Story/Life

This is a story, a story that is difficult to tell. It’s about man, a woman, two children—a girl age 9—a boy age 6 ½. It’s about how this man and this woman came to each other, came to love one another, came to have children they loved and adored as deep as deep can be.

It’s about how this man and this woman eventually grew apart, even while living in the same house and then living in separate houses.

                It’s a story too true and too hard to capture in mere words and sentences. It’s a story about loss and grief. It’s a story about mental illness.

               This story is about understanding too late and tremendous guilt. It’s about sorrow and sorrys that again and again amount to nothing. It’s about apart and endings that never end.

This is a story about a man who was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder in his third decade but never accepted it. Didn’t trust doctors, didn’t believe their opinions and tests. A man who walked away from this diagnosis mostly because he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand.

It’s about a man who pretended that he was above mental illness. Who didn’t want to accept it. Who believed that a mental illness was just another failure in his life.

This is about the same man who hid behind the facade of self-medicating. Who became an addict. Who realized too late that he needed help.

It’s about a man who, while getting help, finally accepted his damaged life, accepted his addiction and left it behind. A man who realized how many years he had lost and how many people he had hurt.

This is a story about a man and fear. A man whose beaten up childhood left wounds too long untreated and not understood for too many decades. Scars that may never truly heal but make sense in his life and actions.

A man who took the legacy of parenting left to him and turned it 180 degrees. A man who became so worried and convinced in dark nightmares that he would visit the same experiences of his childhood on his children that he scattered. Thought that no father was better than the father he grew up with.

This story is about a man who out of love so wondrous and fulfilling—a love he was convinced didn’t exist—turned his back on the only truly good thing he had added to this world. A man who knows today he paid an enormous price in the delusion of protecting his children. Who wishes he could reshape time, take what he knows now about his difficult journey, diminished self-esteem to the moment he decided that the only option was to leave.

This is a story about a man who dearly loves his children and regrets to the marrow of bones any hurt he has caused them. Whose fear of life drove him away from a potentially beautiful life.

A man who ran as a sacrifice to his children, who didn’t comprehend the cogs and gears of his mind, how it differed because of a disease. A man who for many years was cast away, floating on an empty sea.

This is a story about a man and failure. This is about a man gone, a woman strong, two children—a girl now 17—a boy now 15. About the passage of time and how the man looks at clocks but knows he can never go back.

This story is true.

Finding My Life

Hold my life until I’m ready to use it.

Hold my life because I just might lose it.

I want you to hold my life.

                                                                        The Replacements

Another song. Lyrics from The Replacements, a band much loved, that first captivated me a few decades ago. Words that have taken a reflective, more profound, meaning to me today.

I look back. I think about how different my life might have been if someone recognized that something wasn’t going right for me early on.

The periods of isolation. Painting my bedroom completely black. Periods of elation. Staying out for days without a word. The swing between these opposites.

I ask myself why someone didn’t reach out to me in my early teens. I had already begun habitually self-medicating. I found the comfort or numbness of alcohol, drugs – any escape. I suppose that I still was doing well in school and that was enough.

What if someone had reached out, put their arms around me, held on tight to my life, found the medical care I needed. Literally, took control of my life until I was able to take control.

I look back and I don’t have any answers that satisfy.

My family was, to be kind, dysfunctional. I inherited a history of substance abuse and under-the-rug mental illness. A story told in perceived wrongs, open psychological wounds, hardened grudges, shifting alliances, spoken and physical abuse and secrets that ate away at the core of my relatives.

Secrets deeply rooted long before I was born. Secrets I never understood.  Secrets I lived by osmosis.

What do I think now? Everyone was so consumed with their own lives and demons that no one could or bothered to see my own difficulties. As a teenager, I learned what it was like to be ignored; it became normal. In my twenties I turned my back on my family and moved thousands of kilometres away.

No plans just distance. Just self-preservation.

It’s hard to listen to this song. Still I do because it resonates so powerfully. I remember the ache of loneliness and know it’s behind me.

Hold my life. Now I accept, after many years, no one was to do this, to help.

I just might lose it. I did lose it, lost myself. I believed it was gone and not worth searching for.

But I found my life, in spite of myself. Yes, it’s still difficult, but it’s mine. I think I cherish it. I think I’ve grown up finally.

And I’m grateful. Survival brings its own comforts, happiness and rewards.

Bipolar Relationships

We who have bipolar disorder know very well the types of strains, stresses and absolute fractures it can have on relationships, particularly our spouses and children. It’s understandable and sad. They see the best and the worst. The live with erratic behaviour, on both ends of the pendulum. Until we have a reasonable treatment established, they don’t know who might be coming downstairs to the breakfast table each morning.

And too often, they leave. While this isn’t meant to be my personal story, I’ll tell that later, in my experience it isn’t a lack of love or compassion, but a real need to protect young children and find some stability. I don’t judge this and I suppose I accept it.

A website that I find very informative is called PsychCentral. It covers a wide range of mental health issues with experts and reliable information. This is an article I came across about the issue of how spouses handle a bipolar husband or wife. I encourage you to take some time to read it.

http://psychcentral.com/ask-the-therapist/2006/03/28/wife-diagnosed-with-bipolar-and-filing-for-divorce/