Day 64 Depression Knocking On my Door

About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar illness.  Illness, challenge, disorder, mayhem, whatever you want to call it.  It used to called manic depression and I still prefer that wording.  Not because of any degree of how I feel but it just sounds cooler.  And Hendrix wrote a song called Manic Depression.  Just trying to be part of the cool kids here.  I was under a great deal of stress and fighting for my spirit with a fierce desperation unlike I have ever done before in my life. 

The depression side of the disorder was not a stranger to me.  I remember taking long walks before I was ten, early, early in the mornings and looking at homes and wondering what kind of lives were happening in there.  I hoped it wasn’t all the same as the life happening in my home.  I knew my home was bad, but I didn’t know to what degree.  It just didn’t feel right but I had no wisdom at the time to know how to deal with the pressure I felt about it.  Was it a normal household and all the shit that went down was because I was just a bad kid?  I truly didn’t know.  It seemed like we all had independent lives, no one really shared in any type of unity.  Holidays were so hyped up and so besotted with disappointment and resentment that there was no fun in them.  Other than getting out of school but that was the only benefit and that meant more time at home so, well, I’m just saying.  I can truly say it was a family disease.  It spread from the master warhorse and it infected everybody.

My sponsor asked me to think about writing with an optimistic tone.  Ha ha ha!  What’s optimistic is that I’m here 50 years later able to write about it with a fairly clear head.  I’ve learned that there are different types of sanity as well as insanity.  Even though I’ve been branded bipolar, there is great latitude in that orbit that I’ve been ordained to travel in.  Yes medication has been the rocket fuel that has more or less kept me on beam this past decade, but it hasn’t locked me up creatively.  I think.  When you’re initially diagnosed, oh yeah, hold on because there are a million different combinations of medical cocktails that you will be introduced to.  I’m not kidding.  They’ll change your meds, up your meds, down your meds, add to your meds, and give you meds to combat the side effect of your other meds.  No end to the madness, pardon the pun.  The blow was just getting the diagnosis.  I was 48 or 49 and it just didn’t seem like that was ever in the agenda of when I got older.  Maybe win a lottery, get a house trained puppy that fed itself, an old lady that laughed at all of my jokes but no, not being diagnosed crazy.  That in itself dropped me deeper into the depression that was on board already, thank you very much.

If felt like it came on so sudden but that was the weekend I spent in the hospital.  I felt so mortal that night when I took all the pills.  I felt everyday of loneliness that I had ever felt.  Adding my years to the equation it was incomprehensible that I just couldn’t get it.  I would never find anyone to tend to my deep rooted rotten sense of unhappiness.  Would I find a love that didn’t entertain grand drama at the expense of us both?  My passion was the fiend.  Or a member of the team to ever keep me from finding that simple light of contentedness.  That warm glow of an innocent love that didn’t involve going back to the years of fear and dread.  What am I missing?  Why do I keep picking the wrong women?

When things started going south between Nan and I, I could not help but believe I was tainted.  It was my fate to fail in every relationship.  I not only was affected by the fighting and bickering, I was also affected by the inner chaos that I couldn’t seem to stop or separate from the real marriage.  I thought love was missing so I tried harder to show that it was real and living and viable.  But I was throwing out the wrong message.  I was trying to be romantic, trying to fan a flame but it was in the wrong furnace.  I was dying inside of a love lost, a path dwindling to nowhere again.  It was the same old story.  No matter the relationship, it always ended up in the same dead end.  What was it about me that couldn’t find the answer?  Did I even know the question at all?  Apparently I didn’t.  What started happening on the outside was I got distracted by another woman, Nicole.  It was an immediate fix for a problem that in hindsight, I didn’t have the tools or the ability to work on.

Nicole was half my age, beautiful, kind, and funny and she liked me immediately.  She said she was in the middle of breaking up with her boyfriend who was only a couple of years younger than me.  So she likes older guys, great.  They had been breaking up for a year and a half.  I didn’t hear that, or I did but I let it ride over the fields of red flags that I had been ignoring for the past century anyway.  Vaguely I figured this was my middle age crisis that everyone’s heard about so the timing was perfect.  Nan would dog me at home, ignore me or aggrandize Pepper (from the dance academy) and I would just sink deeper in the funk.  The next day at work, I would sneak a moment with Nicole and my heart, head, nether regions would just light up so incredibly bright.  She gets me.  The dance began.  I felt like I was in a play, a tragedy that would end up horrible, death, destruction, babies, you name it, it was going to be a gory ending.

Nicole wanted me but I had to be free from the shackles of marriage before we consummated any part of our relationship.  Sure.  Anything babe.  I fell down the rabbit hole and thought I was in a Disneyland ride with no end.  I had arrived to the table of love and everything was set out perfectly, just like my mom had taught me so many times.  What I didn’t know was that Nicole was a pathological liar and that wee little trait leaked damage into me in so many other ways that I hadn’t imagined could have been possible.  In the big picture it didn’t really matter.  The point was that the emptiness inside was void of love before, and before, and before and here I thought it would be seeded again with another woman.  Just a woman with a different name, different face, different story.  They were all different but the play was always the same.  In this play I did leave Nan and I did file for divorce.  I wanted out of that crazy marriage, I wanted out of that tragedy that completely blindsided me more than I wanted Nicole.  It was all timing we’re talking about.  The Nicole factor just gave me enough room to not feel what the real issue was.  A lack of spiritual worth.  A valueless, nameless ride in a universe full of beauty that I didn’t have the understanding to see or feel a part of.  She was my defense against the inevitable depression, a possession of material to bind me from the true nature of my malady.  I couldn’t love myself.  The years of conditioning were just too powerful and the women I rode to rid me of that sensation had neither the power nor the patience to see me to my destination.

Depression for me is that there is no meaning in my life.  Not one that I can relate to.  How can I identify with a woman when the woman that raised me bore me into ridiculous displays of inconsistent behaviors?  I was wrong, I would never win an argument, I was the source of her misery, I was the evidence of her life gone wrong.  True, maybe most adults live this same thing, but as a sensitive boy, I was painted completely with her shit and fell for it with an earnestness that I had hoped to please her immensely.  I didn’t find myself out of it as an adult.  I started drinking as a very young man and took to that pleasure as the answer to my misery.  I can just ride this horse and life will be instantly better.  Everything seemed better with booze.  But that’s only temporary and I knew that it wasn’t a real answer.  So I suffered depression between bouts of drinking and vacations in relationships.  I didn’t know how to heal my wound.  I never learned to value, to affirm, to honor the woman I was with because I was far more afraid of what I would soon fuck up to concentrate on those simple basic facts.  I needed a god, a spiritual answer, a magic carpet that would take me to that center of self-value and love and set its dial to peace.  This is enough for now.

1.       I’m grateful that I’m a sponsor today!

2.       I’m grateful that I’ve started riding my bike again.

3.       I’m grateful that I feel hopeful about my physical health and am on the right road.