Welcome to the Jungle, Revised Edition. Hilary T. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ Nalgene bottles. The physiotherapists teased me about letting my shin splints get so bad without asking for help. I did the stretches and exercises, got a better pair of running shoes, and eventually started running again.

      Total days of pain: less than five.

      Social approval of shin splints: high.

      Overall experience with shin-splints diagnosis and treatment: supercool!

      Six years later, I was a junior at the University of British Columbia, majoring in English literature. No more sports, no more sniper drills. This was the West Coast, baby—poetry readings, pot, and rainy-night house parties. I lived in a funky old house in Kitsilano that had a rich history of student debauchery and was known to several generations of UBC students as the place to go for anything involving mint juleps and knife throwing. Six of us lived there, and it got loud.

      In January of that year, I started having trouble sleeping. Writing it off to the constant noise and stimulation in the house, I didn't pay much attention. By February I couldn't sleep at all, and my mind was swimming in thoughts and rhymes. Box! Fox! Haha!

      In lectures, I either scribbled furiously in the diary I carried with me everywhere, recording my urgent insights (“He was an ornithologist. He was bornithologist into it!”), or I stood up abruptly to leave partway through and weep in the bathroom or wander in the forest that surrounded the campus. At parties, I would give my phone number to several different guys, then panic and jog home through the night, all the way from East Van to Kitsilano. At my part-time job as a bagel-stand cashier, I would prop my ever-present diary over the cash register and worry about the people who came to buy bagels: whether they knew what I was thinking, if they might be interested in coming to a fabulous party I was planning. At night, I would lie down in bed as a formality, then spring back up ten minutes later when sleeping didn't work out. Eventually, the mental chatter in my mind intensified so much that it felt like there were “four of me” whose constant arguments and repartees were alternatingly sinister and hilarious.

      It really hurt, but I winced and kept going. If I ignored it, it would probably fix itself. Time passed. I limped along. Even though whatever was wrong with me was more pronounced than a physical limp and should have been more obvious, there was no coach to ride past on a bicycle and shout, “Stop running!”

      So I didn't.

      I felt like a ceiling light whose switch was stuck in the on position. Whatever I did, I couldn't turn myself off. Confused and tormented by my condition, I nevertheless strode through the days, handing in essays, going on dates, and calling my parents long distance for normal, how's-the-weather conversations. Even though I was falling apart inside my head, I wasn't doing anything that had enough obvious craziness to attract anyone's attention. Not running down the street in my underwear. Not trying to convince the bank teller I was Jesus. Just wandering around having thoughts that went off like sparklers and a body that had forgotten how to fall asleep.

      When I finally went to see a doctor at the walk-in clinic down the street, it wasn't because I wanted to help myself or because I thought I might have a medical disorder. It was out of shame. I had started crying and rambling in front of my roommates one night because I couldn't sleep, and I felt so embarrassed for crying in front of them that I was determined to get sleeping pills so it wouldn't happen again. I waited in the exam room, feeling guilty for taking up the doctor's time when there were three-year-olds with runny noses waiting to be seen, and when the doctor came in, I started crying all over again. When she asked what was wrong, I blurted, “I can't do this anymore!”

      That's when someone finally said, “Stop running.”

      Over the next few weeks, I went through the usual mental-illness maze of being misdiagnosed with unipolar depression, becoming hypomanic (again) from antidepressants, being rediagnosed with bipolar II, and choking down a series of different antipsychotics and mood stabilizers until I hit on a combination that didn't make me want to bury myself in a hole. I spent a lot of time in the waiting room of the UBC hospital, which was neither fun nor cool, because everyone there either had an STD or a mental illness and there was no freaking whirlpool.

      Total days of pain: lots and lots.

      Social approval of bipolar: not obvious.

      Overall experience with bipolar diagnosis: kinda really bad.

      My dad flew out from Ontario to see how I was doing and make sure I wasn't completely crazy. We blasted through the Chapters bookstore in downtown Vancouver, and he bought me every bipolar-related book on the shelf. We made a stop at the Starbucks. As we were power walking down the street, my dad hailed a taxi midsentence, hopped in, and rushed off to catch his flight back to Ontario. I stood on the sidewalk with a bag of bipolar books in one hand and a half-finished Green Tea Frappucino in the other.

      The party was just getting started.

      In the days that followed, I returned most of the bipolar books and used the money to buy poetry books—not because I wasn't interested in the former, but because they made me feel tainted and messed up. They were too adult, too clinical, too alarmist, clearly written for family and caretakers at their wits' end, and designed to look authoritative and medical. They didn't answer any of the questions I had about bipolar, and I felt like a huge tool for even having them in my room, their ALL CAPS titles blaring out at the world. I thought there should be a book that was a little more honest, a little more badass, and a little more sympathetic to the average teen or twenty-something's first experience of the mental-health system.

      So here's that book.

      This book is mainly about how to live with bipolar, but it's also about how to think about bipolar. Sure, you can think of bipolar as a chemical imbalance in your brain, but you can also imagine it as a video game, a shamanic journey, a crash course in existentialism, or a plain old pain in the ass.

      If you're reading this book and you've just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder: welcome to the jungle. Hope you brought bug spray, 'cause the spiders in here are as big as your face. Taken your meds? Good.

      Now let's get started.

      1

      WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

      LIFE BEYOND THE DIAGNOSIS

      How did it happen?

      Maybe you were doing a research project on the Beatles, and by the end of the term you thought you were one of the Beatles. Maybe you were trying to find a girlfriend, and at the end of a futile year of looking you were trying to die. Maybe you were having a perfectly happy summer that turned into an ecstatic summer or a winter sadness that never lifted when spring came. The sun was shining, cars were honking, the radio was playing something catchy. You were toasting a bagel, playing Xbox, talking to your best friend about the afterlife, or tuning your guitar.

      Then the mothership landed.

      You were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This big whale of a diagnosis slid over the sun, and your world was suddenly held hostage. A hatch slid open and out came doctors, psychiatrists, pills, hospitals, and self-help books. They strapped you to a gurney and scrawled “bipolar” on your chest in permanent marker. “I'm not bipolar!” you shouted, struggling in your restraints. “She's bipolar! He's bipolar! Anyone but me!” They gave you two Depakote and a glass of water. “Misdiagnosed!” you snarled, gulping it down.

      Eventually, the mothership flew away, but left its cargo behind. Medication, СКАЧАТЬ