It is hard to live with, love someone with all your heart and grow up with someone who lives in such close proximity to you who suffers from this illness. When you are a child your own moods, your private thoughts make you resilient, make you bounce back consistently from things that trouble you, strengthen you from the inside out, and make your realize that facing this illness demands sacrifice on your part no matter what age you are.
You cannot discriminate. You are forced not to and cannot self-destruct or sabotage yourself in the relationships you have with other people, your family, your friends or the life your lead just because daddy isn’t himself today or doesn’t want have the energy to spend any time with you or play with you. Yet as a child you still have to find a release somewhere. For all of us, the four of us, we fought our own way out of this illness that seemed fit to overwhelm us drowning visitors, forced us to put our hands up and surrender.
The only way to transcend the painful revelations that comes with bipolar is to realize that there will be days when there is depression, stressful situations in which conflict and challenges abound that we all will be faced with, moods that are terrifying and all at once lifesaving. There were moods that needed to be killed with pills.
The freedom that comes from having this knowledge is a comfort and it transforms us daily. It can also drive you slowly insane sometimes when everything normal, happy and cheerful is out of your reach.
There was always a radiant smile behind which my father hid and while he suffered in silence we all did in a way. We covered up this family secret, bipolar, with secrets and lies even if we didn’t mean to we went out of way to do it.
My father teaches me every day how light can be illuminated, how it can co-exist in fragile systems, hurtling through space and between bodies at indeterminate speeds, always infinitely expanding and contracting to the universe’s own breath not unlike our own breath and how some people call this light God.
My voice is just one in a million. My father’s valiant struggle with this mood disorder, bipolar, is also just one in a million.
The journey we have all been on has always been and is the destination. He has always been larger than life and his spirit invincible. His love so strong, his vibrant laughter, his bedazzling, enchanting smile comes daily shining through brightly even when all there is is gloom in the day and it burns unashamedly, giving off invisible, yet intense, almost blinding vibrations like the white sun. I can see it in his eyes; sparkling like glitter or sequins.
Lost inside of him somewhere is still a little boy who grew up with a father who was a barman at an elite, posh country club and a mother who was a housekeeper.
And then I come to my father the writer and the genetic predisposition of manic depression, suicidal depression.
Suddenly there is this uncontrollable shift; this mechanism in my brain, invincible and everything that came before, stability, emotional stability, normality and coherency is lost.
The loss of relationships derails you but love will find you in spaces ultimately devoid of sacrifice. This town is poor, small, and uneventful. You seldom feel out of touch with the reality of it.
I have always felt that there is an intense radiance behind words, streaming through the invisibility of white pages, an aggression of trapped particles between phrases.
Everything in an illness is an adapted move to the social climate, not structured, then a rescuing force reaching, straining to make sense of the world around you in an embellished utopia or a hellish nightmare filled either with pure, unfathomable dread or adrenaline shooting through your body, powered by an inescapable thread, a disconnected feeling of separation from the masses. They include people who are sociable, in good health, unafraid of the stressful aisles at the supermarket, lists and the hum of shopping malls.