I do not like to call it by its given name for it is not adequate. I am a rapid cycler meaning anything can set it off. A smell, a song, an image: anything that can activate a memory. Memories lead to mood change and then it begins. I do not claim to have a substitute name, but I will do my best to explain my experience being bi-polar. In reality it’s more of a therapy for me I guess; to write part of it down.

It had been suggested before by my doctor, that I write some of this down but, for the most part, you keep it too yourself, you don’t tell anyone. There was a glimmer of hope of people understanding when Breaking Bonaduce was on. For the most part, I liked that show because I could understand a lot of what he was going thru. Likewise, I like the show Hoarders Even though that’s something different all together, at least it deals with mental illness in a way that isn’t as exploitive. They are getting help, and sometimes that’s all you can wait for. Looking back at it now, we knew back in the mid to late 80’s that something was wrong. We just hadn’t put two and two together. My father had it and apparently, it’s hereditary but it’s never something we discussed; not until much later in life. Now it seems that everyone has it, it’s being diagnosed left and right and a new medication ad hits television each week it seems. There’s always some commercial of a lonely housewife: it’s raining outside, she can’t get out of bed and she feels alone and depressed.

That is until she has her Paxil or other miracle pill and all of a sudden she’s going on runs, walking the dog, going to the movies-all the while the narrator is rifling off a battalion of side affects at a breathtaking pace. One would think that you would require special training to read that quickly without taking a breath. So much, for so little and in my experience it often seems that little hasn’t been worth it. The side effects are a nightmare all of their own. Either way it goes, with or without your medication it’s not something I’d want anyone to have to deal with. I pray to God that my son does not have it.

For the most part, regardless of what medication you’re put on (and I’ve tried them all, please believe that) they essentially gave me the same sensation. The best way to try and describe it would be to imagine the scene in the movie X-Men, when you get to see the room where Cerebro: professor X’s super computer is. The room itself is cavernous, cool and metallic. Very much so a room where mind and machine would be one. Extending out into the center of the room is a platform. Now instead of being in a chair, when you’re on your meds, you are in a cage on the edge of that platform, seated precariously on the edge. Before you the walls are adorned with hundreds of screens, not monitors per say but more images in your mind, like a video playing.

Picture in picture multiplied.

In this cage you can see the multitude of videos playing but you can’t interact with them. They all pertain to me, my life, things I am interested in, my deeds-all of this, the good and the bad. This room is my actual mind, the cage the medication but you feel this physical, mental picture in picture of your life that is hell. It’s totally you in this cage made not of metal but of chemicals, and you are aware of the fact that you are not in control, the meds are. It makes you stutter, it makes you pace, it makes you do all sorts of things that have many a time left me looking in the mirror-be it a physical or mental mirror-gazing back at someone that I do not know yet know better than the back of my hand.

A quivering smirk of disgust and honest amusement acknowledges this fact from the face gazing back at me. I make no attempts to pass blame for things I have done, I only state what is. I also acknowledge the fact that it could be a hell of a lot worse: and I am grateful it isn’t but this is still my personal hell (and for those closest to me) and nevertheless I must deal with it. My only attempt in writing this is to clear my mind at the late approaching hour. I know I’m not ready for sleep and I’m not focused enough to do anything else so like a zombie with a singular focus in mind, I type away until my craving is satisfied.

The meds of course are a necessary evil. The alternative is something that can’t be controlled. All attempts at doing so have been a desecration to the word success. It always ends the same way. Me standing at the event horizon: sucked in and torn apart, atom by atom until all of what is me is gone; hoping not to be reassembled on the other side but always finding myself whole again looking up from the bottom bellow crying out to God in shame, hoping that he hears me.

But as you know he does things in his time. So I began to climb…

I don’t attempt to get up anymore and claw my way out.

There is no light but you know you’re not alone. It’s like being in an empty, dark well-way at the bottom. So far down and so far from the light that you can only see its shadow. I used to try and climb my way out; and sometimes it seemed to have worked. That’s when you get bold and assume that you can do it on your own. That hubris and pride comes as a bi-product from consuming too many delusions of grandeur, ultimately sending me ricocheting of the walls of the well as I come crashing back to the bottom yet again. Over time the walls of the well are no longer rocks coated in creek algae but instead they turn into arms and hands that grab and pull on you as you climb your way up. These are your vices, your sins, your thoughts, deeds, actions-your very will in many cases, all pulling you back down, gently at first until you persist on getting out. That’s when they pull and claw and rip you down. So, I stopped fighting and now I wait for a lifeline. Hoping and praying that someone will come along and throw me a line.

“I am a moon man, I wax and I wane.”