Being bipolar just isn't fair. What a useless thing to say, I know, but it's what's been rattling around in my mind for days and days now. It's just such an obvious statement - who deserves bipolar disorder? However, it does feel particularly unfair that I've got to deal with this disease for the rest of my life when I'm supposed to be living my happily ever after.
I had a shitty childhood. Not as bad as a lot of folks, I'm sure, but we all work on our spectrum, right? And on my spectrum, my childhood was pretty bad. My mom had a lot of issues - her secrets aren't mine to divulge, but let's just say she had a hard life. I can tell you that her life was worse than mine and yet she managed to spare me the worst of the worst that happened to her.
So, don't get me wrong, as an adult I'm very grateful to my mother. She did surprisingly well by me and my sister compared to the shitstorm her life was. But kids? Kids don't have that understanding. Kids lack the empathy to understand that kind of stuff. Besides, remember what I said about our own personal spectrum? Well, it's even harder for kids to see outside their own spectrum so I wasn't comforted by "mom had it worse and it could be worse."
Anyway, my mom might have been bipolar, too. She certainly had a lot of the symptoms, most notably that she was generally one of two different people. There was the caring, loving mother who taught me so much and shared so much with me. Then there was The Beast. The scary, mean creature who didn't love, only hated. Who was never happy, only so, so angry. The loving mother offered hugs and praise, The Beast destroyed objects that meant anything to me to punish me for breaking a bowl of hers by accident (I was 6 or 7 at the time). The mother wanted to allay my fears, The Beast caused them.
It wasn't so much physical abuse (there was some of that, but I think on the whole it was fairly minimal - I wasn't beaten every day; I was only hit out of anger about a dozen or so times in my life), it was emotional. While the mother loved me and cherished me, the Beast told me again and again how much she hated me, how much she wished she'd followed through with the abortion she'd almost had, how I was a pig, a slob, a disappointment. I remember all of those words so much because they were branded into my memory with the flames of hurt and betrayal. Except, I didn’t blame The Beast because it was still just my mom and it wasn’t her fault that she changed. It was mine.
I had a lot of self-hatred as a child. I self-mutilated because I felt I needed to be punished for being such a bad child. I spent a lot of nights with an ache eating my gut because of how much I hated myself for being so bad, so terrible that I turned the mother into The Beast. I was so confused because no matter how hard I tried it was never enough. I always managed, somehow, to bring back the monster. And so I hated myself for driving away the mother, hating myself for being so despisable. I still believed in the Christian God at this point and I prayed every night to make me be better. Or, on the darker nights, I prayed for hours, fiercely, to please just let me die. Let me die and go to heaven so I could stop being the slob, the pig, the mistake, the disappointment. Just please let me die, please God, please oh please if You love me at all you'll just, please oh please oh please, just please let me die.
In a few especially dark moments I would hold a knife to my chest and just beg God for the courage to push it in. Just stab myself in the heart and it's all over. I remember standing in the kitchen in the dark, only moonlight coming through the windows, weeping silently - weeping loudly could alert the Beast and it did not like crying. Or worse, the weeping could alert the mother and she'd be so sad because she had made me feel this way and I couldn't hurt her, not after all the wrong I'd done.
My dad was my safe haven. He would often try to protect us from the worst of my mother's rages. But as time went on and The Beast's anger was turned on him more and more he became angry, too. Or he'd avoid the situation entirely and hide in his basement. I imagine he wondered if he wasn't to blame for her rages, too. I think we all, my sister, dad and me, thought we were responsible in our own ways. Because the mother was so good - how could she become something so terrible? It had to be someone's fault and I'm guessing we all just blamed ourselves. Over time, my dad turned more of his frustration and anger towards us kids, trying to keep us in line so that we didn't awaken The Beast. He started to use words like "pig" and "slob" with less discrimination. He was broken.
My sister played her part, unknowingly, as well. I think I was just a fragile child with a damaged ego (not helped by my school mates generally disliking me - I wasn't an easy child to know, probably not an easy adult to know now) and when my big sister, my protector, told me how annoying I was and how she couldn't stand me, I took it much more to heart than I think a younger sibling normally would. But it was my sister, Brandy, who taught me that the mother and the Beast were not the same person. It was my sister who understood, long before I did, that something was wrong with our mom and it turned her into something she couldn't control. It was my sister who explained to me that she still loved me, she just couldn't show it. Hearing it didn't make it true for me right away, but it did set the groundwork for the self hate to stop festering and let me turn my rage outwards, instead. As sad as it might be to hate your mother, it's probably more healthy than hating yourself.
My mom’s dual personality haunted much of my childhood, with varying influences from my broken father and my sister (who was going through all of these horrors as well - it's only natural she lashed out at me from time to time). It wasn't all bad, don't get me wrong. I had a handful of close friends and I don't think they can ever truly realize what a vital part they played in keeping me going. To have someone to turn to when The Beast was rampaging and my dad was beaten down and preferred to hide and my sister, who I had a healthy dose of hero-worship for, was calling me "pee sack" - to have someone I could call and who cared and told me nice things and distracted me...well, it's not out of the realm of possibility to say they saved my life. Ashley and Katie are two names I will always hold dear to my heart. I may not see them anymore and we talk too rarely but a lifetime could go by and I would still consider them close friends because I owe them so much.
But one of the biggest things that kept me going during my darkest hours was the knowledge that it had to end some day. Some day I would be 18 and able to leave the home that held so little love for me and then everything would be better. I would survive my childhood to go off and become someone grand and important and find the love of my life and everything would be perfect. It was worth living through hell to get to the happily ever after that God must surely have in store for me. And once I stopped believing in God, I still believed that things would get better because I would make them better and it would all have been worth it.
When I found Ryan, I knew I had been right. All of that childhood trauma nonsense, that seems so trivial now with years to gloss over the scarier bits, was all worth it because I had found my fairy tale ending with Ryan. I can't express to you how much I love Ryan without abusing a million cliches so I'll only say he is the culmination of every childhood fantasy I ever escaped into to help myself through the rough patches. He is everything. And so I thought I had found my happily ever after and while life would never be perfect, it would be good.
And now I'm bipolar. And it's just...not fair. On Latuda I couldn’t even enjoy Ryan because it took any vestiges of joy and warmth out of my life. Or I was so miserable with akathisia that I couldn't enjoy anything, Ryan or otherwise. I found my happily ever after prince and I can't even appreciate him. Thank every god that humans have ever dreamt up for his understanding and patience and constant, unflickering love because a lesser man might decide this is all too much and leave. Ryan only holds on tighter as I spiral and teeter-totter and loop-the-loop emotionally, dealing with one medication after the next. Ryan and I should be able to have our babies and live a blissful, simple life but now our lives may never be simple because I'm bipolar. And that is just so unfair.
Being bipolar is never fair - I get that. Life isn't fair - I get that. Consciously. But I can't quiet that little voice in the back of my head that says, "It's just not fair! Why me? Why not someone with a happy childhood? Why not someone with an easier life?" Useless, pointless and a little mean to be wishing it on anyone else, but there it is. Being bipolar isn't fair.
No comments:
Post a Comment