Before anybody gets worried, no, I am definitely not breaking up with my amazing husband! But I am finding myself in the midst of another kind of personal loss -
I'm breaking up with myself.
I don't know what anyone else's experience with psych medication is like, but for me, taking my medication is like erecting a glass wall between my past self and my present. I understand that everyone grows up and changes - of course, we all do - but my experience is characterized by a sudden jump in perception and memory. And the older I get the more I realize that I am really, really not the same person I used to be.
Alice at eighteen was a total, brilliant mess. She was thin and sharp and angry, and she was creative in a mad, furious way. She loved too fiercely; she held on to her pain and cherished it. She took too many risks. She balanced on the borders of reality and reveled in ghosts in the corner and the voice of God in her head.
She didn't realize what was wrong in her life, not completely. She had memories of her childhood but didn't feel their sorrow. She sat in the back garden and lied.
She fell in love, she made mistakes, she committed herself to all of them.
Now, through both processes of growing up and managing my bipolar disorder, I'm happier and safer - safer from myself. But I am also mourning myself, in some ways, because that Alice who was so carelessly, recklessly passionate would only be fully accessible if I stopped taking my medication.
And I will not do that.
So a part of me seems so lost.
I wish I didn't have to feel that loss so deeply. Sometimes, when I consider my handful of pills, I think that those false chemicals should cure me of all grief, help me to forget the me who is long gone. They're supposed to fix me, I think, and why aren't they?
I just want to be normal. And I suppose that I forget, in that desperate wishing for a sorrow-less self, that even neurotypical people feel sadness, feel grief, feel loss.
Even people with properly functioning brains might mourn aspects of their childhood and adolescence. It makes sense that we all have things we regret, or things we wish we could reclaim - a good metabolism, for one, and that pain in the chest which comes from loving some girl or boy for the first time. And we all realize bits and pieces of our past, we all see them in a new light as we get older and hopefully wiser. That journey of self-discovery isn't painless.
Challenges crop up in adult life. And I know that I sometimes find myself reacting to those challenges with emotions I've buried and hidden for far too long.
We've been getting a new roof on our house - pretty stressful all by itself - and we've gotten a bit of bad news about our furnace. I've been in crisis mode, calmy doing what needs to be done, but in the quiet moments before I fall asleep I am gripped by old fears and uncertainties. Memories of rain, memories of water pouring down through our ceiling when I was little, come to life and haunt me. Memories of deep cold and helpless anger, memories of feeling out of control and too young and scared. And it's hard to tell, sometimes, if the way I feel is normal or if it's heightened by misfiring neurons and stress hormones and the way I relive the past as if I were there, right there, forever.
I mourn that childhood, and I mourn that I had forgotten about it. I wish I still could.
I'm breaking up with the lies I've told myself to survive, and it's like ripping off a bandage and digging into the wounds, half-healed.
And I'm breaking up with the narrative of Alice, pre-medication, because if the scary parts of my childhood are exposed then it all starts falling to bits - my madness, my fury, my loves. Those are the parts of myself I wish I could keep.
I was talking to my mother yesterday about all this stuff, and at a certain point I found myself saying that I just can't trust my memories or myself anymore. My deep connection to faith is sundered by the knowledge that it was fueled by delusion, by visions, by an unparalleled and unbalanced intensity. My close relationship with the divine - which, at the time, was tightly knit with my emerging sexuality - has less meaning, because I can't access those feelings with my handful of pills. I'm in the middle of giving up on God, not just because of my diagnosis or the difficult loss of my Grandpere, but because I just can't reach God the way I used to.
Another thing to mourn. Another thing to put away.
Growing up - we all do it, we all have to learn more stuff about the world and about ourselves. Broadening our experiences means understanding our past experiences in a new way. Not an easy process, whether you are neurotypical or not. And sometimes, looking at myself from the perspective of the present is like skinning my knees, over and over again, before they are fully scabbed over from the last fall.
I'm breaking up with myself - with the comforting lies of my childhood, with the way I was dangerous, with a false sense of divinity, with old stories of love and connection, with that too-thin girl who danced on the edge of a knife. And it is a blessing to know that the beauty of my present life is here for me as I grieve - my family, my husband, my neighborhood, my home. I'm not alone as I do this. None of us are.
That glass wall, somewhere between when I was eighteen and nineteen - it will always be there. But it's getting clearer all the time. I can see the past, and yeah, it hurts, but I can also access the joys of my unmedicated self. I can value my ability to manage water coming through the ceiling. I can remember my frenzied creativity and I can still play the piano, now, in my little music room. I can be deeply in love because I remember what it was like to feel love for the first time. I can pray, sometimes.
Grief is hard to accept. I don't think anyone wants to grieve, and I don't think anyone finds it easy to mourn parts of ourselves which we cannot get back. I'm telling myself that this is natural, normal, to feel sadness and loss - and of course it is.
But feeling grief is an active process of healing, too. I've got to grieve in order to move on with my life and come to terms with not only the Alice-that-was, but the Alice-that-is.
Breaking up is hard to do. Sometimes it is all we can do.
But every once in a while, I look at my handful of pills, and I wish it were just a little easier.
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