Written on the Streets

Posted on October 26, 2005 in Silicon Valley Stigma Travel - Conferences

It’s wet about five miles away and dry here in Mountain View They fed the library steroids since the last time I came here in the late 1990s. A large, pillared building stands where they used to squeeze a few shelves and a reading area about thirty feet below where I am now sitting.

We’re back where we used to be in the late eighties and nineties. Back on familiar ground that floats me or bends up to press a needle up my spine, depending on the memory.

I remember faces that I dread to see. I remember others which make me glad and I hear that they are very sick or have left the area. Streets roll out like scrolls upon which are written my adventures or misadventures.

We were driving down Middlefield in Palo Alto. The darkness pressed down bluely. As we approached the corner of Loma Verde from the direction of Oregon Expressway, I said to Lynn “This was the scene of one of my worst manic road rages.”

“I don’t remember,” said Lynn as she braked to a stop.

“Good.”

I went through the worst of my disease here, learned — in retrospect — how ignorant and cruel people could be about mania and depression. It could have happened anywhere that I happened to choose to live between the ages of 25 and 40, but it was here that it did. Cavafy told himself that you could never leave the City because the City was always inside of you. In the night of the brain, I learned, this is very true. Streets made of serotonins, dopamines, and norepinephrine run from neuron to neuron; it is when the tracks break up and the static pulses jump between the stripped sheaths that we become lost in our own heads. Training of thoughts, diet, and exercise do help, but they are not enough. You have to adjust the chemical balance, too.

I refused medication here until 1994 when I went on Prozac. Then in 2005, I had to admit to myself that there was more to my problem than depression. I followed the diet, I did the exercise, and I watched my thoughts as they became more and more frantic, less focused, and concentrated on a grandiose vision of the power of my own mind. I learned that I was bipolar.

What if I had had this diagnosis earlier? What would have happened to me here in Silicon Valley? Would I have been better loved by the cruel, hateful people or would I have just had the sense to avoid them, to find better friends? I was involved in the peace movement here, which like many other movements has its silly rivalries, antagonisms, and gainless aggravations. The way that I participated was a symptom of my illness, which is partly physical and partly personality. Not all the problem was me; in the abcess of bipolar disorder, the idea that it was drifted in acid.

Someone brought up a local peace movement activist in a glowing light. I remember the fellow for being an impediment in my side when it came to speaking locally about my trip to former Yugoslavia. Though I now mark it as an instance of mania, many people found my lectures helpful and informative. They learned aspects of the conflict that they didn’t get from either the mainstream press or even the left. I would mention something to this man and he would say things like “Well, duh”, then tell me some fact he’d gleaned from his leftist connections which I knew to be out and out untrue. It was like having your very own George W. Bush on the left. Once he scheduled me to speak and then, at the last minute, cancelled me for a speaker on El Salvador because “it was more recent”. I turned my back on his rudeness, realized that he was a cad. One thing you could say for me that you couldn’t say for the average sociopath is that when I left, I left for good. You could not get me to go back and I didn’t.

Last night, Lynn and I had dinner with Chris of Regula in a Nepalese restaurant along Lombard. We discussed the usual issues of prejudice. I was hypomanic, so I gave him a lecture about bipolar disorder. Chris listened respectfully and assured me that I wasn’t losing it. At one point, we looked across the table at each other, me the bipolar at the gay man.

“You know when they need someone to pick on,” I said, “they go for two groups: the gays and lesbians and the mentally ill.”

It is more fashionable on the left to champion the gays and lesbians than the mentally ill. When the middle or the left speak about us, they do so in reference to the homeless. The middle says “Just take your meds and stop whining.” The Berkeleyesque Left often speaks about the “right to see reality as you wish, so stop your whining.” The Right likes to say “You’re just lazy, stop whining.” Regardless of the political slant, the appendage “stop your whining” is a constant theme.

That’s written all over the streets of Mountain View and Palo Alto for me, perhaps because it is Mental Health Week and I am going to a DBSA conference over the weekend. I have not been here for five years. Rain slicks the street and I am angry at the purblindness of those who can vent so readily about the war in Iraq, Bush, liberals, gays, and whatever else you want to politicize, but who spend so little time learning how to practice a little kindness. I know they have no clue because I have seen how they act around the mentally ill and the homeless, how they ignore them and make them invisible.

They do it here in Mountain View just like they do it in the Orange. They talk about all their great programs but when you look at it, the message is just the same. “We did all this for you, so quit your whining.”