The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big.
I am in the zone, the perfect balance between manic and drunk, I am mellow, I’m cool, cool as cats. I’ve found the answer, the thing that takes the edge off, smoothes out the madness, sends me sailing, lifts me up and lets me fly.
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.
Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.
You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
I relish my life. It’s the one I have. It’s difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it’s mine.
The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I’m not stupid. I know when it’s time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe locked doors, sounds like a relief.
Here’s the hell of it: madness doesn’t announce itself. There isn’t time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future.
Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.
I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife.
Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and also to take pleasure in the small triumphs of our days.
There is always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.
I wanted to turn heads not with lecherous leers of bemusement but with awe. I wanted to become untouchable, cruel, glittery, sleek and haughty as a cat.
I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.
I missed him so much that it felt like a physical pain in the area below my ribs. I opened my mouth to accommodate it. I put my hand to it. A hollow, aching, piercing place.
We’re like little kids. We are little kids, but don’t tell us that – we’re having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties – the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I’ve raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. Crazy people don’t have dinner parties, do they? No.
The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.
I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.
Every morning I watched the sun rise and read a highly religious little meditation book and tried having a conversation with God. I waited for that sense of the presence of a Higher Power that I’d heard of. I chastised myself for not being open to real spiritual experience. It was one of the loneliest things I’ve ever done.