Every night I skulk past. I can’t look, because if I do, I’ll have to do it. As I move through the kitchen on my way to bed I tap on the top of the dishwasher. Perhaps tomorrow morning, before or after breakfast. Perhaps I’ll unload and reload. Perhaps not.
I drag myself up the small flight of stairs to bed. It’s hard this week, even though that is the only place I want to be. I’m worried. What if I can’t sleep? What if there are voices? The Doctor says the voices are not real, that they are always psychosis regardless of their tone. I don’t believe him.
When I get to the top of the stairs, and through my bedroom door, I look at the floor, clothes, clean and dirty everywhere. The clothes are the same as the dirty dishes, I will get to them tomorrow, I promise myself. I’ve been promising myself this for more than a week.
I pull the covers back and fall into bed. I set my alarm. I set three alarms, I won’t get up to the first one, if I’m honest.
It’s very quiet, I live in the middle of a paddock. I lie, listening. Listening to the quiet. If truth be told, quiet is all I want. You see my brain is muddled.
I keep trying to pull myself out of the quagmire that is this brain mess. ‘I’ll start running,’ I say on Monday. Then, with a thud I realise that my knees would give way beneath me if I ran more than ten steps.
‘I’ll start doing personal training again,’ and so it begins on Thursday, but my brain needs more than the trainer can deliver. I’m older than I was when this used to happen all the time. I have the same luxury of time, (which I don’t think is necessarily a luxury.) I could spend the hours I used to at the gym, relentlessly moving my body, waiting. Waiting for the chemistry to shift and for life to feel ordinary again.
I ‘dance’ under the stars in the garden and stomp up and down the driveway at night, in the darkness, with the stars. I.Must.Keep.Moving. or I will be swallowed up.
On Tuesday I considered ringing my Psychiatrist. I need help.
I don’t ring. I’ve rung before and they all say the same thing, this too shall pass. There’s nothing more that can be done. ‘You’re on the gold standard for bipolar medication,’ he said to me once. Fabulous.
Only a couple of weeks ago I dared to say to someone that I hadn’t been sick for more than a year. ‘Maybe I’ll never get sick again.’ People say that the older one gets, the easier things get with a mental illness. I’m forty five, maybe that’s the magic number when things settle down and one can pack up their bipolar disorder and lock it away I’d even dared to believe recently.
Every night as I fall asleep, I make plans for the following day. They are never complicated. I will stay busy, and try again to start at the beginning of all the things that are important to me.
One of the worst things I find when I am feeling like this, is that there are no tears. My aunt always used to encourage my sister and I to cry when we were sad. I remember one day when we were children, she drove us to school. One of us was sad about something, and Jenya drove us around the block, around the whole of Gundaroo, ‘Just CRY!’ she’d say in her most encouraging voice. To be honest, I can’t remember whether one or the other of us cried, but Jenya sure gave it a heartfelt shot at encouraging those tears.
I want to write, to finish that I am one of the lucky ones. I have things most people dream of, a great family, a partner who I love and who loves me, and really more opportunity than a lot of people ever get in their lives, but this is real. It doesn’t pick people for any particular reason, it just is. It is the unlucky in my life.