Wonderfully Pink Objects.

I think I've been underestimating Pink. Audrey Hepburn believed in it! Color is so important to my mood and level of engagement. Monochromatic displays, ads, and search results calm me and seem to turn on a light when my mind is dark. So I'm going to try to take more notice of pink.

• My lithium and Abilify--both are pink pills. They are probably making me overweight, but they are also probably keeping me alive.
• My pink and white sparkling eyeshadow quartet, Pixie, from Hard Candy.
• The light pink lining of my big Cinderella (live action) purse.
• Pink "for her" pens by Bic. They're just so pretty.
• The pink notepad with gold polka dots along the top: home of my endless to-do list.
• My big, 1-liter, pink water bottle.
• The pale pink zipper on the fairy pouch my mom made for me.
• Sparkling pink Stardust pens.
• Mrs. Grossman's pink palace stickers. 
• The pink blanket I sleep with every night. 
• My pink ballerina fairy in our bathroom.
• Our pink towels with white polka dots.
• The pink cupcakes on the dishtowel.
• My hot pink T-shirt that says, "Fairy Tales Come True."
• Pink jellyfish. Behind glass, they fascinate and soothe me.
• My big pink and gray hoodie from Queens.
• Pink envelopes for quick letters.

A Perfect Day.

Okay, this is just one version of perfect! I can think of many more.

Mom and Shane come over early and take Oliver to a park. Josh and I would marvel at our being alone in our house. Normally, this happens for, perhaps, 3 hours a week. We decide not to use the time for sleep. But we stay in our room and talk and make each other laugh, which we can do well.

We eat cinnamon rolls from a can. We shower and put on clean pajamas. I have no trouble remembering to take my meds, we all have the meds we need, and no shadow figures blink by the corners of my vision. I watch Josh play some of an RPG.

Oliver comes back, and we all snuggle for a while. Josh sends me to the guest room and my chaise where I read an entire book (a short one) and two whole magazines. The boys go out and return with Panera. I go through my story ideas and run with one. I have a first draft in a couple of hours, and both of my first readers (Josh and Bruce) love it.

We watch a family movie and get all the way through it. Josh starts a fire in the fireplace and take Oliver to bed. I scribble near the hearth and am almost asleep when Josh comes back to give me a massage and tickles.

A Bipolar Body.

My bipolar body is mine, and my experience won’t match that of others. But bipolar disorder is a physical experience as well as a mental and emotional one, and the medications dissolving in that body leave their own calling cards. One of my greatest frustrations with BSD is my inability to distinguish symptoms of the disease from side effects of the medication.

I’ve almost always been pretty thin. My Irish Dance legs were too muscular for me to really be slender. A few years ago, I got to the point of accepting that I would never really be thin below the waist. But lithium and probably Abilify (along with a pretty serious case of self-medicating with Dr. Pepper, I’m guessing) have, in the last two years or so, bestowed 40 pounds upon me. It’s shocking. It’s a shock every day. I apologize to Josh; I don’t look like the creative writing major wearing size 3 LEI jeans. He always finds something kind to say. So far, diet changes and exercise don’t seem to be helping.

I blame another problem on Abilify because—well, the timing seems right, and my psychiatrist thought it was likely. But it could be something else. A mania doorbell ring perhaps. My whole body nearly screams with burning tension. It feels lie fire ants in my bone marrow. I can’t reach them. I stretch compulsively, constantly, trying to escape it. But another medication, benztropine, almost completely took all that away. Thank God. Something that really works! But I’m not crazy about having to stack medications to cure side effects.

When mania is coming on, manifesting itself quickly, I feel burning and shuddering in my arms and legs. The light changes, becomes more fluorescent. Things look different—did they change the wallpaper? I move more—more tapping, more gestures, more looking around. My eyes seem to bounce. I sit forward, ready. Thoughts come stacked 3, 4, 5 deep. When I try to address them, they unravel and speed away. I want to talk. I need to talk. I trip over words. I use the wrong words. I lose ideas, unsure if they were brilliance or crap. I don’t have to sleep as much.

The beginning of mania, or hypomania, can be so empowering. But mania intensifies. Visions engulf me, usually terrible tragedies that my brain thinks it must work though in simulation. How would I get my family out of a burning car? The images don’t stop until I’ve figured out what to do. My brain seems to be shredding itself. Something compulsive like shopping can numb me a little, for a while. Only sleep seems to help me in the moment. I think my brain uses my sleep to heal, layer by layer of frozen or torched consciousness.

I used to experience something like temporary partial paralysis. I call it the Tin Man. I lose the ability to move, even to turn my head, rearrange my limbs, ask for help. People close to me have noticed. Luckily, this hasn’t happen for a long time.

Even in important situations like a meeting about my son, sometimes, my body and a lot of my mind just check out. It’s like the frustration of a computer restarting because of updates you know nothing about. My mind is stressed, so the body takes over and turns the volume way down.

I’m clumsy. I trip. I walk into walls and corners. I get dizzy. I have trouble with physical multi-tasking like walking and talking at once. A few months ago, I fell hard outside Dean and Deluca.

When I was on a high dose of lithium, I threw up almost every night. Even now that I’ve been on a lower dose for about 2 years, I still randomly throw up about once a month. Why does the body want to get rid of the medicine? The disease is smart, smarter than I am sometimes.

Depression makes me feel sluggish in every way. The part of myself that wants to go live, to do what I love, is in a dungeon, and I can barely hear her. Tin Man happens sometimes. I feel that I’m worthless, that I don’t belong, that I’m all wrong for my family and everything else. Thoughts float by, some about self-harm, splicing images between ordinary thoughts. Sometimes, I get scared. My face is vacant. Josh calls it the thousand-mile stare. The depressed bipolar body could sleep for days. It’s trying so hard to get better. But it’s like lying on my back in a swamp. Even if I get up and get out, I’ll still have to remember who I am and find my way back home.

I take 6 different medications to be stable. They don’t save me from everything, and they sometimes make me exhausted or make me throw up, but I know I have to stay committed to them.  I have to do all I can for the body and the brain.