school. It was a bus transfer point for Notre Dame’s students. It was also my family’s parish where we went to church.

But my mother (who was the sole decision maker here – the only time in our family she was allowed to make unilateral decisions, perhaps because she was a cradle Catholic and my dad was not) refused to send me there. Her story, passed down through the years, was that a teacher at St. Mary’s told her that if she wanted the better Catholic education available, to send me to Notre Dame.

But Notre Dame has the beginnings of what would become a long waiting list to get in, as the entire school from K-8 had room for less than 400 students. So, I went to a public school, Park Elementary (strangely enough with some kids that would transfer later to St. Mary’s) until November of my kindergarten year when I was unceremoniously yanked out of what I thought was a fun school and delivered to the tender mercies of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

To say this was a shock to my system was putting it mildly. I will skip details; I’ve discussed some of them earlier in this blog.

But the real mistake was probably made earlier when my parents decided to move from Mayfield Heights to Chardon. I was on the verge of kindergarten when they moved (August 1968) and was set to go to my neighborhood public school in the Mayfield system, one of the better and later, best in Ohio.

It was also the system where my mother taught second grade – not in the school I would have gone to, mind you. But there would have been some familial clout later when she because the teacher’s union president.

I often stare at the ceiling at 3 a.m. and wonder what my life would have been like to go to school with the kids I knew in my neighborhood, without ever having to be subjected to the ritualistic humiliation suffered at the hands of the nuns, largely for two reasons – my parents weren’t rich and I was a willful and smart kid who didn’t want to hide it.

Even though my mother would never admit, I was in the worst possible situation I could have been placed in. Even she would later admit that I learned almost nothing in school relative to what I taught myself by reading. Several years into my 8 ½ year sentence, even my father was making the case to my mother that perhaps I should transfer to St. Mary’s. If you knew my father, or have read about him here, you know that his objections were significant. Usually he didn’t care if I was suffering if it would ‘toughen me up.’ But he had seen enough of the nuns’ behavior and what went on in the halls that even he was disturbed.

I got off easy. We literally drove some kids right out of that school through bullying – kids that entered in the fourth and fifth grade. And yes, I participated lest they pick on me. And I was picked on enough being a fat kid with a funny last name, a geeky intelligence and a family nowhere near the economic level of the most popular kids. And there was nowhere to escape when you spend almost nine years with the same 26 kids (more or less) in the same room.

An aside: I often wonder if it ever occurred to her when she sent me to my first shrink between seventh and eighth grade, that my school environment would have had something to do with it?

But mom held fast. First, as I said, it was the only decision she had ever been allowed to make unilaterally in our family and second, she was one of these people who believed that once you committed to something, you should stick it out no matter what the damage or regret. After all, she didn’t have to be exposed to the nuns on a daily basis, she didn’t have to stand in a lonely outfield on a hot day waiting for the occasional fly ball that I would inevitably drop.

She also didn’t have to attend the Cub Scout pack comprised of people from the local elementary schools I didn’t go to when the majority of my Notre Dame classmates were part of the pack at. . .yep. . . St. Mary’s.

I KNOW this sounds like whining and I get that. But she couldn’t have devised a childhood to fuck me up more. I was surrounded by people I couldn’t bind with. And my insecurity as I got older just got worse as the mental issues took hold. Chicken or the egg? Causation or correlation? I’ll never know.

When I was paroled from Notre Dame and went to Lake Catholic I was very intimidated at first. But the people I met were not like the kids at Notre Dame. They seemed far more accepting. There were more people like me. And a lot less snootiness. After about a month, I was in smoothly and greatly relieved.

It wasn’t perfect but for me, no environment is ever perfect. But, although it isn’t the same most people, high school, looking back, was some of the best years of my life, especially after what I had gone through.

The years immediately after high school were full of effort on my part, to retain those friendships and connections. Eventually, slowly and sometime painfully, eventually, we all drifted apart.

I guess that’s why I was so jazzed about my class reunion last year – our 35^th. Of all the friends I had known, these were the people I had gotten closest to. I was very curious whether I could make friends again and possibly keep some.

The reunion went very well. I thoroughly enjoyed it and re-connected with some people. Unfortunately, for some of these folks, my own posting about religion and Trump have undone some of these connections. To their credit, most of my classmates are still nominally Catholic, many seriously so. Catholicism and I parted company some time ago. I do miss the feeling of belonging to a community, having something in common with people and the strangely comforting rituals of the Mass. But for many, many reasons, I simply can’t go back. They have their rules and I respect them but I don’t think it can ever be again.

As for politics, the heartbreaking thing is in another time, this would not have been an issue. Unfortunately, we only had a small grace period before the election would tear some of those bounds asunder.

