Manic and Depressed — An Existential Window into the Mind of Madness
I need to be in the hospital but I’m not fuckin’ going
I hate my life. I hate where I live. I hate that I can never get ahead. I hate everything.
My psychiatrist says I have dissociated. I am not me right now. He said he did not recognize me or my voice. He said he has never seen this happen so severely in me before and so now I likely have a new and frightening diagnosis to add to my resume of mental illness — Dissociative Identity Disorder.
My affect is flat. My normal personality has checked out. I am now some dark, disturbed version of who I really am who hates hates hates I don’t give two fucks about anything, stop talking and telling me where to sign the admitting paperwork to the psych ward cuz I ain’t fuckin’ going and you can’t make me because there’s no M1 hold on me so fuck the fuck off.
My psychiatrist gave me until next Monday to think about admitting myself to the hospital. Yeah, let me just get right on that for you, it sounds real fuckin’ fun.
My true self has no hate for anything or anyone. I am told that I am one of the most kindhearted, giving, nurturing and loving persons on the planet.
Not today though.
And not yesterday.
And most likely not tomorrow either.
I am the antithesis of Kari. I don’t know where Kari went but she hasn’t shown up for a few days now. My brain has fractured into millions of pieces, and I cannot put them back together no matter how hard I try. My hands shake as I type because of the medications I am on that don’t always keep my brain from splintering into madness. And just why do I take these pills again? I don’t even know why this is happening, can someone tell me why my 155 IQ brain is doing this shit to me? Like, can my worthless IQ ever work in my favor? Fuck.
I am hearing voices. They tell me to walk into oncoming traffic. They tell me to get the fuck out. Get the fuck out of where? And go where once I get the fuck out? The last shred of logic I possess poses these questions. Kari did get the fuck out. I have no idea where she went. I don’t have the energy, I don’t even care to try and get her back. She has slipped away into some ethereal and elusive other-world where she keeps her nascent, innocent, traumatized inner-child safe from the ongoing chaos and trauma of her life.
I hate that I have thyroid disease. I fucking hate that it made all my beautiful hair fall out. I hate that I also have thyroid eye disease and that it’s making my eyes bug out like a goddamned freak. I hate that I am fat and batshit bonkers from the steroid they made me take for the thyroid disease. I hate that I am poor and that I depend upon benefits just to survive from one day to the next. I haaaaaaate that the most because if they ever decide to take my benefits away I will be homeless, starving and insane from not having my medications paid for by the state anymore. I hate that the state has to pay for my meds, which by the way total about 2500 a month. Yeah! Does that fucking piss you off? Do you hate that as much as I do? To press a pill into its solid form costs about a dollar. To use the press (media) for a pill costs millions.
I HATE THIS. IT’S SO FUCKING BACKWARDS, LIKE WHO IS RUNNING THE SHOW HERE?? HOW DID WE GET HERE IN THIS BACKWARDS-UPSIDE DOWN-PARALLEL-UNIVERSE WHERE MONEY TALKS AND HUMANITY HAS WALKED RIGHT OUT INTO THE BLEAK NOTHINGNESS, LEAVING US MORALLY BANKRUPT AND DEVOID OF ANY ABILITY TO FURTHER BEHAVE HUMANELY TOWARDS EACH OTHER AS A SOCIETY?
My god is it any wonder I swallow pills all day long just to have some semblance of functioning as a “normal” human being… and fuck your normal, I hate that too. Maybe I am the normal one, and the rest of you are the ones with something wrong with you.
