Rotten Luck

On Saturday, July 8, I laid screaming and crying in bed while staring alternately at my phone and the ceiling. I lay there weeping uncontrollably, hyperventilating, eventually crawling to lie face down on the floor in a pile of laundry I had been too unmotivated to fold and put away, because the floor felt solid and my bed had felt too soft. The only thought that ran through my mind, the thought that was tearing through my mind and leaving me a puddle of incoherence in it's wake, was this: I want to die. I don't want to be alive. They are better off. I am nothing. I am worthless.

Thankfully, I don't have anything in my apartment that can get the job done. I looked. This was not the first time I had had a breakdown that culminated in suicidal thought, but it was the first time in awhile.

In March, I got too drunk by myself watching Shameless, drinking boxed wine and feeling the incomprehensible weight of just being me. I remember, fuzzily, walking out onto the front porch to smoke a cigarette, and wishing a car would tear up the street so that I could throw myself in front of it. I cried, alone on my porch, clutching a glass of wine, wishing for it to all be over. The next day, the thoughts scared me, and I pushed them to the back of my mind. These thoughts were not a surprise, though.

I've been feeling this way as long as I can remember.

Now, prior to these breakdowns, you'd never have guessed there was anything wrong with me. A little too boisterous, too talkative, but typically the life of the party. Or typically, trying to be. I was not, and do not present, as a "depressed" person. This was the diagnosis I claimed, and had done, for 14 years now. Over time, it's become clear to me and those around me that this initial diagnosis was a mistake.

A week prior to this most recent breakdown, I made a phone call to a psychologist while on my break at work.

"Hello, I'd like to make an appointment for a new patient. Yes, I'd like to be tested for bipolar disorder."

Even the words "bipolar disorder" feel foreign and terrifying when I say them. When you hear "bipolar", you think "crazy". Or at least, I do. My mother was a diagnosed manic depressive, though I didn't really know that until recently. Bipolar isn't just a mental illness, it's an insult you can hurl at anyone who seems slightly unbalanced. It's a death sentence for friendships and relationships. It's a roller coaster of rapid thought, paranoia, intense highs, and devastating lows.

There are seven markers for it, and I have all seven. Upon my first meeting with the psychologist, he told me that I was a "typical bipolar 1 case" and they could "put my picture in the textbook."

I don't know that it's possible to explain the rush of emotion. First, revulsion with myself. Then, relief that I wasn't crazy...I mean, I was definitely crazy, but not for thinking that there was something wrong with me. There WAS something wrong with me. Terror, that I would have to go on something like lithium or some similarly awful drug. And finally, some sort of acceptance that I had been this way my whole life, but that the way I was wasn't actually normal.

When your mother has manic depression and is not regularly treated for it, your definition of normal becomes somewhat skewed. I never considered that the way I flew off the handle when I was a child or teen at little to no provocation could be a "symptom" of a manic episode. Hysteria was just how I handled disappointment. There never has been any such thing as a "middle ground" for me. Since I was a child, people have commented on how my mood changes seemingly immediately with little to no warning. Everything is always the BEST THING or the WORST THING and there is no inbetween.

I dove in and started doing some research. My psychologist recommend I read "An Unquiet Mind", which is a memoir of a clinical psychologist who suffers form severe bipolar 1. I read it in a night. So many parts of that book were like looking in a mirror, or looking at my mother.

I told some of my friends as soon as I found out, and was surprised that some of them did not greet the news with support, but with denial.

"You don't seem depressed."
"You just have anxiety, you don't have bipolar disorder"
"I've never seen you be manic"
"You should get a second opinion"

This sucked, mostly because I felt like I finally had found something that made sense, and that explained the way that my brain worked. Maybe I have just been really good at hiding my crazy.

The thing I've learned is that bipolar disorder isn't just periods of highs and lows...it's things that become associated with those highs and lows. Mania can be everything from euphoria and spending 600 dollars in my savings account in a day to being incredibly irritable and paranoid. When I'm manic, I can be the light in a room, or I can be a black hole of negative energy. I have a compulsion to speak that I cannot control. This includes text messages. If I don't get an answer, I keep going. I say things I don't mean and don't remember saying them. Paranoia becomes the very air I breathe. Everyone is talking about me. Everyone thinks I'm awful to be around. No one likes me. No one is actually my friend. They're all conspiring against me. They pity me. They think I'm awful. They'd be happier if I weren't around.When I am manic, I am obsessive. I am impulsive and do things and say things without thinking. The part of my brain that checks myself before I wreck myself is g-o-n-e.