If we can’t find a way to get beyond it, and we probably can’t, I probably won’t go to the 40^th reunion. I still have Facebook friends that I am trying not to lose or push away for various reasons. I hope they understand that I was always just a little – maladjusted. But I mean well.

When the elementary school classes of 77, whether they be St. Justin Martyr or St. Mary’s Mentor get together, I feel that tinge of what might have been. Although I recognize many of them who went on to Lake Catholic from the Facebook photos, I know that is not my tribe. I had four years with them – they had 12 and many grew up just streets away from each other, attended the same sports and social leagues and hung out at each other’s homes.

There were only four of us from Notre Dame that went to Lake, absorbed into a freshman class of 375 students – all boys, no girls.

And many of them still have friends and family in Northeastern Ohio. I’m two hours away in Pittsburgh so I can get up there if I want, but it’s not the same. I only really interact on Facebook.

Strangely, one of the guys I went to school with at both Notre Dame and Lake Catholic lives here in Pittsburgh. We used to be thick as thieves at Notre Dame. He won’t respond to my friend requests yet he is friends with some of our mutual friends at Lake Catholic. I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt just a little.

I realize that a set of circumstances led me to where I am today – some I had control over, some I didn’t. I love Pittsburgh. I love my wife. But one should have friends outside of their spouse. My wife does – she’s tight with both her former classmates and all the friends she’s met in her knitting hobby.

My effort to do the same at work, at the Mustang club, at the local NAMI branch, at the improv school all have ended in either regret on my part or simply not being a good fit with others. But I have tried.

It’s difficult to talk about being lonely when part of the fault is mine. Most people who know me online don’t know how hard it is for me to go to work every day and when the day is over, I’m all out of spoons and find it difficult to leave the house for socialization. In fact, on my days off, I find I almost always have to work up the nerve to leave the house at all.

I try to be someone I’m not to make friends because I’m always worried that people won’t like the real me. And to those who always say, ‘be yourself’ I can go over my track record where that has lost me enough people in my life. And besides, this three-page whine has gone on far too long.

It just hurts.

Spoon issues

Spoon theory, for the uninitiated, is a way for people with a host of behavioral issues to explain how they deal with stress.

You are given a certain amount of spoons every day from the great spoon-giver. Each spoon represents the amount of social interaction or physical activity a person can expend before the need for what we’ll call regeneration.

Regeneration usually, for most of us, means spending time alone with our thoughts to process the situation and regain emotional strength to go out into the world and interact again. Those of us who live with social anxiety use spoon theory as a simple way to explain what we go through but we don’t really expect people to understand it. At least I don’t. It’s impossible to empathize unless you can feel it.

Anyway, I have problems on weekends recovering from work. It’s really starting to piss me off, perhaps more so now that it’s so obvious. When things were bad, weekends melted together with workdays since the level of stress and hyper-vigilance was constant. 

Although the ‘bad times’ I experienced are receding into the past, the emotional scars remain. I feel them every time I drive onto the property at work. The subdued, yet ever-present feeling that I am always one word away from having the moon and stars fall on me again is always there. 

But the overt threat of losing my job or being shot by the police in a botched ‘health and safety check’ is gone and now weekends should be a time for me to ‘do’ and enjoy more than sit and worry.

And yet, Saturday morning arrives and I make it to the couch and find I have a monumental task trying to raise myself back up again and get on with the day. Other than the bed, the couch is my ‘safe place.’ 

Yesterday I went to the cast dinner for the performance of Listen to Your Mother, an event I have been very much looking forward to.

But yesterday morning I felt entirely empty of strength and filled with worries. It took everything I had to get ready for this happy event. The cast had lunch at Lidia’s and read our written stories to each other. My worries included how I, as the only man in a 12-person cast would be received, and the usual fears about driving downtown exacerbated by the St. Patrick’s Day parade being held at the same time.

As usual, my fears were groundless. Listening to everyone’s stories was literally a transcendent experience.  Being around such creative and intelligent people was like breathing pure oxygen for me. 

And yet, when I got home, in no time flat, the feeling of excitement and stimulation drained quickly and I was back on the couch, dog tired, wired and fried.

And mad.

I am so sick of this. 

I should be over this. But I should have realized long ago that my conditions, which have waxed and waned my whole life, will be with me always. Thirty years of meds, shrinks, zen training, ‘lifestyle changes,’ weight loss and exercise have not exorcised this beast. I will carry it to my grave. 

It is my shadow. I can, under certain conditions, banish it for a period of time or land up in hypomania – where I’m in a fun and creative period making everyone else’s lives miserable.

But it always comes back.

I vent to my wife but she’s heard it all before and I know that my moods affect hers. So I try to keep the feels to myself.

“Why couldn’t this feeling last just a few hours longer,” I asked my wife and the universe. 

Why indeed? Would it be so much to ask to at least go to bed feeling the warm afterglow of an enriching, life-affirming experience?

