Running To Beat The Wind
Somewhere there may be a think-tank for tangled, off-rhyme thinkers like myself, one of those kids who grew-up in a family so rife with domestic dysfunction that survival almost was not an option. Oddly, I have the memory of eight elephants, and indeed, I remember almost all that occurred around me, most especially nights in bed, all lights out, me-as-infant practically traveling at light speed, it seems, the world inside my head literally spinning to the point I’d have to open my eyes simply to keep from falling out of bed. This, I learned later, hallmarked severe anxiety. Even during the day, though precocious almost to a fault, I literally could not sit still. My parents? They decided I was hyperactive and hoped I would simply grow out of it.
Beyond my own odd behavior, however, were twists and turns almost too confusing for me to imagine. When my mother bore me in 1954, as a 28-year-old woman she had to take care of legal matters surrounding her bedridden father who had been rendered into a vegetative state, matters surrounding her sister who was interred in the New Mexico State Hospital for the Insane (believed then to be schizophrenic) and her mother, gulled by cancer. Worse, her husband and my father was drinking late, not coming home, catting around and basically torturing the entire family with his own issues. In other words, my mother was not emotionally available to me. She simply was not there. Yes, I did feel this. In fact, I flew into rages because I needed, not mere attention, but loving presence in my life.
Many years later, I talked to my mother about this. “We knew that all that stuff was going to have a bad effect on you, but there was nothing we could do,” she said. In 1956, she recalled, she was down to 85 pounds, anorexic, worried, living with too much life for a woman her age to justifiably handle.
In short, I was getting it from both inside my head and outside in the world around me. I had no fellow children my age. This made my life tremendously lonely, so much so that I would introduce myself as “a lonely child” to family visitors and neighbors. Anxiety, family dysfunction, emotional unavailability and tragedy. I really wonder sometimes if anyone comprehended that this was not merely the world my mother and father faced, but my own world as well. My initial defense was to become one of those irascible kids who fights like a tiny lion and wins. I was angry. Of course I was. And other kids “torturing” me did not help either. All in all, I felt tremendous fear and an almost absolute sense of neglect and the need to simply please and please and please–anything to get the love I seemed instinctively know I needed.
It wasn’t until I reached the age of 10 that I began to realize that, nope, my family was not like the families of the other kids I knew. When we moved to Texas around that time, the resulting depression struck me so hard, right alongside those dawning realizations of my different world, that I remember waiting in the cold January morning, my head against the cold steel of the locked elementary school door just aching. Then I went numb. My grades collapsed. No one seemed to comprehend what had happened. I was supposed to be “intelligent”. But by sixth grade, my reading comprehension hit bottom. And I got into huge trouble.
Those of us who have to live with long-term depression understand quite easily that depression robs us of something important: awareness. Depression means flying blind. Other children began to mature and to grow into young adults, but I was like a blind, deaf and dumb outsider. No, I did not know this. I smiled, but inside, I was dark night, absolute zero. And the anxiety. When it emerged after long periods of dormancy, I would be awake all night long, worrying, waiting for something to save me. But from what?
It would be years before the anxiety and misunderstood set of phobias that plagued me all the way through college suddenly led to the one, sharp snap of my first out-of-control manic spike in 1977. I heard voices through the radio. I thought I was Jesus. Impulsively, I drove to my university, ready to settle old scores and to get back things I had lost along the way, namely a couple of old girlfriends. I ended-up in jail after mistaking a Volkswagon for an old girlfriend’s car. I was going to return it to her, when the police arrested me. Eventually, I found myself in the psychiatric ward of a public hospital. After 30 days and some ECT, this was the verdict: drug-induced psychosis. Even the drug abuse program I joined didn’t stop the repeated episodes, and eventually I gave up and returned to self-medicating. Between 1977 and 1993–when I finally got a correct diagnosis–I had literally laid waste to a promising life with measurable literary talent. I was a goner when the police shattered my bedroom window to rescue from a suicide attempt after I “called-in dead” to work. Luckily, SSRI medications had opened the doorway to scientific understanding of the extensive swath Bipolar and depressive disorders cut through the lives of too many to count.
The meds worked well. I regained some “lost” self esteem, depression and Bipolar related, and began my life at 39. I tell people I am a “late bloomer”. All those years, all that immense fear and worry, the lost relationships, the broken chances, the shattered nights leaving me drinking alone with nothing but loud music bashing my eardrums to shut-out the noise inside my mind: all gone.
Learning to come-back from a hereditary illness with all those dysfunctional family complications, the misbegotten understanding of what love feels like, the traumas, the re-traumatizations, is no easy feat. Here I am, 61, still learning. I dig deep. I am not afraid to lose sleep if I am learning about myself. No longer willing to act-out, I write it all down, sometimes right there in public, a sort of long-winded self-investigation, and yes, this strategy is beginning to open doors to bright sunlight after half a life spent in a personal Dark Ages. This stuff is difficult to explain to those who cannot or will not comprehend the type of pain a manic episode wreaks through the mind. Sometimes, I simply let those people lie in their own arrogance and misunderstanding. Being a gentle and kind person at bottom, I choose the gentle and kind among me to share my history of dealing with monsters that make all the zombies in all the horror flicks look like cartoon characters, nonentities, nothing. I have to learn every single day,
The pearl in the dust is that I have strength, character and empathy for others the naive do not get. People like me. And best, I am happy at last. The noise is gone. Life is coming back to me as quickly as I am coming back to life. As Grace Slick hooted at Woodstock, “It’s a new dawn!“