Why I Take My Meds

Posted on March 1, 2006 in Psychotropics Satisfaction

Sunday. Glorious. The narrow strings of clouds ahead of the storm moved on to San Bernardino. An afternoon of sun afforded me and several friends — all except one of whom were bipolar — a fine hike up the Borrego Trail to the red rock of Whiting. We sauntered through an arcade of oaks and plazas of grass that came halfway to our knees. Here and there a true native of California — a pincushion of bunch grass — crowded out the rye, the oats, and the crabgrass.

One friend — missing one fifth of her lungs — had to turn back. She just wasn’t ready for hiking. Her friend and driver went with her. The rest of us advanced, crossed the wooden bridge, and entered meadows filled with bunch grass and fringed by wild gooseberries hanging their scarlet closed-umbrella flowers like Christmas lights. Just before we came to a steep section, a third friend decided to sit on a rock rather than finish the trail. The remaining four of us entered the pink rock maze and gasped at the small bit of Southern Utah brightness dropped in the drab chaparral.

I said we’d be back in fifteen minutes. My friend said we’d taken thirty. It didn’t seem that long to me, but who doesn’t know that time flies when you are having fun? The woman who stayed behind — call her M. — had a strange fruit that looked like a dried up orange. “Do you know what this is?” M. asked.

The orb was light, “like styrofoam” as M. put it. I glanced over the surface and declared it a gall.

“That’s what these other guys said,” M. related. “I don’t think so.” She pointed up a scarp at an overhanging shrub. “It was hanging off that bush.”

I found a break in the skin. “See,” I said. “This is where the wasp came out. Later, I would realize that the flaps of the hole bent inward; no escape had happened here. But at the moment, I held fast to my theory. “It’s a gall. If you cut it open, you’ll find a big hole or a larva.”

We agree to a test. Another hiker, E., took out his hunting knife. He laid the orb on a rock. “If there is a wasp in there,” M. said, “I don’t want to see it.” She made a vibrating sound out of the corners of her mouth.

The knife blade came down, the halves separated, and there we saw a solid interior with a crescent of seeds on either side. My mind flashed to another day. Red fruit on a bush whose name I didn’t know on a hot day. M. had been right.

“I was wrong,” I said.

We hold on to certainties, solid on the outside, sure of the inside because — well, we have told ourselves that is what we will find. And many of us never look. In mania, I might have demanded a second cut of the fruit, dissected the seeds, insisted that the seeds were pupae. Or the surly Titan inside me would have resisted the test in the first place. I might have fought this issue for hours or brooded. I did not do that. I accepted the evidence and went down the trail.