SS On What's "Normal"

Last week, I posted the thoughts of SS, a regular reader of this blog, concerning her experiences with ECT. She passed along something else over the weekend. Read on.

When I was in 7th grade, the big movie was “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. I knew this movie was rated R but somehow all the kids in school had seen it and I had to fit in. So I begged my mom to take me one weekend.

So the whole family went one Saturday afternoon. Me, my mother, my father, and my sister, who was given a big bowl of buttered popcorn and was told it’s OK if she fell asleep.

The movie scared me. A bit earlier one of my friends and I snuck into “The Exorcist” and that scared me. But this was different scary, although I couldn’t pin it down in my 11-year old mind. Maybe it was the men, shuffling around and looking vacant that scared me. Or maybe it was a feeling in my stomach, a foretelling.

Years later, in college, I took psych classes. The professor, who was very respected in the field, made some disparaging comments about bipolar and schizophrenics, saying that they wouldn’t be able to do much with their lives and end up pretty much in locked mental wards. He treated sociopaths much kinder.

I was petrified, because as I studied, I realized this definition for this new thing- manic- depression, was I. And my professor was saying it’s easier to be a sociopath and fit in society than what I had. I cried, and it bruised my struggling self esteem.

Oh the indignity.

Maybe that is why in the real world, I do not tell people I am bipolar. My actual diagnosis is Bipolar 1, but I keep this under my hat.

I hate being bipolar, but it’s me. I hate the fact that I cannot seem to attract a normal guy. When I am dating and eventually it comes out that I am bipolar, they run away like I have a terminal case of gonorrhea and their privates will fall off if they are with me. If they don’t run then, they run like hell when they find out I am a suicide survivor.

I hate the fact when I write I cannot be “Out” and use a pseudonym.

I was in a relationship with a lovely man, who would always introduce himself to whomever he met by saying “Hi, I’m (blank) and I’m bipolar”. I could never do that.

But why?

I wish I had the courage to out myself. I can do it at a DBSA meeting, I have no problem at an AA meeting, but in my normal life, I try to just appear normal and not say anything.

But Normal- that’s a setting on a washing machine. No one is 100 percent normal.

What is it about Bipolar that scares us like we are the boogeyman or Freddie Kruger?

It could be ideas like my well-meaning professor. After all, he read Kesey and saw “The Snake Pit”, and based his ideas on that. He probably read papers from the 50s where mentally ill patients were rounded up and placed in mental hospitals and forgotten about. Lobotomies were common, even JFK had a sister who had one.

I am embarrassed and I shouldn’t be. Part of me loves being bipolar; I have touched Mt. Olympus in Mania, and visited Hades in depression.

And part of me hates it. I feel like damaged goods. I don’t feel human. I don’t feel accepted, or loved. I look at all the houses where I live, all the houses made of little ticky tacky, with children playing in the yard and dogs and cats and I want the normalcy of it all. I want the comfort of it all. And that is denied to me, because like attracts like and even though I may fuck like a demon in the sack when I’m manic, when I am depressed I totally embrace abstinence. You can’t run hot and cold- said my last boyfriend. But I do. And when your meds change to something that takes away your libido and your appetite, you have to wonder, HOW MUCH DO I WANT THIS?

I want to have a life. I want to have a job again, and not live on disability. I want to be a productive member of society again. I want to go out with my friends and club, and date and go to movies and concerts. I don’t want to be treated like Mrs. Rochester in the Attic.

Right now, as I write my libido is back for the first time since October. I am so horny I could fuck a doorknob. Hell, I probably have, in the search to get off by any means possible. My kingdom for a cucumber. But when I went to the store, I wasn’t in the mood for salad, instead I bought lovely blueberries, strawberries, oranges, and a new fruit I was just introduced to, a mango. Add cottage cheese and voila! Dinner!

A few nights ago there was a female cat outside my apartment, clearly in heat, meowing. “Oh baby girl”, I thought to myself, I too wish some boy cat would just flip me on the backside and get it over with. If I could meow like that I would join her.

My biggest problem with my wellness is thinking that all happy families are alike, and everyone is happy all the time. I know this is not true. Nothing in this world is an absolute, except maybe a brand of Vodka.

Normal people – I don’t understand them, yet I long to be one. It’s like high school where you look at the popular clique and long to fit in there. And you know you won’t. And maybe that is why, even though I admire those in the blogosphere who can use their real names without qualms, while I write under a fake name or my initials because I haven’t had the strength to further my recovery.

And the only way to erase the prejudices towards mental illness, is by doing that. In the 60s society had a revolution and racial and sexual barriers were broken. Maybe this is the decade to do the same for mental illnesses.

Maybe this essay is a baby step towards it. My baby step.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at July 16, 2007 12:18 AM
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