hindsight

Well, I had another psychotic break.  It's my third one, this past December.

I was taking the medicine my doctor had prescribed but it was clearly not enough.

I was upset about a lot of things.  A lot of things feel unfair, and I guess my mind just wound up and wouldn't stop.

That's the real kicker with being bi-polar, when it happens you are the last one to know.  I didn't think it could possibly happen to me again, after last time.  But, sadly, it did.

I wound up in the psych ward at the Institute of Psychiatry at MUSC in Charleston.  I was there for sixteen days and hallucinated my way through Christmas.  I had people loving me, I had people hating me, I was talking to the dead, my dead relatives, my dead friends, and I was making peace for a whole lot of people.  What really happened, I have no idea, I was probably just strapped to a bed in MUSC, babbling my brains out.

But the creativity of the broken brain boggles my mind.

I started to come out of it around Christmas, or the day after.

Fuck, is all I could think when I realized I would have to face the wreckage I had made of my life.

Luckily, I am not a violent person, so the wreckage didn't involve any broken laws, or any broken bones, but it did involve other people.  The poor souls who got wrapped into the narrative of my hallucination, for whatever reason.  What a shit show.

My landlord came to visit the day after I got out of the hospital, and told me the homeowner's association wanted me gone.  Really, I said, trying to remember who I had targeted and why.  "It was a significant event,"  he said.  Oh really, I answered  dryly.

All I know about being bipolar, besides my own experiences (which clearly I have little insight into) is from Carrie Mathison, the bipolar person's biggest hero.  It is Carrie, and her awesome sister, whose name I now forget, who told me that following a manic episode, always comes a depression.  Makes sense.  But nobody has ever mentioned that to me, when they shuffle me out of the hospital, after I wake from what seems like an eternal dream.

So, that's what I am dealing with now, the downside of that epic mania.  Miraculously I did find a new place to live that's nice, so my old neighbors and the homeowner's association don't have to deal with ...me, and all my rough edges.  (bahhh, must be nice to be so perfect)...

but, whatever, I come from a world where people break, where people love each other foolishly and badly sometimes, where people scream, laugh and cry all in the same breath...its music, it's life...

My therapist says, "you were overwhelmed."  I try to remember that.  What a nice, peaceful and unjudgemental thing to say.  "I was overwhelmed."  Yes, I most certainly was.