Marya Hornbacher - Madness - A Bipolar Life

He’s studying my face.

“Do you ever feel hopeless?”

The word yawns open in my chest. “Not really,” I say, looking out the window.

“But sometimes?”

“Sometimes.”

“When?”

I still don’t look at him. “When I stop to think about it.”

“About this?”

“About any of it. About being crazy.” I chew my thumbnail and look at him. “It’s getting worse,” I say. “It’s getting harder not to think about it.”

“Does anything help?”

I snort. “A drink?” He doesn’t laugh. “Not really,” I say. “No.”

Nothing. Nothing makes it go away.

He finally scribbles something on his notepad and clicks his pen. He looks at me.

“You don’t have depression, that’s for sure.”

“No shit.” What a relief.

“You have bipolar disorder.”

I sit there. “Is that the same as manic depression?”

“The very same.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s crazy. I mean, manic depression: that’s crazy .”

He shrugs. “Depends on how you look at it. I wouldn’t say it’s crazy. I’d say it’s an illness.”

“Bipolar disorder,” I repeat. “Do you take Prozac for that?”

“Not a chance,” he says. “You’re right that the Prozac makes you feel crazy. I’m going to prescribe a mood stabilizer. It should help.”

My chest floods with a mixture of horror and relief. The relief comes first: something in me sits up and says, It’s true . He’s right, he has to be right. This is it. All the years I’ve felt tossed and spit up by the forces of chaos, all that time I’ve felt as if I am spinning away from the real world, the known world, off in my own aimless orbit—all of it, over. Suddenly the solar system snaps into place, and at the center is this sun; I have a word. Bipolar . Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it’s a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn’t merely an utter failure on my part, if it’s a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cure. At least it has something that should help .

And then the horror sets in. All that time I wasn’t crazy; I was, in fact, crazy . It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression . I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away. All my life, I’ve thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I’ve always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I’d be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else.

I think how impossible it seems that I have never connected the term manic depression —I guess they’re calling it bipolar —to myself. For that matter, it seems impossible that they would never have applied it to me.

What if this Beedle fellow is right? What if my good moods are the same thing as mania? And what if, God forbid, the lows are the same as depression? And what if manic depression means crazy? Well, obviously, it does.

So. I’m crazy as a coot. Mad as a hatter. End of story. That’s all, folks, now you can all go home. I’m sure, sitting here in the doctor’s office, that there’s no final cure for the truly insane. I am no longer young, wild, crazy, a little nuts. I’m a crazy lady.

I knew it all along.

“WENT TO THE DOCTOR today,” I say, yanking the cork from a bottle of wine. Julian is sitting in the breakfast nook, reading the paper.

“Are you sick?” he asks, taking the glass I hand him and glancing up at me before looking back at the front page.

“In a manner of speaking,” I say. “He says I have bipolar disorder. It’s the same thing as manic depression.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t think so. But it sort of explains the last few months.”

“How so?” He sets the paper down and takes a swallow of wine.

“The rages,” I say, stirring something on the stove.

“This was a psychiatrist you went to?”

I nod. “Named Beedle.”

“Beedle,” he muses.

“Right,” I say. “Anyway, he gave me a prescription.”

“For rages? What do they prescribe for that?”

“Mood stabilizers.” I look at the prescription slip in my back pocket. “Depakote. I think it’s supposed to help, you know, sort of all around. With the moods. And things.”

“Ah yes,” he says. “The moods. And things.”

“So I should be a little less crazy.”

“All right,” he says, and bites into an apple. “When’s dinner?”

By the end of the evening a miracle has occurred, and I’m feeling fine. All those years of changing my thoughts! improving my attitude! have suddenly become very useful. By my second glass of wine, I have chosen a new perspective! as follows:

Bipolar? Kind of an overstatement, but whatever. Just another name from yet another shrink. Interesting, but not really relevant to my day-to-day—after all, it’s not like I’m sick . I’ll take the meds, though—they’ll get rid of the rages, and the afternoon lows. Back to normal in a jiffy, back to my usual good mood . And surely no one needs to know; why focus more on what a fuckup I am? They’ll take it wrong and make a fuss. This is really no big deal. I’ll be good as new.

I’m immensely pleased with myself for changing my thoughts in this so-healthy way.

MY INSURANCE doesn’t cover Dr. Beedle, so he refers me to someone it does, a Dr. Lentz. I like him—he’s mild, cheerful, seems awfully concerned. He asks how things are going; I’ve got to get rid of the rages and lows, so I tell him about those and he fiddles with my dose. He asks me, for some reason, how much I drink, and tells me if I drink a lot, the meds won’t work, but since I’m not an alcoholic or anything, his question has no relevance.

I’m delighted with these meds, and I usually take them. When I feel bad, anyway—that’s what they’re for, right? To cheer me up? It’s those depressions I hate, and the rages, and the spinning thoughts—what I want is to hit that perfect high. That’s my normal self.

And I’m getting happier and happier all the time, working constantly, keeping the house spotless, throwing parties that feature gales of laughter and me at the very top of my game. These meds are a miracle! I tell him how much they’re helping. Perhaps I’m a little too happy? Why, no! He raises an eyebrow as I babble on about how inspired I am, so I tone it down—obviously not too happy, I say, dismissing the thought with a wave of my hand. I’m just back to normal! It’s summer, after all. This is the way I’m supposed to be! I’m always high as a kite in summer!

I WONDER what difference it might have made in my life if I’d taken my bipolar seriously right then. If I had, in fact, stopped to think about it. Maybe read up on it. Maybe learned something that might have changed the way I lived, something that in turn might have altered—maybe dramatically—the way the following years played out. I sit here now, writing these words, just out of the hospital for the umpteenth time this year. My vision is blurry, my speech is slurred, I can hardly keep my fingers on the keys. I’m not safe to drive, I can’t make a phone call; I woke up the other day in a hospital bed, staggered out to the nurses’ desk, and demanded to know how long I’d been there. “Eleven days” came the calm reply. “Eleven days?” I shouted. “What have I been doing this whole time?” The nurse looked at me. “Well, you’ve been sick,” she said. That means I’ve been sleeping for days on end, when I wasn’t running around like a demon possessed, and getting electroshock, and being wheeled through the ward with my head lolling onto my chest, and downing Dixie cups full of pills, and slurring through the haze of medication and chemical malfunction to my hospital psychiatrist (who is nothing short of a saint and who makes a regular practice of saving me from the vicissitudes of my mind), and falling back into bed again, and launching myself out, and running around; eleven days, twelve days, fourteen. It happens like clockwork, every few months. Hospitalizations lately: January 2004. April 2004. July 2004. October 2004. January 2005. April 2005. July 2005. December 2005. January 2006. July 2006. September 2006. October 2006. November 2006.