A Hemorrhoid in the Back of the Throat

Posted on November 18, 2008 in Bipolar Disorder Originality & Creativity

I spent most of my last two years of therapy complaining in single sentences about how I had lost my voice. I was perusing less poetry, writing less about myself.

“Oh maybe you need to write about other things or take a writing course” she would say to me. Her panacea was to send me to the University of California at Irvine where I would earn a degree in the writing program. That was her cherished evidence of a cure, a piece of paper that said I had survived two to three years of the rogueries of criticism ((In graduate school — where I failed largely because I was in a severe depression — I often had a hard time speaking up for myself, especially when the things people said about me were out and out erroneous. Not having a degree sometimes means I lose pissing contests over points of grammar, but otherwise I don’t miss it. What I was trying to tell her that I missed was the excitement of the ants crawling over the windowpane or the beauty of the coarse skunk hair on the sidewalk.)) . I just wanted to see material that shook a limb.

Readers of my blog noticed the change. A few left and have not returned. I started publishing more about politics, funny videos, the occasional photograph. Pieces about the details of my life and feelings got a shot of muscle relaxant. You see, the other rule of her therapy seemed to be that we discussed emotions for one sentence and then had to move on. If I felt upset about the way someone treated me, I had to mutter a little mantra about how maybe they were right. “So and so said that the earth was flat.” “Well, maybe they are right.” I grew more and more depressed under her care, focusing more and more of my time on not talking about myself. My therapy sessions became like my blog. The high point of our last months was the little time that was devoted to preparing me for the possibility that all the secret racists (they were, there, she assured me) would come out of the closet and vote McCain into office.

Finally, after a few months of my stonewalling against trusting her, we gave up. And I don’t think she has a clue why I agreed to leave her care. The miracle is that in the last few days, the toes of my bloggings have begun to wiggle a bit ((I’ve never been more than a quick witless wit about politics, so I suspect you will be seeing less of that: if that’s what you came for, I am sorry.)). The hemorrhoid that had somehow migrated from my colon into the back of my throat and the top of my spinal column shrank and went home. Paralysis departed. Fingers began to move. I stopped to read a volume of Garcia-Lorca’s poetry.

A few weeks ago, at the Calfornia State DBSA Conference, I heard Dr. Kent Layton ((who worked with J.P. Feighner, one of the authors of the description of bipolar disorder in the DSM IV)) describe the difference between someone with ADHD and someone with bipolar disorder. When you put them up against an obstacle, the bipolar person explodes in rage. Mea culpa when in episode. The sufferer of ADHD, on the other hand, just flops over. Gives up.

Throughout my therapy, I wondered why I had lost the will to write. We never went into depth on this — it was another of those “Well, you’ll get over it” moments. Perhaps there was a diagnosis sitting right in front of me: beneath my bipolar was some kind of attention deficit disorder. Take away the bipolar and all the energy that had produced poetry disappeared. Or maybe there was a lesser wall, one the right kind of therapist who knew something about creativity could have taught me how to clamber over. Never once in my therapy did she invite me to bring my poetry or my photography or anything I held sacred. Our sessions suffered from a deficit of attention when it came to matters that meant a lot to me. We ended up never talking about them and I made myself take the blame for it.

I wanted to change and grow, but not on her provincial, philistine terms.

So here I am talking about myself again, ten days after I ended therapy. Think there might be a connection?