But that’s not the way things work. Every day is a fight, sometimes easier than the day before, sometimes not. Two days are never the same and the differences in mood and energy from one day to the next can be so stark as to be scary.

I must realize that getting angry at the situation or getting angry at myself for not being able to maintain a steady mood state will get me nowhere except more frustrated. 

Somehow, at this late stage of a lifelong struggle, I must learn to accept the situation with grace, appreciating the good periods as well as the bad. 

Easier said.

Touched by Fire

Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco (Luke Kirby), prepare to be taken to their home planet. No, I'm not kidding

So, I watched the movie ‘Touched by Fire’ yesterday, by myself, while my wife was out shopping. Well, about 2/3rds of it because she came back.

I didn’t want here to see my reactions to the film. And, to be honest, I wanted to watch it alone, just in case there were any reactions. And there were. 

This requires an explanation which I’ve tried to give my wife in my own recently disjointed style of explaining myself. There are activities at home which, while they may seem innocuous to the outside observer, would make me feel self-conscious if anyone saw them.

Often, I wander from room to room, stopping to examine things, especially in the basement where I pull out old artifacts of a previous life or stare at fading photographs of a family long gone. I realize so much of this is self-torture, yet I’m drawn to it anyway.

I’ll talk to myself – long rambling soliloquies that either try to explain my actions to myself for the 119^th time or a string of things I need to remember or comments on current events. I can only do this alone for reasons that, for anyone similarly afflicted, are all too obvious.

Many times, I’m buried in the Internet (interesting choice of words) doing what I usually do: finding the information that reinforces my cynical and negative view of humankind. I guess if human society is stark raving mad, I must not be so bad. Current events are reinforcing this view at a prodigious rate.

So, we come to the movie. Briefly, it’s about two young people, probably in their mid-20s, both afflicted by bipolar, both having trouble staying on their meds. They annoy their families, are given to delusional, grandiose thinking and land up meeting each other in a mental hospital where their manias merge like two flaming suns and lead then down the rocket slide to near total insanity.

They are both rescued, a few times, a return to the mental hospital where they are put back on medication. Although the staff tries to keep them apart for their own good, they find each other again, a pregnancy results with all its usual complications and . . . well, I won’t ruin the ending. 

The important thing to me was how much I saw of myself in the characters. Now in middle age where the body (and the medications) start to regulate the amount of mischief the mania mind can accomplish, I had to think back when I was in my 20s and 30s with more freedom to act on my delusions and yes, I can see more of myself in their behavior. It just came out in different ways and circumstances. No two bipolars are alike, after all.

And the movie couple are bipolar1 and I am a twosie which means my whipsaws between depression and mania are not so sharp. Also, not being on your meds makes both the ones and twos equally capable of fucking up their own and others’ lives. Us twosies tend to fall much more on the depressive side of the scale but in some of us, although our manias are less bombastic, they can last longer and, in some cases, do more long term damage to our lives and others around us. 

What happens to Marco is what many guys with bipolar disorder struggle with. He finds that on his meds when he attempts to have sex with Carla he feels nothing and can’t get into it at all. The mind is willing, to a certain degree, but there seems to be a governor on the body’s and mind’s ability to carry out the act. This is MAJOR issues with men on medications for bipolar. The other problem is that the meds, while keeping your behavior and thoughts within a socially acceptable range, also tend to crush the creativity and heightened enjoyment of life most people in mania experience.

At one point in the movie, Carla assures him, based on what their psychiatrists say, that he will gradually be able to experience the full range of motions (not always true). Marco replies he doesn’t want the full range of motions – he wants mania. 

Whether you’re a onsie or twosie, great things can be accomplished on mania. Much of it is artistic – writing, painting, dance, etc. Much of it is activity based – a sudden compulsion that the whole house is now out of style and needs a complete makeover – and you do it. I can still remember gardening at night (yes I know it’s an R.E.M. song). Personal relationships are at risk – everyone else suddenly seems more attractive and interesting than your partner and you want to feel the rush of what it’s like to start a new relationship – no matter who gets hurt, because you’re not thinking of that. Sometimes you just want to get away – to travel and grab as many experiences you can while family members are left baffled by this sudden compulsion to take an instant vacation – alone. And then there are the other compulsions toward great creation and schemes. 

My mania gave me the incredible (to me now) ability to build a bookstore out of nothing including all the planning and design. My ex-wife wandered into my store for the first time and her jaw dropped. “You actually made it happen,” she said amazed. “You actually did it.”

So it cost me a marriage. But what an accomplishment!

At some point when the maniacal haze burns itself out or when the meds start working, the bipolar person has a crushing realization, a kind of ‘what in God, possessed me to DO that?’ The refrain is similar: it seemed like a fantastic idea at the time. Many times, in this phase which is often accompanied by depression and severe regret, we want to apologize to all the people whose lives we’ve upended or hurt. And apologize over and over again.