I am manic most of the time.

I have destroyed relationships because I can't stop talking or harping on one thing. I have destroyed friendships because I need constant reassurance that I am not the thing everyone is talking about. My brain is usually firing 1,000 thoughts per minute and I don't know how to slow it down or make it stop.

The most terrifying thing about all of this is that bipolar cannot usually be controlled with therapy alone, though my psychologist has been incredible in the 6 weeks I've been seeing him. Bipolar 1 is characterized by the manic episodes, but here lies the rub: my mania can be so incredibly productive. Before it goes up in flames, I want to create things. I have fun with my friends. I am social and fun and I don't need sleep, because sleep is for the weak. I can sleep less than three hours in a night and still want to clean the whole house. I want to write jokes, I want to perform, I want to start new hobbies and plan new endeavors.

When they medicate me, who says I won't disappear? Who says all of the things that make me who I am, that make me funny and sharp witted, all of those things, who says they won't just disappear in a haze of lithium or seizure medication or a combination of any number of drugs?

When they medicate me, who says I won't lose all of the things that make people like me in the first place?

I'm struggling hard through a peak of paranoia and as I typed that, I thought to myself, who says they like me at all, in the first place?

Bipolar disorder has a 19 percent suicide rate, so the choice for me is clear. I am going to seek out medication and a psychiatrist. I am going to continue seeing my psychologist. I am going to research and try to understand exactly what is going on in my head so that I can try to control it as best I know how, in the interim. It is a difficult thing to wrap my brain around, but I know I cannot continue in the way I have been doing. I cannot destroy any more relationships. I can't push away any more friends. I can't miss any more work because my mania breaks and I can't physically remove myself from my bed or my floor or make myself eat. I cannot continue hiding the things that I am struggling with because they are frightening to myself and to others when the most terrifying thing is that 19 percent of people lose this battle and their own hand casts the killing blow.

I've been thinking about writing something to this effect since I had that break over a month ago, but I couldn't put the words together to say what I wanted to say. I know I want to destigmatize mental illness. I know that my disease and who I am are not the same, when I am clear headed enough to think about them logically and separate myself. I know that I am scared a lot of the time, and that I loathe being lumped into a category of "crazy" people. I crave understanding and acceptance and for people to be patient with me, and with other people with mood disorders, as we navigate our way back to a "normal" we haven't ever actually known.

Ultimately, though, I know this:I can't push away any more friends. I can't miss any more work because my mania breaks and I can't physically remove myself from my bed or my floor or make myself eat. I cannot continue hiding the things that I am struggling with because they are frightening to myself and to others when the most terrifying truth is that 19 percent of people lose this battle and their own hand casts the killing blow.

Recovery is a process, as is understanding. Since receiving my diagnosis, I have been hyper aware of all of my moods, and questioning everything I know about myself. I have been more paranoid, felt my mania more distinctly, and let myself succumb more deeply to the throes of depression. They say that after a diagnosis of bipolar, patients report more severe symptoms, but I think they just become more aware of them. Our normal isn't "normal" at all.

So I write all this to say, be patient with me. Be patient with us.

I firmly believe there is a light, and in my darkest days, my biggest mood swings, I'm clinging to that, for whatever strength gets me through the day.

In "An Unquiet Mind", the author discusses her experience when she tells her lover at the time that she has bipolar disorder (though it was then called manic depression). He holds her in his arms, and only says to her one thing:

"Rotten luck."

And it is. It's a rotten spin in the genetic lottery. I didn't choose this. I never would have chosen this. The choice is what I do with the information. And I am here to say I am choosing to fight. And I'm choosing to be open with the struggle, so that hopefully others experiencing what I experience, or even close to it, won't feel so alone.

As Aragorn once said, "there is a day when the courage of Men fails...but it is not this day....this day, we fight."

So, I'm going to fight.

Just another day.

When I walked outside this morning, the air felt exactly like it did in California when I touched down in San Jose. The light is different, though.

