Inside & Out of My Mind

Letters to Bipolar Disorder...

 

Dear Middleground,

 

I wish you were here.  There is none of the stability between the hallucinations and the blackness, nothing that these textbooks claim that I might have for months or even years at a time.

 

I am quick-cycling. Darting through traffic, feeling invincible. Darting into traffic, hoping for a bus to flatten me. I am quick-cycling bipolar disorder with a boyfriend who can’t live in the real world and a world that tears me to pieces. I am quick-cycling. I am forever cycling.

 

I pop the pills which they assure me are working. I refuse to have anything that will make me gain weight; the eating disorder that still shrieks at me forbids me to try them, so I’m left with the anti-epileptic they assume me will work someday soon, despite the highest dose my body can handle surging through my body for the past two years.

They tell me I’m being melodramatic.

 

I ask them to explain my hospital bracelets, and why, at 21, my CV looks like a list of dead-ends because of the amount of times this has ruined me.

I ask them to make it stop.

 

They look at me with pitying eyes.

 

Dear middleground,

please exist.

 

 

 

 

Dear Depression,

 

I thought nothing was worse than your visits to me, but I’ve found that worse than that is watching you tear apart the man I love. 

 

I do not recognise him anymore. He told me that if I felt like I was just in a cycle of living until overdosing I should complete the job. The man who held me while I cried over eating a bite of cake and bought me flowers when he visited when I lived away from him is turning into someone who leaves me in a crying mess in the shower. I don’t know what to do anymore. My happy man has stopped smiling. The arms that have held me for two years are pushing me away. Instead of asking for cuddles at night, he recoils when I touch him.

 

You are stealing him from me. He is not yours, I am only a small girl trying to be a woman and I’m not strong enough to fight you; I need you to let him go. I’m afraid that if you have him too long, he’ll forget how to come back. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which one of us is sinking faster; him in his ship or me in the quicksand.

 

I’m tired of crying in the shower instead of making him breakfast. I’m tired of coaxing him out of bed instead of walking in the cold winter sun with him. Please don’t keep him long. Please let him come home. 

 

Last night we watched a film, and I lay with my head on his chest, cuddled up into the side of him while his arm rested on my body. I pretended he was holding me like he did before his depression hit; I closed my eyes, let the fallacy sink in, felt the ghost of him become real before we had to turn on the light to see the tears in his eyes. I am caring for him with the subtle worry that he will never come back from you; it’s been so long since we had a week where we smiled when we woke up in the morning looking at each other lying in the sun. 

 

This isn’t going to be a long letter. I just need you to know that he deserves to feel hope again. He deserves for you to let him go so that he can breathe freely, just for a few months, just give him more time before you barricade the front door and force yourself into our home. He is my home, and you are wearing him thin. The walls are cracking. The foundations rattle; the sobbing makes them shake through the storm. He is my home, and you are taking him from me.

 

This isn’t going to be a long letter. You just need to know that he is worth more than you.

 

 

 

Dear Depression,

 

I have lost myself somewhere and I don’t know where you’ve hidden me. I haven’t washed in a week. I haven’t left my bed in two days. Nobody has words for this. Everyone asks how I am, asks if I’m doing okay. They want to know if I’m alive. I let them know I’m still breathing.

 

 

 

Dear Mania,

 

Please come visit soon.

 

I know this is a terrible thing to ask, but I need to feel invincible again, before I give in to this feel of being hanging to life by a thread.

 

Let me feel strong before the storm. Let me have sleepless nights that stem creativity and productivity. Let me feel for a moment than I am more than just an empty shell. Let me feel like the lunatic that I am.

 

I’ve only held your hand once, briefly, for fleeting days until I felt the crash of reality as I fell back to earth, but God what I’d give for just those moments of breathlessness.

 

 

By Michelle