Brume.

I recently finished reading The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing up Bipolar by Terri Cheney. Though I read An Unquiet Mind shortly after my diagnosis, reading the remembered perspective of a child felt important. It might help me address a few of the questions that are so dense in my mind that I can only decode some of them.

• When did I "become" bipolar? 
• Did I have the disorder before the actual onset? 
• When was the onset? 
• Was I born with this or only with the tendency or possibility? 
• Can my diagnosis explain any of the childhood experiences that I've only recently begun to recognize as strange? 

But that isn't what I'm going to write about now. One of the most fascinating aspects of Cheney's book was that, even at age seven, she referred to her experience of bipolar disorder as "The Black Beast." This surprised me because I'd never thought of it as a separate entity, as something that pushed me or taunted me, as something whose appetites I had to endure or satiate.

But I've since realized that this is much more accurate than I thought. I think in part, I'm beginning to separate myself from the disease. Of course, that's difficult, confusing, nearly impossible...because the disease is me. It is a part of me, and it colors who I am and every aspect of my life. It always has. That's part of why I find myself trying to re-frame every memory, every trait, as it returns to me.

But. Something shouted numbers at me in 10th grade math class. Something was desperate to do, find, grasp what I didn't even think I wanted. Something pointed out my enemies. Something made me struggle to act appropriately. Something also made me stronger, braver, more competent, and more confident than I ever would have been alone.

I think of my brain and my mind separately. I first thought this way when I began to realize that medication was not going to heal me; medication might help fix my brain, but it wouldn't help fix my mind. The disorder lives in my brain. My mind usually lives there too, so my mind is damaged. I don't know how I'll ever untangle it. The body is involved too, and of course, it's directly under the brain's influence. I can't necessarily trust the body to tell me the truth or to help me.

So. Bipolar disorder does not seem like an animal or a person, even another version of myself. It's not that clear and concrete. It's only recently taken any real shape at all. Maybe it will solidify eventually. For now, though, it's fog.  A fog. The fog. Sometimes, it's thick and choking and ghostly. Anything could be in it. It keeps me from seeing and concentrating. It throws me off course. It subdues me. Depression is a traditional fog.

Other times, it's the kind of fog from a fog machine. It makes everything more dramatic and exciting. It can have the perfect lights or pyrotechnics in it. It's fantastic, really, like a fantasy. But then, it can become too much. The strange fog machine smell is overpowering. The fog is full of neon flashes, strobe effects, dissonant music. No clear air exists, and the fog itself seems laced with heart-pounding, head-spinning drugs. Mania is gorgeous and then horrific, and I trample myself trying to escape it. The doors are locked.

And sometimes, I don't know where I am. The fog spills off a black-lacquered stage in the middle of an ice-crisp field. It all happens at once, or it switches rapidly. This is the mixed state, or the state with mixed features, which is where I think I spend most of my time.

It's not particularly original. But I always find names comforting or validating. I needed a name, a technical term, for how others categorize what happens to me. And I need my own name for the changes, the ambushes. Okay. Fog...or maybe the literary version, brume. Naming something is the first step to defeating it. Or to loving it.