I clutched the handle of my drunkenly packed suitcase so tightly I thought it would snap in half. I had made it. The connecting flight in Salt Lake City, where I only had a 30 minute layover, did not best me.

My rental car ended up being at a Hertz location clear across the city of San Jose, and I had no way to get there. I panicked. But even that didn't stop me; a saint who worked at the airport location volunteered to drive me to the other location. I still don't know why she did it. Maybe she took pity on me or could sense my panic. Regardless, even that didn't best me. An hour later, and I was in a rented Aveo driving toward Morro Bay, California, to say goodbye to my dying mother.

There is something so strange about being in a new place when you know you're going to do the hardest thing you've done in your life there. I remember driving down the interstate, listening to The Shins, while the sun was setting, and being struck with the true beauty of California. I had never been before. That feeling was immediately replaced by guilt. How could I be even slightly happy or comforted when my mother was dying? I laid the accelerator down a little more firmly, reminding myself that the reason I was in California were my grandmother's words from a few nights before:

She might not last the night.

Two hours later, I pulled into the driveway of the apartment my mother and stepfather shared. My stepfather, who I had not spoken to since I was 18, was thankfully not there yet. My grandmother, my older sister and her boyfriend, and my mother's youngest were there. My older sister called me and said she wanted to make sure I was really prepared for what I was about to see. I asked
"Well, how bad is it?" and she replied, "She's just really yellow."

So this was it. This was the moment. The first time I had seen my mother in five years. Our most recent phone conversation, when she gave me her prognosis, was the first time we had spoken in three months. When she told me she was scared, and I left work hyperventilating and crying to seek comfort in my favorite bar and tequila. Typical.

I walked into the room and it was as if the blood and breath went out of my body in a single, terrifying moment. There would be no conversation, no forgiveness, no explanation. She was not lucid. She had gone so fast. Her skin was a kind of yellow they don't make for crayons and paint. It looked waxy. Her skin was so yellow you couldn't see her tattoo anymore, the dolphin on her ankle.

I sat on the edge of the bed and my grandmother woke her up. She came to and my grandmother said "Nicole, look who made it. It's Morgan." Her eyes met mine and even the whites of her eyes were yellow. I had always loved my mother's eyes. Her smile always reached them, and they were filled with laughter when she was happy. This time, I had a hard time not looking away.

"Mom," I said, while fighting back years of emotion, pain, and held grudges. "Mom, I made it. Mom, I love you."

She sat up in bed as best she could, more of a lurching motion than a calculated one. I held her hand and for a minute, I hope, I think, she saw past the morphine haze and knew who I was. The light came back to her eyes briefly, and she said "I love you". Those were the last words my mother spoke to me, though she spoke some more as the week went on.

Following this exchange, I retreated to the porch to smoke cigarettes. Tears poured out of me. It's a kind of pain that I simply cannot describe. I cried until I thought I might vomit. I cried until my eyes were swollen. My chest hurt to the point that I thought I would die. Even recalling this moment now, my chest hurts still.

I always thought I would have more time to repair my relationship with my mother. When I grieve here, I'm not only grieving the beautiful woman I envied my entire childhood, I'm grieving the woman I never really got to know. I moved away to save myself from a terrible environment.  I truly believe if I had lived with her as a teenager, I would have ended my own life.

It's funny how quickly I wanted to forgive her when I knew she only had a few more days.

On the second or third day I was there, my grandmother wanted to give us each our space to make our peace with our mother. Everyone left the room. I held her hand sitting next to her in a chair I had pulled up to the bed. I desperately wished there had been room for me to crawl into bed with her one more time, like I had as a kid, when I would wake in the night from a terrible dream. This was the terrible dream, though, and there was no way to be comforted. I guess that's what adulthood really is.

I told her that I forgave her for all of the lies. I told her I forgave her for the drinking, for the abuse, for everything she had said and done, for all of the things she told me about myself that I believed were true for so long. And then I told her how sorry I was that I couldn't save her, that I left when i Was fourteen, that I didn't call, that I selfishly let my pain and my pride get in the way of a relationship with her.

I sang her the Garth Brooks song we used to sing to my little sister together. I sang her amazing grace. I searched my brain for other religious songs I could sing, to comfort her, or I guess myself, but even with my music degree from a Christian university, I came up with nothing.

