To The Manic Depressives I've Loved

There’s a type. There’s always a type.

You have a type. I have a type. We all have types of people we entangle in our lives, that we hold until they’ve beaten us to a pulp, leaving us gasping and brutalized with their passion, hurting but craving for more.

Think about your type.

Do me a favor, write it out, say it out loud. Talk about the ones that draw you near, the ones you can’t ignore, the ones that ignite fire in your life. Ignore eye color and hair and the voices of your closest friends, the lovers that held your breath whenever they touched you.

Tell me about their attitudes, their energy, their loves and hates and everything in between. Was it fast? Was it slow? Is it a quiet and simmering fire or a blazing and passionate inferno?

Until quite recently, I lost count how many people I was close to who had bi-polar disorder. So many friends, associates, and lovers who could soar to the heavens, only to come crashing down later. And I, cruising and racing alongside them, either rising to meet their glory or to rescue them from their demons. I was wanted, loved, hated, and despaired at the same time. I was always felt.

I envied them. I wanted the ability to taste pure, unbridled freedom of joy and the crushing true reality of despair. I wanted to feel.

I have major depressive disorder (MDD), which makes me very, very far from manic. I quietly hyper focus on my work, and have done so since I was a teen. Whether it was taking on an extra shift at the museum, serving on yet another sport team, or agreeing to yet another article when I think I don’t have another slice of energy left. If I’m going to feel anything, I might as well feel exhaustive satisfaction. I am not a compulsive person, getting up in the middle of the night to drive to the ocean and dance on the beach, or to suddenly order drinks for everyone in the bar, only to hook up with the hot bartender in the back of his Honda Civic an hour later.

But I found myself constantly seeking out those who would inspire me to.

You see, my mental illness is not that of the carefree artists or wild partiers. I do not inspire nights of passion or the darkest pits of quiet afternoons. I see things in shades of monotone, MDD refusing to let me rip through to the extreme joys and sorrows of this beautiful, terrible, multicolored world of ours.

So I sought it out, socially.

The people I was closest to in high school were my friends who had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. They wore wild, chopped up sweaters from Goodwill with their boot cut jeans, had little white pills they took with their pasta salad lunch on our school’s Victorian-era quad, and saw expensive therapists in swanky skyscrapers in the South Loop of Chicago. They carried beautiful sketchbooks from Borders, filled with lacey poetry and drawings made on the fly in their hand-sewn satchels, eschewing the fancy knock-off Louis Vuitton purses that most of my wealthy high school class carried. They stole cigarettes from their mothers and shoplifted bracelets for the fun of it. They dated all sorts of boys and girls, and would show me heart wrenching notes from these poor souls who became enmeshed with them, discarded when they found others. I always prayed that I would never know the pain of discard from myself.

Like many a teenaged poser, I modeled myself after these girls and boys too, thinking I too, could become a fun and carefree artist type. I wanted the manic, the light, and the incredible, painful darkness that was guaranteed when the light burned too bright. So, I took part in the same clubs as they did—our high school literary magazine, our local community theater, writing seminars at Columbia College and free sketching classes at the School of the Art Institute downtown. I laughed harder with them then with any of my other friends. Their passions, from Sapphic poetry to obsessive love of Degas and Gaugin, all the trappings of the manic-depressive white girl from wealth, inspired me to write and draw. I always felt my creative juices turn from a small stream to a raging, class V rapid after hanging out with them, spurring me to write until the early hours of the morning on my family's computer in my mother's bedroom.

However, MDD, my dearest Mother Depression, does not like disorder or chaos for her children, and she did not like this concept of manic joy, even if it was paired with her crushing pain and darkness afterwards.

Whimsy is not allowed for Mother Depression's children, and one must sneak creativity around her, less she crush it with her monotone fists of fatigue and exhaustion. Mother Depression is a caring, but cruel, parent, who does not like her children to wander from the safety of their cocoons, where they can be holed up for days on end, seeing and feeling nothing, their brains producing no serotonin for them to even feel the sunshine on their face or the wind in their hair.

