Everyday Practices of Mental Health Ableism

I try to be the ideal bipolar. I try to perform my illness in the most rational and grounded way. I try to contain my episodes so they do not seep into my intimate and close relationships. Contain it and contain myself, so I don’t offend you with my instability and intensity. I try to be the acceptable bipolar, the one who can talk about the disease as if it’s as inconvenient as a hang nail. Lest I allow it to unsettle you with its erraticness or its unpredictability. I listen to your comments as you internally congratulate yourself on your acceptance and tolerance of neural diversity. You make the joke that everyone is bipolar too and how labels are so passé; I nod and hide my cringing insides under a tightly pursed smile. You tell me you love me, but my intensity can be exhausting, because you love giving constructive feedback; I swallow that slap across the face and let out a little chuckle and vow to never display my intensity. I will learn to do better next time. I tell you about my sadness, I tell you about my grief, I tell you about my anger and anxiety. You hear me out with an invisible little smirk, I can feel it and see it, I hear it loudly, even though you don’t say it. My flooding emotions are not valid, since you cannot see a causal reality linked to them. My emotions burden you, whether or not they touch you, whether or not they invade your choices and will. Their presence disturbs you even though they ask nothing of you. When my mind is reduced to utter nonsense you find it hard to hear me, you find it even harder to hear me after you witness my mind and cognition falter, even when time has passed and they no longer falter. I drop some names, Foucault and Derrida and I drop some words, ‘subject’ and ‘differance’, I pray that I have redeemed myself with my intellect so you can restart to hear me. You don’t want to isolate me and you wish me the best from a distance where my bipolar cannot disturb you. I absorb your judgement and try to do better next time. I try and educate you, so that I do not feel your judgement, I do so because I do not want to be isolated. 

Fifty percent of people with bipolar have attempted suicide at least once, twenty percent have succeeded. In both April 2013 and April 2017, I got so close to what would probably have been botched attempts, but miraculously, at 37, I have managed to dodge being a statistic. Both times, I was having a manic episode. As someone with bipolar 1, I tend to have more manic episodes than depressive episodes and I tend to have more mixed episodes than I do simple manias. In a manic episode, there is a lot of energy. I can feel euphoric, elated at times; the mania colors the world as I perceive it. Colors are brighter and more saturated, empty space is speckled with glitter, catching and reflecting light in a million different colors. I am more likely to trust strangers and place myself in risky and unsafe situations. I will not only feel loved by the people around me, but worshipped and adored. My thoughts, writings and ideas are great—no, not just great, phenomenal. For about 5 minutes. And then with the same charge, I will feel despised, worthless, and regretful of all my life choices. As I alternate between one state and the other, with no rhyme or reason, my perception of depth becomes altered, the solidity of things becomes questionable and I become confused and anxious, losing touch of my existence within my lived chronology and body. I become haunted by the shadows that flit across my field of vision to a soundtrack of deafening sounds and screams. I can imagine how hard this must be for you to witness, so please, I understand, do keep your distance. 

For years, I refused to be on medication. I had had a really bad experience when I was first diagnosed 18 years ago. Since April 2017, I have managed to find the right combination of therapy and medication. For years I put all my energy into holding the pieces of reality together as my brain waged a war against my senses, my logic and thought processes. I had never imagined that a pill could do this for me—hold my mind together so I can continue with my life, uninterrupted. Every episode had required a cleaning up period following it, whether it be physical injuries needing to be tended to, or professional, social and romantic redemption. Life was often unforgiving, so instead I tried to forgive myself and forgive the bipolar, yet work harder on containing it. I accumulated exhaustion with every episode, with the amount of time, energy and resources that were required in my everyday life to manage them. Schedules, routines, nutrition, therapy, writing, processing, sleep, exercise and reflection help minimize their frequency and intensity, but the cruel joke is that these are the very same things that an episode dismantles before reaching its crescendo. You kept my inconvenience at arm’s length. Every time I pulled through, I either did it on my own, or had invested in deconstructing your biases, vetting and educating you so that you could be there next to me.

