Cycles: Not This Again

It’s Sunday evening, and my son has just pulled out of the driveway after spending the weekend with me. I know what comes next and I think, no, not again, as I stand on the precipice of despair, this black hole of a feeling that he will never return, a reminiscence and result of his father’s threats to take my children and not let me see them ever again. Then I remind myself of the turning of the earth and that twice a month my son still comes and, as he is cusping adulthood at the age of 18, he has a say as to when he sees me again, like my adult daughter who comes when she wants to now — and I WILL see him again. I sit on the porch steps and think of the next day ahead.

And I realize.

Tomorrow is Monday.

Tomorrow is the end of the weekend, when I begin the work day again, when the cycle of waking and coffee and business attire and traffic all begin again. The week is a cycle that turns back in on itself — the days of the week repeat, if not the actual days themselves, in a never-ending daze of regularity.

And I realize.

Life is set of cycles.

Cycles of circular spirals set in on themselves in an uneven fractalized mess in which we ritualistically create our routines to have an artificial sense of order.

Each day is a cycle. In the morning, I push myself to get up to get going, to face the daylight, to face my to-do list, to face the work, the chores, the meetings, the energy needed to get to the setting of the sun until a new day comes — another rising of the sun. A cycle.

Each week is a cycle. I get through the days of work, the cooking of meals, the weekly meetings, the phone calls to my parents and daughter, to rest and get cleaning and writing and sketching done during the weekends. My son comes every other weekend, Fridays I go to his football games. Each work week leads to the weekend, each weekend leads to a Sunday night where I sit on the porch steps and think, not again, because tomorrow is another workday and it starts all over again.

Each set of seasons is a cycle. I have more energy in the summer, so when autumn rolls around and I stop doing things I love, start having to push myself to go to the library, not wanting to go on my walks, as the sun comes up later and goes down sooner, I think, not this again, and I get out my therapy light and prepare myself for the lack of energy and talk to my doctor and call my support team more and forgive myself in the cold months for not getting as much done — because spring will come again. It is a cycle.

And through these cycles, as they become hard to bear and at times seem boring or overbearing and I wonder if I can hold out any longer, wonder if I can stand it one more cycle, if I have the energy to make it through the loop of one more spiral — I wonder at the point of keeping up with the routines. I wonder why I go around and around, why I dizzy myself with the mundanity of the boring everyday life to hold on for another everyday life that wakes me in the next cycle.

And I remember.

I have bipolar.

My mania is the absence of these cycles, the absence of routines. It is the breakdown of reliability, when entropy rules and chaos reigns. I stop sleeping every night, stop eating. I miss work and busy myself with benign activities until the point of collapse, when catatonia takes over. Psychosis creates false realities, and relationships break down.

I remember.

Then the routines, the getting up and the therapy light and the medication and the work every day and the regular meals and the chores and the cat and the meetings don’t seem too mundane. They have meaning. My cycles have a direction, the spiral slows down to an ellipsis created consciously by nature so that I can live authentically and capably, can reach each sunrise and spring, each Sunday night and Monday morning with a sense of purpose.

Yes, life is a set of cycles, and, yes, there are times these cycles seem to dizzy me. But it is these times I slow the spiral enough to appreciate the continuity of it all, ease the spinning to see the pattern and revel in the beauty that is brought on my the everyday of it all, the small wakings and comings and goings, the connections and mergings, the fact that in this insertion of myself with the world around me, I am becoming a part of it.

10–19–21

Tansy Julie Soaring Eagle Paschold