But after the mania burns out and time passes and we’re good little boys and girls and take our meds, there comes a longing for the energy and excitement of that time. Things get hum-drum and boring playing at life using the normal rules. We miss a time when things were fresh, new and exciting. We don’t forget the wreckage we left behind but we’d just like to feel what we felt when we were able to accomplish something so grand and glorious. Because now we can’t.

Because now we’re accomplishing holding down a job, taking care of our living spaces and significant others and marching slowly and safely through a life that no longer inspires us. And death awaits. For many men, it’s the long, slow, middle aged march to the grave where, instead of firing up grand, exciting ideas in your mind, you spend more time checking your bank accounts and what’s in your retirement savings. Hardly seems like living. 

You make and lose a lot of friends along the way until you’re left either partially or totally alone. I miss the parties of my youth but I can tick off the last five times recently I tried to become part of a group in some way and landed up either alienating or being alienated from them. 

And we begin to think that for our own good, perhaps we should just stay at home when we can, inside our homes with our significant others and limit human action to Facebook, where we run in to trouble anyway.

Notice how many times I have switched between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in this piece? Draw your own conclusions. 

Would I recommend ‘Fire of the Mind?’ Yes, even though the writing falls into sentimental claptrap, stock parental characters give stock parental lines and some of the acting and writing could have used a bit more of a realistic makeover. It’s enough, as usual, to make any afflicted person steer away from being honest about their condition to anyone, especially to mental health professionals.

I’m cautious that the film will not dispel but reinforce stereotypes about bipolar people and people with other mental illnesses in general. Is it worth the attempt? After all, ‘Rainman’ did so well to raise the awareness of autism, didn’t it? Well, if you want an honest answer to that question, ask anyone on the autism scale who has seen the movie. And so it is the same here too.

I suppose we could make the distinction between bipolar people who are relatively easy to spot and the vast majority of those who sit quietly next to you on the bus or plane, who write the articles you read, make the food you eat, create the art in galleries you marvel at, etc. And you’d never really know. How about the person at the business meeting who has an idea and his/her enthusiasm is so infectious, that everyone in the room is fired up by the idea (which may or not be feasible since the long-term prospects may not have been considered) that they jump out of their chairs in support and the boss says “we need more people like him/her around here!”

Yeah, they could be. 

Because life and relationships are long, we reveal ourselves in some way eventually. Either peers don’t recognize this sudden change of energy and idealism or regard it as symptomatic of some other factor or mental illness. Many times, I’m sure, people think the bipolar person has discovered some new kind of recreational drug when they truth is, they’ve actually stopped taking a drug.

The author David Foster Wallace, whose affliction and brilliance is reflected in his writing, was similarly tortured with what most professionals diagnosed as depression which began as a child and which he referred to as ‘the bad thing.’ He was able to create brilliant work while making his way, somewhat awkwardly, through the world of normals. He worried however, as the pressure grew from those in publishing and his fans to continue to produce even better writing, that the meds were inhibiting his creativity. In fact, I suspect ‘Infinite Jest’ was probably written off his meds.

Anyway, Wallace stopped taking his Nardil which led to severe behavior issues. At this point, both Wallace and his shrinks flailed around for something else that would work – anything that would work. In desperation, Wallace went back on Nardil but it no longer worked for him. As we say in the world of psychotropic meds, once a med craps out on you, it craps out forever.

Long story short, Wallace tragically hung himself. 

But when you take an honest look at Wallace’s behavior throughout his life, I think a strong case can be made that he was also on the bipolar scale. My early diagnosis of depression or major depressive disorder, masked the bipolar that was hiding behind the depression. Remember, your psychiatrist/psychologist only sees you for one hour bits of time where you could be anywhere on the scale. They don’t live with you, go to work with you, see your personal interactions. They know what you tell them, true or false (or somewhere in the middle) for the slim hour a week they see you. They really don’t know you. Sometimes no one really does. 

So, we’re left with a confusing mix of people with bipolar, ones and twos, with varying symptoms that wax and wane due to many different reasons. And movies can never really display a compendium of the average bipolar person. Movies must be entertaining and broad to be profitable. We get that. So, it’s a double-edged sword of hoping for awareness while fearing further stigma.

But, rounding out this terribly long post, ‘Touched by Fire’ did deliver a few serious gut punches to me. I could predict some of the action. I could see myself in some of the situations or dialogue. And if you’re wondering, yes, sex between two people in high mania could move mountains. . . before destroying them.

So, with all of those caveats, it’s worth seeing. If nothing else, I could identify with some of it which made me feel a little more comfortable with myself while still mourning what was and what will never be again – and for good reason. The ending imparts that lesson.