The times I wanted to end my life, there were three thoughts slamming about and around in my head, throwing snippets of other thoughts and self-perceptions into the air like confetti. One: I couldn’t take the pain I was experiencing right now and wanted it to end now; two: I couldn’t take the pain resulting from wanting it to end now and being fearful/resistant to ending it now; three: even if this pain passes, as it always does, it will also come again, as it always does. Over the years, my ability to resist and to be optimistic has become worn out. Being able to go on, before the medication, came with having an extensive support system of friends that could hold my hand and bring me down from the edge, whenever I was endangering my life. My life depends on a support network that has taken decades to create. This support network is large enough that I can strategically rotate through it. In those moments, living wasn’t a question of what I wanted or didn’t, but whether or not, by relying on my support system, I was able to get through the episode intact. 

Finally, being on the right medication has really helped me, but it took over a decade for me to be able to trust that the mental health establishment would be able to help me. I have been to more harmful therapists than I have been to ones that can actually help me. I have taken more medication that has exacerbated my condition than I have medication that actually helps me. I have known more people whose words and actions, subtle and overt, conscious and unconscious, have alienated me than were able to embrace me. The level at which I am able to manage this condition is not proportional to the support that was readily available to me, but to the labor that I was able to devote to creating a support system, a task I will never deny was made easier because of class privilege. I resent that those of us who have chronic mental illness have to do this to survive, above and beyond the energy that is exerted merely to live with a forever unstable and shifting reality. 

On Mania and Grief

Sometimes I feel that a manic episode robs me of my grief. Somewhere in the whirring of my thoughts, these strings of words in my head, my grief is taken away from me, it is moulded and shaped into a dysphoria of euphoric proportions. It is transformed into anger, no, anger would be an understatement, a rage, an endlessly bleeding rage. Grief has an unusual ability to still hold on, seemingly poisoning that persistent euphoria. Making sure that I, will not, under any circumstance, feel joy alongside a manic elation. 

There is no room for my grief, in the midst of hallucinations, of flying objects, of changing backdrops, of the dissolution of the familiar. The familiar surroundings and the familiar self, all become alien, unrecognizable, having much of the same anxious quality of when you meet someone new, or when you move to a new city, that anxiety as you try and swallow your surroundings, contain them within you, familiarize them with your being, and your being with them, but they resist, because grief hangs onto them. 

Grief becomes insignificant when every single emotion known to mankind, every emotion ever felt by everyone, every sensation ever experienced, everyone single one of them, encases your skin, your organs, with every breath even the insides of your lungs.

25 mg of Seroquel later….

But today, I finally have room for my grief, to grieve the loss of things I love. To grieve the loss of the things I poured my being into, the loss of the connections, the loss of the familiar that never became unfamiliar. Today, I am making space and time to honor these things I have lost by letting myself grieve, by holding this grief close to my heart, by allowing it to enclose me. 

Insignificant

you slap me
once twice across the face
across the arm
my hair, you pull me down
you call me a victim
and you show me i'm insignificant
through the endless minutes of my life
i am nothing, i am worthless
you tell me, and you show me
you stare into each other's eyes
glazed over, empty, disconnected
uninterested, a rage that consumed
to death
disintegration
choice
cut open my face
break open my veins and yet commend yourself that my skin remained intact
that i bruise easily
that i got a private school education
that you fed and clothed me
my blood spills beneath my skin
you don't have to clean my mess
as i clean up a glass of spilled milk, that had slipped from between my fingers
stupid, clumsy, careless
sticks and stones
words, sticks and stones..
stings into sting, pain into pain,
like the peaks of multiple orgasms
insult into insult into praise, into insult till you lose all touch of you
the milk gets to seep to move to escape and my blood remains hidden
you choose me over you every time
you choose to hate me instead of yourself
you choose to hate me instead of your failed life
your failed marriage
your failed parenthood
and I'm the one that failed you?
I could sit and believe you, and I did.
over and over
I am failing you,
Because my body refuses you
because that skin, that stung and scarred
tries to run and hide inside my body when you come near
because I don't want to hear your words
of love,
because I do not want to hear your words of love
intertwined with your words that drown me in insignificance
I caught a glimpse of me one day
and it wasn't so bad
it didn't slouch and didn't shuffle
and it didn't feel it was silently screaming to be released
It didn't need a surgical blade
point to skin to break intact confining skin
I loved it
It was love
And I choose me
And I chose it

They Can Violate You, But...

