Useless drivel

bipolar

         The screened area is falling down and there’s garbage on the porch where one of the cats has raked her claws through it; the lawn needs to be mowed, the bills are piled on the table ready to be mailed; and a deep seated melancholia has wrenched it’s way into my workings again. My auto insurance has labeled me a high risk driver and I wonder if I need a vacation.
         My thoughts turn repeatedly to my mother and what she was thinking at the last. Worried that she was tormented by fear, I sometimes find myself unable to sleep at night. Doctors call this interminable sleeplessness mania, the high point of manic depressive disorder, or more heroically bipolar disorder; a chemical imbalance of the brain that causes processes and synapses to fire at will and make the sufferer cycle endlessly high and intolerably low for unknown periods of time. Most take lithium to counteract these assaults. I do not, have not, will not ever. Lithium is a salt, there is too much salt in the American way, too much too much. Too many long term effects, too many affects that I can’t deal with: diarrhea, nausea, vomiting; the meds I have been on and am on now cause others: hand tremors, involuntary movements, facial tics, mostly when I am at rest and no one notices since I am rarely at rest around others.
         I am told that I have an old soul, an ability to see into people that far surpasses the ability to care and to love, a capability that often leads to culpability for things which I have no control over. I find myself spiraling and covering it so well, I am confronted by it only when those who know me well, those who know me better than myself ask me those key questions, tell me they are concerned for me. I suffer from migraines. For many years, my body’s way of telling me to shut up and slow down, my body’s only way of making me stop and sleep. I can go for days without sleeping, for weeks even. My temper flares, my easy going nature turns volatile over traffic infractions, I hear things coming out of my mouth and know that I am raging, and suddenly, I am stricken with a headache the magnitude of which there is no escaping. I swallow pill after pill to prevent them, pill after pill to help keep me on an even keel, and when they strike anyway, when sleep has left me stranded for days upon days, I swallow narcotics handed to me on silver platters by nice young doctors in white jackets in little offices who hear nothing of the desperation I keep hidden so well.
         I avoid psychiatrists, therapists, and psychologists at all costs, for they alone hold the key to my freedom. They alone hold the key to my sanity, but they also would dole out the little pills that keep me from me. The pills that stop the cycling but prevent the sleeplessness, at a cost too great to endure. The diagnoses have been variegated over the years, but the prognoses all the same: lifelong. Minus the medical bills and the files that taint me forever, I could have told anyone who had asked that this would never go away. I could have told them when I was nine years old. When the headaches started. When the nightmares started. When I forgot how to sleep.
         When I was 17 I thought I had had my heart broken. I was devastated.