I hate that I am stuck in America’s system of modern-day slavery, where I am rewarded (enslaved) with benefits if I don’t work, but they are stripped away once I start making somewhere in the neighborhood of nine bucks an hour for twenty hours a week. Who the fuck can live on that and pay rent and buy food and pay for 2500-dollar-a-month meds that keep me sane (sort of) — you do realize that nine dollars an hour, twenty hours a week is only ONE-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS A WEEK right??!! You strip me of my medicaid and food stamps once I start making $180 a week? Where is the fucking incentive to even work?? (In case you didn't know, this is the enslavement part.) How the fuck would I even be able to afford my meds?! My meds alone are an entire rent payment!! I hate that I have to depend on anyone to pay rent for my mind. I wish I wasn’t stuck in this cycle and that I could do it myself. You don’t get to rent space in my mind. Oh wait, yeah you do because you pay my rent bill every month. See how I’m enslaved to the establishment…
I hate you for keeping me and millions of others as slaves to your elitist-exploitative-economic debt bondage-military, medical, sports, prison, and white-savior industrial complexes. How do you fucking people sleep at night? And in addition to your industrial complexes you STILL want to take away what little I even have? I ask you sirs and ladies, how do you sleep at night?
CAVEAT: well they are all rank-and-file-bought-and-paid for Kari my dear, they have their greasy little hands in Big Pharma’s back pocket, so they sleep just fine, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it! They’ve got limitless kickbacks of free Ambien and Lunesta to help them sleep (wink, wink ;)
EXAMPLE: people (me) borrow money — SO THAT THEY CAN SURVIVE (aka feed starving children) — that they cannot repay, and are then required to work to pay off the debt, which in turn creates loss of control over the conditions of both their employment and the debt.
**Do not for one second think that I am not grateful. Regular Kari (that’s a dumb reference but I don’t know what else to call her right now) is grateful and humbled that the state is keeping her a healthy (sort of) and sane (kind of) individual. Regular Kari volunteers and gives back to her community as way to say thank you for the help she receives from the state. Regular Kari does not believe in receiving free benefits and doing nothing in return for it. She believes in giving back as much as she can.
But she’s not here right now, there’s a bipolar bananas manic-depressed party in my brain. It’s a mixed-state going haywire. Mixed states are the hardest to treat because the person is both up and down. What a shit show. There are a million neurons firing every second go go go yes go higher JUMP! Oh, shit. That’s just the voices saying that. I hate that I have mental illness. I hate that I can’t feel anything right now, I’m about to cut like the cutters do just so I can fucking feel something. Maybe I’ll jump, sigh. Meh. Jumping is messy. And so is cutting.
I hate that I cannot let go of a long-lost lover who vacillates between being my OTT (one true thing) and my futile battle to cling to a love that is only present when he is present. But he is not present most of the time, so I am only setting myself up for failure. And still, I binge on this fantasy because it temporarily makes me feel better, feel something, but I probably shouldn’t.
I hate that I purged my dinner last night. I’m not supposed to be doing that. I lied to my psychiatrist and said I’m not purging anymore.
I purge the wrong things, and I binge on the wrong things. Why do I do this? Thank you bipolar, borderline personality, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorder, and alcoholism for my inability to purge the charred, toxic wasteland of my life. Oh, and now I can thank dissociating too. I have dissociated into someone I don’t recognize. In therapy my therapist and I named her Karen. Karen is out to play, Kari is just out. She got the fuck out somewhere to protect herself from Karen. Maybe the voices know something I don’t about protecting the inner me that is fragile and helpless.
The voice in my writing has changed. The tone is nefarious and futile. I know. I’m sorry. It’s Karen.
I’ll go to the mental hospital on Monday. We’ve got to get Karen tucked safely away back into her dusty, cobweb-covered corner of Kari’s mind. Then I can get Kari back. I like Kari a lot better than I like Karen.
Kari is sober for 129 days today. It’s not all bad. I’ve still got some wits about me. I’m still here, somewhere, fighting to get back control of my splintered mind. Hospital it is, sigh. Welcome to groups and art therapy and smoke breaks and the med line to get our pretty little pills and Nurse Ratchet and grey scrubs that make me feel like a locked-up criminal. Okay, there’s no Nurse Ratchet anymore, staff is pretty cool. I mean shit, they deal with people like me all day. Gotta love those folks for what they do. I’ll go.
