Maybe This Time

Apologies for the delay in posting - there has been a lot going on in my life, related to bipolar symptoms and otherwise, and I feel like I'm in a bit of a craeative black hole. However, I thought I'd pull together a post about some recent events.

One of the worst things about this illness is regretting actions I took and choices I made before diagnosis and treatment. To an outsider, I was a healthy and even highly functional human being but to those I allowed close to me I was a mess. My decisions were driven by fear: fear of something that I couldn't identify (until later, when it happened and a cruelly honest part of me was relieved to finally understand what it was I had been trying to avoid for all this time). I clung to people I thought could protect me and I pushed away those I thought might bring me closer to the edge. These were often the same people.

Over the last few weeks, I've tried unsuccessfully to reconnect with two people I was close to during the two most difficult years of my life. With the first, I had a relationship that I firmly believe could have been one of the great ones, but that happened to start just months before my diagnosis and a few more months before my treatment. One day when he was visiting San Francisco, I tried to go to a yoga class a few blocks from my house. I was so hypomanic, confused and disoriented that I ended up walking around for 20 minutes, getting completely lost, and calling him in tears from Washington Square Park. He had to come get me, link his arm in mine, and walk me home, where I took an Ativan and fell asleep. This was one of our few nights a month together. I will never forget his face as he walked towards me in the park - nonchalant and resigned, patient and loving, and utterly confused. Was this what he signed up for? Was this what life would me would be like? Of course not, though I have to admit that if he had stuck around to find out it would have gotten much worse before it got better.

Speaking of much worse, the other person I tried to reach out to supported me through my darkest moments, and for that I will always be grateful. He also hurt me when I was at my most vulnerable, and for that I will always resent him. Our relationship was based on him taking care of me - how could he have known that things wouldn't always be that way? In moments when I don't know if things will ever change for the better, if I will ever change for the better, how are those around me supposed to know that? I've come to believe that the only people with whom I managed to retain a relationship over the past few years are those who love me unconditionally or those who were able to keep a respectable distance. There are times in life when the only type of love you can bear is unconditional love.

I'm different now. I'm still bipolar, I still have a hot temper and a jealous streak, and I'm far from the perfect friend or girlfriend. But I'm different. I don't take midnight trips to the hospital (usually), I'm not trying a new set of prescriptions every month, and I'm not fighting my diagnosis, but holding it close, all the better to understand it. These are changes that are hard to convey in a breezy text message to your ex boyfriend, and in my case at least, these people from my past aren't particularly interested in hearing about it. And I need to practice some radical acceptance here, because why should they care? Why does it matter why I treated them poorly, given that I did treat them poorly? Why should they grant me forgiveness or a second chance?

I understand that there is no good reason for these men to ever speak with me again.  I understand that they are a part of my history, like hospitals and doctors, like thoughts I hope never come back. I still feel a desire to show off my new self, though, and an aching curiosity: If I were to meet him now, knowing what I know about myself, having gone through all that I have in the past few years, how would things be different? What would be the same? Where would we end up?

It's not just men I wonder about - it's classes at university, jobs, apartments, cities, friends. What if I had known about my illness? What if it hadn't had to get so bad before it got better? I've generated a sickening amount of emotional waste over the past three years and when I'm reminded of that landfill, by a scene in a movie or a street in San Francisco where he used to live, it hits me like a garbage truck: putrid, heavy, and inevitable. I know what I'm supposed to tell myself: that I'll make new memories, that emotional waste can be compressed into solid bricks upon which your future, stronger self confidently stands to look out over the horizon, that there will be other men, other friends, other jobs, other cities.

But what if.....