I stepped outside to smoke. The light in California is something to behold. Everything seems to have a glow around it. The breeze was soft and chill, and I could hear the gulls cawing and the sea lions barking in the bay. It shimmered in the distance.

If I die anywhere, let it be California.

My stepdad gave me a crisp 100 dollar bill and told me to drive up to Hearst Castle, the estate of the late William Randolph Hearst. Apparently my mother had loved it there. Hearst used to throw parties for some of the biggest names in Hollywood, political figures, etc. My mother would have fit right in.

My stepdad made it a point to tell me how proud my mother was of me. I thought it was funny because whenever she and I talked, it was to scream at each other.  It was nice to know, even if it wasn't true. I choose to believe it was. She and I were never great at communication.

The Hearst estate was a welcome and beautiful distraction. I saw some zebras, remnants of his long gone zoo, grazing along the side of the road. I stopped and saw elephant seals lazily basking on the shoreline, kicking sand upon themselves like thin blankets.

At this point, everyone was gone except my grandfather and my aunt Noel. Having her there meant the world to me. At this point, I learned my grandfather had also struggled with alcoholism. He beat it, though.

I left because I didn't think I could handle being in the room when she died. When I got the news that she had died, I was about to drive through a Starbucks drive through. That was a year ago today.

Grief, for me, isn't something that is going away. When I first came back to Tennessee, I felt like I was underwater and I couldn't breathe. It took me awhile to get back to work. I didn't want to be touched. I had no interest in male attention. When I finally did come back to work, I was a raging bitch. Stress got to me more.

I thought after a few months went by I would be fine. I wasn't. I was making irresponsible decisions with my emotions. I entered into a relationship with someone because I really wanted to be with someone, and I truly cared for him, but I'm not sure I would have done that if I weren't still struggling with the grief. I relapsed back into my eating disorder for a few months. I started drinking heavily.

I denied that any of this had to do with grief, or with guilt.

It's a year later. I made it. A milestone. I missed her on her birthday and thought of all the times I said I would send a card, and didn't. I missed her on mother's day. I missed her when I smelled blistex or vaseline lotion, and when I was Christmas shopping in Target and had to leave because I was so blinded by tears I couldn't read price tags anymore.

I missed her on my birthday and on Christmas and listened to old voicemails she had left me just so I could hear her voice. I feel like  my sadness has turned me into a cliche.

Its been a year and I'm just now starting to feel like myself, and like I can breathe again. There are days I don't think about her much at all, and then feel guilty for forgetting about it.

There are still days where I can't physically get out of bed because the sadness and the loss is that deep.

A year is a pretty short time. I wish she could see me now. I'd love to have her make fun of my hair color choice, or see me do stand up comedy, or meet my dog. She would love Oz. I see other people have their milestone moments, weddings, children, and selfishly my first thought is anger that my own mother will never see me through moments like that. She won't dance at my wedding, if there is one. If i Had kids, which I likely won't, she won't know them. She won't see me get my graduate degree or my doctorate. It's like she stopped knowing me at our last good memory.

I miss you, mom. I miss you calling me fourteen times in a row until I picked up the phone. I miss you never having figured out time zones and time differences between California and Tennessee. I miss your laugh and your handwriting and the way you always smelled. I miss you waking up at midnight to cook boil in a bag rice. I miss you giving me your clothes and jewelry whenever I visited. I stole some when I left California, but I didn't think you'd mind.

I wonder if this day will ever get easier for me. I wonder if this pain will ever really go away, but I think it will stay with me forever. I am so lucky to have an amazing family and supportive friends who have stuck with me through the mood swings, the drunken crying, and the conversations about my mother. For those of you who stuck around to the end to read this, damn, you must either really care or be really bored.

Most importantly, what happened to my mother has allowed me to take a deep look inward at both my drinking and my mental health and monitor them closely so I don't take a similar path. I still haven't made it to a grief counselor, more out of pride than anything else, but I know my mother wouldn't want me to suffer. She really did want everyone to be happy and healthy. That was something I took for granted about her.

Today, when I walked outside, the air felt exactly like it did when I landed in San Jose, but I feel different than I did that day.

I may never be healed, but I am healing. And I love you, Mom.