A Growth on the Body Politic

Posted on March 21, 2006 in Sorrow & Regret

Alms for an ex-leper! Alms for an ex-leper!

After last night’s talk, I found myself engaged face to face with myself. “Recovery from being bipolar” as a life plan works well if you are in your twenties, take the meds before the symptoms get out of hand, and have solid support from your family. Giving you expectations beyond what most people would normally place on a bipolar is helpful, the good doctor said. And I agree with that.

The trouble is that at the key point in my life, I lacked the things I needed. My mother, a registered nurse, was about as anti-psychiatry as you could get. She and my brother were constantly afraid of being exposed as child abusers, I think: I could have probably nailed both if I had wanted to do so. So I didn’t get the meds of the day, which in any case weren’t the best remedy. My symptoms got out of hand and the damage to my brain was done.

It seems that people were very free with their advice: go back to work, forget about school since you flunked out, don’t take English as your major, enter teaching, etc. etc. etc. No one asked or gave me what I needed at the time. Then there was my checkered work career, all in jobs below my intellectual competence. Flunking out of graduate school derailed who I wanted to be. Now I look across the void to Academia and recall how much I wanted to be part of that, how I wanted to teach young adult minds, to read, to research. This disease and all the empty advice I received from people who kept lowering my expectations defeated me when I was most in need of growth.

So here I am, a growth on an uncharted place of the Body Politic. I am rested, relaxed, stable, and near to utterly unable to resume what I abandoned nor seize what I yearned for, but never got to have.

If there is a true place, I am as far from it as you can get.