A manic machine that drives me forward, but also grinds my soul into its cogs.
The inevitable pull pushes me up the hill. Through the mechanical clatter, the ker-chunk ker-chunk of the chains pulling me upward, I feel each tug yanking me along without any effort. Like a real ride, there’s some nervous anticipation the higher one gets. But if, like me, you’ve ridden this rollercoaster a million times, you’re resigned to the altitude. Once I make it to the top, and I know I always will without fail, I can take a short glimpse at the world around me. It’s really the only overview of my life I’ll get before gravity yanks me down.
Rattling rails roar as the whole train makes its way down, turning tight corkscrews, thrown for loop after loop, but through it all, thrills.
I was around fifteen or sixteen when I was given a diagnosis of Bipolar I Disorder. Once there was a word for it, a pamphlet, a sullen recognition that there was something behind this whole rabid experience, some people are comforted while others shudder, knowing that this will cast a shadow over them for the entirety of their life. I am unable to recall how I took it, but there was a bit of relief that I had dodged a more dangerous bullet, a more psychotic bullet, one that would have had me hearing voices and knocking down plaster while searching for listening devices. When doctors broke it down, it sounded manageable, and in those days, they had a plethora of different chemical cocktails they were dying to try out on kids. Drugs, which were touted daily as “never the answer,” were suddenly presented as a way of finding some sort of normal.
One thing that stuck out from one of my psychiatrists was that there is no cure. No day would come when I woke up unafflicted by the lack (or excess?) of neurotransmitters flowing through the capillaries in my brain. I had suffered from depression, sometimes deep, dark episodes that lasted months, since I was about ten. Into my teenage years, before recreational drugs became my crutch, it was expected that I could medicate the worst of the symptoms with a combination of pills. Those were supposed to be the light at the end of this dreary tunnel. What wasn’t explained to me was that once I was balanced – artificially so – I would lose the drive that had fueled me to write for days, to create music, to experience life on a level that allowed me mystical insight into the beauty of art, words, and human experience.
Basking in the glory of circular insanity, I would spend night after night reading, writing, and ingesting anything I thought would make me a better writer. The more I learned about my disorder, the less inclined I felt to curb it. I was engrossed in the process of riding the highs and lows, knowing full well the train would always come back around. After giving up on the prescribed solution to all of my woes and abilities, the time in between thrill and doom became shorter and shorter. Sometimes, there would be no respite at all, just another go-round, the machine churning out poem after poem, a flurry of dark impulses and haunted dreams. And if it was to be that way, well, so be it if it was chiseling away at the mortal stone, carving something that could live beyond the eighteen years on earth the ghostly whispers in my ear proclaimed I had.
Decades of this went by until I realized that the crutch, the self-medicating, was more of a detriment than the original defect. Now, clean and sober for over six years, I still struggle with both the terror of falling fast, imagined terror, and I still wait for that ramping up of energy, grandiose in its splendor, knowing that I will accomplish more in a few days than I have in the past weeks. I count on it to make something of myself. It is less and less sustainable as I attempt to be something real, a real writer, a real father, a real person who deals with emotions in a healthy and mature way. Also, physically, I can’t stay up all night chasing phantoms on the promise of creating something that will raise me beyond the station of a grand pretender, with a CV no longer than my list of publishing credits.
It is less and less sustainable as I attempt to be something real, a real writer, a real father, a real person who deals with emotions in a healthy and mature way.
Dedicated to each and every small step, I want to use the old machine to produce at a higher, more engaging quality. Instead of a hundred poems, I’m happy to settle for a handful that feel at home in my newer, clearer, more identifiable approach. The time between traveling from the start of the cycle to the end has gotten longer, and for that, I’m grateful, but far less prolific.
Taking better care of myself, eating right and sleeping nightly, is far from medicating with a prescription pad or a bottle of whiskey, but both methods have stifled a creativity that, in its natural state, is as destructive as it is creatively enriching. But what is the cost, and am I willing to pay it? It’s much steeper than it used to be, that’s for sure. It might even prove to be an investment my body and mind can no longer make. Even if I do go back, I’m less and less inclined to believe the sales pitch. There’s nothing for me to write about down there, anyhow.
In these years of clean, easy living, I’ve tried to coax the machine to life, even as it sits idle in its dormant state, waiting for me to forget it’s there. Then, when I’ve settled into enjoying the extensive in-between, it cranks up, pistons pillowing smoke, gears grinding each other around. In a haste to make the most of it, I sit here typing away, filling in the blanks of pages that, at first glance, feel unfocused, sometimes petty, and read like some unsettled score. Hoping that somewhere in here is something that someone out there can identify with, or at the very least recognize as coherent, I keep going, taking smaller steps these days, but still, one foot after the other.
Had I not made those mistakes, though, I fear I would never have made it to where I am now, a place that I love, being a person I am proud of, and a manifestation of my own machine.
