What I Do All Day

Photo by afiq fatah on Unsplash

See things; think about eating (but don’t); go for a walk; take meds; suffer emotional pain; laugh at it all; cry; try to read.

It’s an existence framed by a schedule, and the schedule consists of when I meditate, if I exercise, and when I have to take meds. I manage to get my daughter and wife off to school and to work most mornings, and often meet my daughter in the afternoon to walk home with her. Driving is completely dependent on what meds I take and when, so I do a lot less of that than before.

Before what? That’s a big question.

Before all this, back when I was an anomaly. My doctor and people who ought to know better thought this, because I lived for so long, so high functioning, with bipolar I. I held jobs, stayed married, had a family, all for well over a decade. But what wasn’t noticed was that the jobs kept blowing up. A bit of stress and I came apart like seams on a cheap shirt. This time the shirt completely tore, and I couldn’t hide the wasted flesh beneath anymore.

When things go wrong the doctor always changes your meds, and I’ve had some major changes this time. New doses of some old standards, the elimination of one I’ve taken for about three years, and two new ones that completely knock me out. I’m in the middle of a mixed state psychotic/neurotic break, and the drugs seem the best way to take me down and punch it out of me. Then we’ll work on what’s left to put back together.

Those two new drugs really do it. One I’ve actually taken before, a benzo I used to abuse. I’d sit in a jazz club in West Philly, smash the pills under a heavy cocktail glass topped off with tequila on the rocks, and snort the powder off the table. Needless to say, it does calm me down. The other some call ego glue, because it holds you together when the whirlwind of mania and psychosis seeks to pull you apart. It’s the one that people hear you’re taking and think “oh, you are really fucked up.” Seems it works, too.

How do I know they’re working? Negative logic, actually, because I know what happens when I don’t take them. They’re prescribed as PRNs, or take as needed, so there were these two times I didn’t think I needed them. One morning after I woke to pictures in my head of the house as a crime scene, with people slaughtered and me the suspect. The other time I simply had to take the bus to center city to pick up a couple books and I couldn’t do it. Not, “oh this is a bad idea maybe another time,” but actually terrified and unable to leave the house. Walking the dog was a sheer, hellish act I could barely pull off, and I scooted her down the street, paused a moment, picked it up, and ran right back to the house. The dog and I on the couch. The books back on the shelf, unclaimed.

So here I am, past some people’s statute of limitations on “you should be better by now,” when if I’d merely broken an arm I’d still be in a cast barely signed. I’m completely dependent on prescriptions to make it through the day. More than one person has asked me if I have the right doctor (I’ve been seeing him since 1999 – he came to our wedding!), and another friend asked, as we sat at a bar and I milked a water, “What if you don’t get better?” I brushed it off, been through it all before, I always get better, and he said, “but what if you don’t?”

What if I don’t? I am a lot older. Have been some signs of cognitive decline brewing. And my thinking is just different now. People asked when this one started. Well, there was a Tuesday in early February when I just couldn’t make it to work. Then a Wednesday, and my wife had to call my boss and I haven’t been back since. But before that I was less and less able to handle stress, and with work failing, my wife not working, my daughter’s high school selection, and the bills, and this nagging pull to just disappear (I still don’t have the honesty or courage to admit what that was about), there was more stress than even I could handle. And I’ve had a lot of practice at this.

Then there’s the truly crazy part. The thing that really makes this one different. As may be excusable for one with a severe mental illness I have a deep relationship with reason. Slightly skeptical that the whole world makes sense, aware that our thinking makes it so. But a few months ago I was taking a class on The Canterbury Tales when we came to a section in “A Knight’s Tale” where two men with very different takes on a situation have an existential dispute. Chaucer wrote of the arbiter: “Pity runs swiftly in a gentle heart. Though he had quaked with anger at the start he had reflected, having time to pause, upon their trespass and upon its cause, and though his anger at their guilt was loth to pardon either, reason pardoned both.” And that was all it took to make me come undone. Reason can justify either side of any dispute. Completely. If you disagree, well, that’s morality seeping in. Reason is deftly explained, and morality, who really knows where that comes from? And you can’t prove it anyway. And here I am, devoid of reason, only able to make it through the day clutching, swallowing, two tiny pills marked take as needed.

I’ve been mentally ill a very long time. I never felt crazy before.

William Gibson wrote: “When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” Well, I’ve come apart. I’ve been called hyper-logical and hypo-emotional. Now, with the logical part lopped off it seems I should go on some spiritual quest to figure it all out. But that’s crazy. That makes no sense at all. We’re all science here, taking pills just to survive. It’s almost 7:00 and I’m due for mine. Then I’ll meditate, as if I’m doing everything in the proper order. And then, like The Judge at the end of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, just to cope, I’ll tip the fiddler and keep on dancing.