Io non piangea, si` dentro impetrai.
-Inferno, Canto 33
It is 3:40 AM, the witching hour, and my being awake cannot be a good sign.
Of course, I have been awake at this hour every day for quite some time now. Maybe wanting to get up and write is a good sign.
Things here are, well, empty. I suppose it is a depression of sorts, though fortunately like the ones I suffered as a child and teenager, before the “manic” part was added to the title. It is much more bearable, at least on the surface, than the episodes I have suffered in the last few years, because I am just quiet and still and numb. No racing mind or body torturing me with horrible thoughts that come faster than any human was meant to think. If I didn’t have the practicalities of running a life to worry about and could just crawl into bed until it goes away, it wouldn’t be bad at all.
It is strange how it has come full circle, taken me right back to where I started. It does remind me of that time when I was 12 and my mind broke for the first time, for seemingly no reason. It is familiar, if not comfortably so, ha ha. It makes me a little nostalgic for that time, when I thought that the worst that could happen, crazy-wise, was the need to crawl into bed for months. Before I knew what could really happen, all the ways a mind can burn and break that I know now.
It does get better throughout the day, and by evening I am almost normal. Unfortunately, 9 PM is not the best time to apply for jobs or deal with the mundane details of life. Every night I go to bed thinking of what I will do first thing in the morning, the interview I will schedule, the tax papers I have been avoiding (two forms, that’s it, two forms!) for months.
And then morning rolls around at 3:30, and I am numb and frozen and terrified again and nothing gets done.
I have not worked in four months. All solid job offers are shift work, night work, in busy, miserable emergencies for minimal pay. Seeing as that is what made me so crazy over the last few years, I have not accepted any of them. I don’t want the responsibility of not missing a heart attack for $5 of pay. It makes me physically ill to think about going back to medicine.
I wrote before that it wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t trying to keep up with life, but I am not sure that that is entirely accurate. I woke at this atramental hour, and beyond the dampened terror of my bank balance, the horror at the thought of returning to the repugnant job that is the only one I am qualified for, a little voice dared to run through my head and say the one thing that I have not allowed myself to think: “Your hope is all gone,” the voice intonated. “Your mind will not work again. This is what you are now.”
I miss very much the streams of words that used to race through my mind, needing to be caught on paper before they got away. I miss writing, which used to be an automatic and unconscious activity. Whatever force I used to channel, whatever it was in the universe that fed me the words, has left. I have been alone, without even the words that I could always count on to come, unbidden. I try to force myself now to write, but I sit and try to think of words. I have to choose them, and they are never quite as right as the ones that come from without. I never used to “have to” make myself write. The words used to just come, words and phrases and alliterations and allusions would streak through my head, unannounced and at odd times, often surprising me and making me laugh or smile at their unexpectedness. All I ever had to do was appreciate them, and transcribe them, and be thankful for the electricity that ran through me when they were flowing, the sense of pure purpose, that this is what I had been put on this planet to do.
But whatever consciousness it was in the universe must have moved on, found another emissary or oracle.
Not only the words are gone. The more primal, wordless passions, the pathos and exultations of life, are muted into nonexistence. For months now, I have been walking around on the verge of weeping, with tears in my eyes that obstinately refuse to fall. I think that if I could weep, something might shift, maybe for the better, maybe not, but at least there would be motion.
I don’t understand where those tears are coming from, why they are so firmly fixed behind my eyes. Maybe when my muse left, someone else’s tragedy mistakenly got into the void left in my eyes, and I, having picked up the narrative in the middle, cannot identify the nature of the misfortune, and thus, cannot weep for it. I have no reason to be sad now (unless I think of the countless broken bodies and broken lives that surrounded me and sometimes touched me over the last years). So I am not sad. Just numb.
The lack of hope – another entity that has left me: something in my head keeps whispering, maybe this is it…this is the best you will ever be. Sometimes I wish that the “maybe” would disappear. If I were to be sure, I could figure out how to arrange some kind of half-existence around what is left. But as long as there is still a memory of how I used to be (abstractly, anyway – I cannot channel how I felt when I was alive and ready to do anything and conquer the world, but I can picture my younger self smiling and full of energy, doing things, doing everything), there is that little last bit that keeps me waiting, as the song says, busco un mejor momento. In some ways, this keeps me from playing the hand I have been dealt. I am always waiting for the next deal.
For my own record, since I do record this shit, I just saw a new shrink. It was horrific and humiliating, as usual, but no worse than most new shrink appointments. The decision was to raise the bupropion, give that two weeks, and if it isn’t enough, add valproate. I have a hard time seeing much logic in this; it seems to me that the last thing I need now is a drug that will slow me down or make me stupider. But I suppose I have nothing to lose (except my hair and my hormonal balance and my lack of diabetes and any potentially normal fetus I may someday conceive), so I’ll try. Mostly because I don’t want to be that patient on the very first meeting with a new shrink.
And things have undoubtedly improved ever since getting out of the miasma that was the previous shrink. I miss him, maybe, as a person, and on some level I think I like him more than this new one, but I cannot ignore the overwhelming experiential evidence that it was bad for me, and there were too many lapses in professionalism to ignore (see “refusing to release records”).
Sometimes, though, in these tenebrous hours, his words still haunt me: accusations he made, (mis)interpretations of things I did or said that nonetheless were hurtful. The insinuations from someone I trusted that something is so wrong with me that it is a miracle I function, and that I will never be “normal” without serious interventions, which apparently have not yet been invented.
For these reasons, even though it is all I think about almost every day, I am trying to avoid anything psychological or mental health related. When I am away from the whole paradigm, I’m just a flawed person, no more or less than anybody else. When I let them near me, I become an amalgam of pathologies and brokenness. Sometimes I wish I never had gone to any doctor. Then, I would have just been eccentric, or emotional, or melancholic, or even just plain crazy.
I have to remind myself that I don’t even believe in their system of belief, that people lived for thousands of years without shrinks, that 99% of the world’s population has never even heard of their concepts. I try to remember who I was before I ended up so entangled with this bullshit system. I was a person. I wasn’t perfect but I was alive and I did things and knew people and sometimes felt something.
Somehow, all of that has disappeared, and all I can think about are all of the words that have been used by the priests of this odd religion to judge my essential being. I do not believe in their religion, yet somehow, their damnation of my many sins, that they delineate in the clinical terminology of their liturgy (affective instability, noncompliance, Melancholia, Mania, narcissism, Cyparissusism, Axis I, II, III, x, y, z, the asymptote of mood-personality-behavior), haunts me.
I don’t know why I cannot break the hold this farcical cult and its practitioners have on me. I suppose it is my version of the person who doesn’t really believe in God anymore, yet somewhere deep down, is too frightened by the spectacle and rhetoric of the fundamentalist hellfire to actually get up and leave the pew.
And so…back to the title quotation. I feel that underneath the conspicous anodynia, there is a well of misery hiding. Hell, it keeps trying to creep out through my eyes. I can’t help suspecting that the underlying pain is for all that I have seen over the last few years and all the people I have lost. I would drain the well, cry profusely and feel deeply, if I only knew how to reach the stygian waters.
But it is too late. So many years of having wept not, I both created and became the adamantine stone.