Which is why I found myself drawn to the wild types for much of my life, almost all of whom suffered from bi-polar disorder. I am a rebellious child of Mother Depression, a bad girl. I wanted, for many years, to be a feckless artist, a wild dancer in the woods, a fearless child of the universe who wept and laughed with the truest feelings possible. When I could, I hung out and befriended the wild artists, dated them, loved them.

But I’ve been trouble when it comes to relationships. Mother Depression makes her children narrow minded and far sighted, and when we can not climb to the brilliance of mania, we lay down, as if to observe the stars that mania produces, but not feel the heat of their suns. Or the burns that they produce.

When my bi-polar friends and I fought, as we always did, I withdrew. When they reached their lowest pits after days or weeks of mania, I could stand beside them, but I never had the energy to fight them or engage with their pain in the manner that they wished. They would then call me horrible names, tear down my looks, my family, my accomplishments, my weight, my other friends, everything.

Their rage. enflamed from the exhaustion of mania, would be so that I was a shaking ball of tears, wanting to run back into Mother Depression’s arms and hurt myself. Whether it was because I loved them too much to truly hurt them back, or because I cannot give the emotion that my lovers and friends wanted, that helped them fuel the fires that burned so brightly that it nearly destroyed them.

And Mother Depression loves the ground, the earth. It keeps her exhausted children settled. That, despite my fighting against it, was me. Depression made it exhausting to get up and follow wild dreams, and showed the terrifying possibilities of if an artistic career or job fell through, or if someone close to me hurt me in ways that could permanently damage me--whether professionally, personally, or physically. Depression not only kills your creativity, it also kills your courage. It makes you negotiate your dreams, if not destroying them completely.

It sounds sad, and it's taken me years to be able to write and draw again. But Mother Depression's earthbound nature protected me in the long run. Indeed, it was cute when my then-fiancé—the son of a bipolar man who would later be diagnosed with the same mental illness later—and I lived in his 1986 Suburban for a few weeks, in between being kicked out from our house in San Leandro and finding shelter in Eugene shortly afterwards. It was thrilling and exciting to live on the road as a 21 year old, but I can not imagine doing so at 36, my current age. My body and mind could not handle it, no matter how much fun it was.

Unlike many of my friends, who lived on streets and couches and survived to brag about their survival, I knew I could not handle this lifestyle. Mother Depression reminded me how scary and uncertain it was, sprinkling her favorite spice into my mental meals—anxiety. Anxiety about the future and the world is one of Mother Depression's many ways she keeps her children from running away from her.

Indeed, when the same boyfriend pressured me to give up my full ride to graduate school to follow his bohemian lifestyle to Alaska, I ended our relationship right there and then. He was the last person with bi-polar disorder I truly loved. Sometimes, I look him up, or hear stories from friends. He's been arrested for mailing letters written in crayon to sheriff's offices across the Pacific Northwest. He's watched his farm catch fire, and still sleeps in that van somewhere in Northern California, smug in his freedom amongst the Redwoods, even if his world is on fire.

Mother Depression refused to let that happen to me. I no longer have the redwoods, the freedom, the wild untethered life of traveling on the road. But I do have other, easier to obtain gifts I stole when she wasn't looking.

Indeed, her guidance has had magnificent benefits, by telling me to stay close to the ground. I'm writing in a house I own, with my husband playing on his expensive computers behind me, and our daughters asleep in their prettily decorated bedrooms upstairs. My girls have a secure, normal routine that my former loves would have openly mocked. I will do everything in my power for my daughters to know that their parents' moods are not wrought and manic, and that the things that they love will not be smashed or sold out of a wild, mood-driven rage, as I have seen my former friends do.

There are many times I miss them all. I miss the sketchbooks, the fights, the laughter, the wild chases, the long nights, the ever loving feeling of being flightless. I do not think I would have the ability to be creative, should I have not entangled myself with so many manically beautiful people. But I am too exhausted to keep up, especially as my body ages, stressed from life and love with Mother Depression.

I’m a tortoise, making plans, keeping things organized, somewhat envious of the hares I knew and adored, who sped through creativity and talent only to crash, waiting for me to make my way to them to help. Eventually, this tortoise found her way back to the safety of her desert, munching on cacti and living her life.

But that tortoise, it still sometimes watches the hares, wild and free, live their dangerous lives, and feels a pang of envy.