The Brain's Betrayal

The oldest memories I carry with me at the cusp of 41 years all involve me being alone. I remember sitting in the living room of my mother’s oldest apartment, and no one was there.

I must have been two or three then. I wandered around, then spent time dissecting one of my mother’s cigarettes. I vaguely remember her anger at me having done so, as the fuming cylinders were her crutch and her everything.

I remember also my insistence that I could carry the eggs from the grocery store around that age. My mother either had a lapse in judgment or I was convincing, or both. But I ended up dropping the eggs, watching as their yellowy innards drooled across the floor. I remember, even then, the disappointment and guilt I felt at being unable to honor that childish promise.

Childhood in the poorer parts of suburban Georgia was sometimes a joy, but mostly a struggle for a kid who was placed into the Head Start Program, a program designed to help prevent the onset of autism for kids who could not afford to go to pre-K programs and whose parents struggled financially.

I was a shy kid who retreated so deeply into myself that the occasion was rare when I came out to honor the masses with my attention.

A Shyness More Than Vulgar

In school, I struggled in many ways. I kept to myself, so attached to my mother that I co-slept with her for far longer than any brave kid would care to admit. I enjoyed school intellectually, but socially, I carried a deeper appreciation for the teachers and staff than I did for the other children. I found social interactions tenuous, and a friendship was something I could not comprehend until the fifth grade.

One day, when I wandered around the playground alone, as usual, one of the teachers introduced me to another kid who was shy, Jasmine. I liked her because she had long black hair just like Princess Jasmine from the Aladdin film near the time. But the concept of friendship was alien to me. I didn’t know how to be a friend or what friends did.

I retreated into myself. I really liked unicorns, and pretended to have an invisible unicorn as a pet for a time. I pretended that Sonic the Hedgehog was my friend, but never believed him to be there. I spent a lot of time listening to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack and imagining myself somewhere like Halloweentown, somewhere that was made for people like me, people who were misshapen, though I was misshapen in ways I couldn’t articulate or really even understand.

I was quiet, rarely voicing my displeasure other than in a household that was founded on the principle that, in order to get anything done, you had to yell. I wanted to yell at my mom and grandma when they were fighting, and spent so many times with the counsellor at school, crying because my mother had yelled at me.

The Joy of Order Among the Chaos

I lived in chaos. The chaos of the world around me. The chaos of boisterous children at school, always crying and getting into dramatic arguments. The chaos of living in a single parent home where, when I was about 10 or so, I was abandoned to be a kid who stayed home alone, along with my sister, two years my junior.

I kept order in my head, even though my head couldn’t always be counted to not be chaotic. When other kids spent a lot of time playing house, I played library, loaning out my books to my sister and using one of those stampers I had so proudly acquired to set some due dates on them. There was a neatness to it, a control in a world where I had no control.

As I grew older, I retreated more and more into the world of books. While I managed middle school better than elementary, high school brought out the old feelings of alienation, the feelings of a difference so innate and irreconcilable that I began expressing through goth. I still yearned for Halloweentown.

Order, for me, though, truly lay in reading and studying history. I spent most of my days reading nineteenth century novels where I identified with tragic heroines like Jane Eyre more than I did with my peers. I imagined myself on the moors, and how I, just like Jane, would do the right thing, even over love, because it was the right thing.

Reading was a coping skill during a time when the chaos turned inward in more obvious ways.

The Brain’s Betrayal

This brain had been, for me, the one thing that would not betray me. The vast expanse of knowledge, of imagination, of creativity; the strength that lay there to keep the world at bay . . . it started to crumble in earnest when I hit adolescence.

Once more, I spent more than a little time at the school counsellor’s office. For a long time, I would eat sandwiches in the bathroom stall for lunch, hiding in preference to the horrific idea of having to eat among teenagers I didn’t know. I began crying daily, writing dreadful details of my emotional state in a journal, which I carried with me to every class.

I wondered if I may need to see a doctor. I addressed this to the counsellor, who speculated that I may have had a depressed mood because I wore a lot of black and listened to music like Nine Inch Nails. I protested the idea, saying that she had placed the cart before the horse. I had been cutting myself while listening to The Downward Spiral, certainly, but it was cathartic when the inner pain became too unbearable.

I fought hard at the age of about 16 to see a doctor. I forced my mother to take me to a county facility where I waited, finally opening up to a clinician. I was put on antidepressants and, for a while, the effect was like a miracle. The darkness began to fade and I was able to finish high school with as much embarrassment as everyone.

The Second, More Difficult Betrayal

It wasn’t until college that the mania came out full force. If I look back at my life, I believe I’d had hypomanic episodes for a while. One of my friends quipped that she thought I was bipolar, because I would talk about things like they were perfect one day and then fall into the darkness the other day.

I ignored this, though a part of me wished I had bipolar disorder, because it seemed linked to creativity and was less boring than depression. I had taken a college level psychology course in high school, and there was a part of me that envied how unrestrained and flippant a classmate diagnosed with bipolar was. I would never have been so dramatic, would never have forced so much attention on myself.

If I had any doubts, they were erased by college. The mood swings were incredible, brought on by the little sleep I indulged. Writing papers the night before was more important than a little bit of sleep.

I was brilliant. I excelled in philosophy. I thrived in art history. I participated in shenanigans with friends. I was a personality in ways I was never in any other setting. I was an academic, an artiste, a Sylvia Plath without the burden of a Ted Hughes and kids.

I did many stupid things. I met a young man from an art school in Atlanta. I experimented with him sexually, letting him “take” my virginity. I started chatting with men online, experimenting with BDSM through that medium, and masturbated a lot. I was exploited by people who “trained” me to do things for them online because I had bad impulse control and an intense desire for validation.

I almost met a man nearly 40 years my elder at a motel.

I was able to talk myself out of the worst of it, but it started a habit that I found hard to break, the intimate yet disinterested sort of relationships I began to form with these people. The distance, the lack of care, and the lack of real feeling kept it safe for someone who wanted to pursue a sex life but didn’t want the consequences that come with impulsivity and attachment.

A Double-Edged Brain

My brain has always been a place to retreat, to hide from the rest of the world. I’ve had very few constants in my life, as people come and go. Circumstances change. I spent years struggling with the abuse of my mother, with my own loss in returning home after college. For so long, so much felt like one defeat after another.

My brain has been friend and foe in this, but I’ve started to be gentler with myself, as the brain that wanted me to die for so long also gave me the gift of sharing a story in a relatable way. It gave me the gift of empathy, the gift of deep and abiding feeling and emotion.

As we finalized our breakup the other day, my ex accused me of relying too heavily on labels. Throughout the relationship, he was uncomfortable with my explanations of triggers, of my concern for better mental health, of my dramatic nature, my mood swings. He found mental health to be an uncomfortable subject throughout, even though our relationship started as I was in the midst of some very, very dark things for me.

Thinking of his distaste for my love of labels, if I could have done that conversation over, I would tell him what I’ve told others who are worried about their mental health or about the future for them: it is OK to find comfort and stability in a label. We find our identities in labels. We find better ways to express who we are through labels. It is cruel to suggest that to someone who has found calm in the storm of her life through her understanding of her experience as a person with bipolar disorder.

Labels help us understand ourselves and explain who we are at the end of the day, what we believe in, what we value. There is no need to use them like some kind of fandom, to fetishize them, to make them more than you are. But we use them for many reasons.

As I finish this piece, I consider what the labels have done for me, the ones that I have kept, the ones I have discarded. Sometimes they change, and that is fine, too. I reacquaint myself with the label of bipolar, and I understand my experience in a great deal through its lens.

Ko-Fi