I’m crazy, and I’m sorry. Or not.
Every once in a while, I’ll have an ordinary day, or I’ll get to work every day of the week and not have a bad brain day, not feel completely depleted at the end of a work day. I’ll forget that I take medication several times each day for my mis-wired brain, and I’ll start thinking that I might be normal. Maybe my mental illness isn’t so bad. Maybe my diagnosis is all made up. Maybe I’m not as crazy as I think.
This is a dangerous place to be. This is the place when I start thinking I don’t need my medication, that I’m cured, that it isn’t so bad, that things in the past weren’t as terrible as I thought they were. And since my PTSD likes to erase and coat over the trauma and terrible experiences in my past, I can’t always remember them correctly.
But they did happen, and I am crazy, and it really was that terrible, and I really do need my medication.
What do I do to remind myself of these things? I don’t beat myself up, I don’t live in the past, I don’t feel sorry for myself. But I do give myself reminders of certain events that my mental illness caused just to assure my brain that it truly is mis-wired. Like the time I honestly thought I was two people and could be in two places at once.
I have been placed in several mental illness buckets, including anxiety, alcoholism, PTSD, and bipolar I with psychotic tendencies. Part of being bipolar for me is a mood episode in which I become psychotically manic. This episode can include sleeplessness, high levels of energy, hypersexuality, visual hallucinations, and delusions. I act so different from my usual self that I started thinking I WAS someone else. And in a way, I am. I even have a name for my psychotically manic self: Rita. But once, it got so out of hand, and my mind was so delusional, I thought Rita and Julie were two separate people, and that they could do separate things.
Once, before children came along, and before I quit drinking, I had scheduled some time out with a group of old friends of mine that had been together since grade school. We were going to a winery to catch up with each other and talk about the good old days. I was excited, ready to have a calm afternoon with friends.
The night before, Rita decided to show up. My brain took a left turn into psychosis-land. I went out to the bars and talked up my next day’s plans with acquaintances of mine. I reasoned that, while Julie was talking with her friends from grade school, Rita could be drinking and getting wild at the winery with these new acquaintances in the other side of the room at the same winery. No, I didn’t think I would be bouncing from table to table. I literally thought I would be AT THESE TWO TABLES AT THE SAME TIME. AS TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE. It sounds absolutely absurd when you read it, or think about it now.
And when the next day came, and after I woke up from my two hours of sleep, I had to face what Rita had planned. I had arranged for a van-load of acquaintances to show up at the winery at the same time as my friends from grade school. Surprise, surprise: I couldn’t actually physically be in two places at the same time. It just didn’t work. I tried to run away from the whole thing, called my friends from grade school and bailed, but the acquaintances weren’t so forgiving. They came and got me, brought me along to the winery. So I spent an afternoon thinking I could hide at a small winery from my friends at the other table while I drank with my acquaintances across the room. If I didn’t look at them, they couldn’t see me, right? If an ostrich sticks its head in the sand, it thinks you can’t see it. Same idea here. Another delusion; they saw me, but understandably they didn’t comprehend what was going on, thought I had dismissed them for new friends, and took it in stride. Why they thought I would choose to go out with new friends in front of old friends I had cancelled on is another brow beater, but let’s leave that to another shake of the head. Some things you just can’t get out of.
Side note/tangent: before you go blaming it on alcohol and being drunk: I have done some of these things perfectly sober and absolutely crazy. Like believing I could heal people. And believing I was indestructible and couldn’t get hurt. And voices talking in my head. So my mental illness has nothing to do with being drunk. Being drunk was actually a crazy way of self-treating my mental illnesses. That’s a discussion for another day.
This isn’t the only time Rita, my psychotic manic self, has done things that I have “woken up” to discover and have had to deal with. Some of them were extreme and life changing. All I have to do to remind myself that, yes, I have a mental illness, and yes, I still need these medications, and yes, it has been much worse than this, and yes, it can become much worse than this if I don’t do what I need to do — is tell myself these little Rita stories.
And to my grade school friends that I bailed on that day: I don’t know if I ever said I’m sorry. I don’t know if I ever tried to explain. I don’t know if things were ever the same after that. I don’t know if it’s possible to explain something like that. Maybe this helps you understand. It wasn’t me, but it was. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry for hurting you.
I’m sorry for many things I did when I was psychotic and manic, and unaware at the time of what I was doing. I’m sorry for the people I hurt, even if I’m not aware of what it is I did, and even if I don’t remember doing it.
But I’m not sorry for who I am. Some people say they AREN’T their mental illness, that they HAVE a mental illness. But it is so much of what creates the fabric of who I am, it is knitted so far into the aspects of what makes me ME, that if you took my mis-wired brain away and wired it correctly, I wouldn’t be me anymore. When I’m manic, I don’t act like me, but I’m still me. It’s still a part of who I am. There are dire consequences of having these illnesses, but there are unexpected delights, too, there are talents and eccentric thought processes and wonderful poems and there comes a point when you learn to accept that who you are is who you are. Bar none. I may change little things about myself, but the essence of who I am, mis-wired brain and all, will always be here.
I’m Julie, I’m crazy, and though I’m sorry for things I may have done to hurt people, I’m not sorry for who I am.
Thanks for reading.
Tansy Julie Soaring Eagle Paschold
March 5, 2022