They can violate you,
but they can't humiliate you
When their hands grab at your body
and you can't see their faces
too many faces, you smell their sweat
Dripping on your face, burning your eyes
The stank of a men's locker room
and you feel the wind against your face
and their bodies pressing against you
Too many faces,
Too many hands
Your feet are off the ground and hands pulling at your arms
a wave, no not a wave
a whirlpool, enclosing, drowning
Air, you need to come out for air
Dizziness, swirling, groping
You call on the Friend, the Guide, Truth

مدد يا مولانا

Silence, a calmness between the waves
You breathe, and breathe and breathe
As you waltz your way between bodies,
trapped in a divine gift of momentary stillness
167 were not so lucky.

Bare Back

You stood behind me
your erection in my back
yes, back
yes right there in my back
because you were towering over
white synthetic shorts brushing against
my bare back
towering over me, because I was 12
I don't remember your face
We never spoke
There was no invitation
And a bikini on a flat-chested prepubescent
was hardly a provocation
Yet the liberty you gave your cock
and the freedom you gave your rough dark hands
dirty grimy nails
pinching, squeezing, chaffing
small nipples that refuse to grow
A whole top part of an abdomen
sensation-less, frozen
layer after layer
loose, wide clothes
concealing
Build a fortress of flesh
A deterrent
Mine, not really mine
no mine,
or not?
a body disembodied
SHAMED
And YES you took a part of me
A part that I cannot and will not ever know
And as cliche and dramatic as this may have sounded
My chest was hollowed out with a bulldozer
As many times as
hands, fingers, lips, cocks
groped, pressed up, grabbed, pinched
VIOLATED
There is no resolution

A Letter to A Professor: On Foucault and Mental Health: A Personal Experience

Dear Professor,
When I received my acceptance letter for a masters program in a prestigious ivy-league university, thoughts raced through my head. I knew that having this opportunity to study at one of the world’s renowned environmental studies institutions would no-doubt advance my ideas and career. Little did I know that it would also give me the tools I needed to examine a very painful period from my past. As soon as I arrived I immediately took advantage of the school’s mental health unit. As helpful as this was, I gained the most profound insight into my past from the class: “Advanced Readings in the Social Sciences: Governmentality, Power and Capitalism” that was theoretically immersed in Foucault and Foucaudian analysis.
It might be strange at first to see the connection between a class and the mental heath issues that had haunted my past. From 1999 to 2001, those who had the power granted to them by their psychiatric knowledge effectively converted me from the person I had always known into a bipolar subject, which later evolved due to misdiagnosis and medication induced psychosis into a schizophrenic subject. I was no longer “me”, I was bipolar or I was schizophrenic. I did not have the knowledge or power to become any other subject, this privilege was held by the mental health experts who proceeded to conduct my conduct, through psychoanalysis, restrictions on my lifestyle and medication. By 2001 I had to drop out of university because I was so heavily medicated that I could not function. I walked around, at the very best a drooling zombie, and the mental health experts considered my progress a success. My family and therapists’ panopticon reached to the deepest recesses of my psyche, watching over my every thought, action and chemical constituents of my mind, responding expertly to any signs of elation, paranoia or depression. I had become regulated, by altering my neurotransmitters my thoughts and emotions had become governed and my mental deviance became governable. So why was I not feeling happy, weren’t I finally regulated, hadn’t this team of experts finally managed to govern my ungovernable mind? Why was I feeling alienated from my own mind and body? Why was I feeling powerless?
In 2001, I finally rebelled against their expert authority and concern, and went through the hazardous journey of navigating through intense mood swings, withdrawal from psychiatric medication and assistance. I improved tremendously after this period, but till the spring of 2010 I felt something had been taken away from me, and for years I did not know what this something was. Whenever I looked back at these two years and I would feel a heavy sensation that would overwhelm me. I could not put my finger on it till I was introduced to Foucault’s writings.
Professor, I am sure you often wondered during our Thursday morning classes why I was so engaged, why I hung onto every word and why my passion would veer on rage. I do not know if you ever noticed the times my when eyes would well up with tears or when my face would flush because your lectures made my heart race. During our Spring 2010 class I not only was able to understand what had happened to me, but I was able to reclaim power that had been violently stripped away from me at my very first visit to a psychiatrist’s clinic in 1999. Two years of my life had been taken away from me, for my own wellbeing, yet not for a minute did I feel well during this dark period of my life. How could I have felt well when I was rendered so powerless?
My words will never convey the amount of gratitude I have for your class and instruction. The class not only changed my theoretical inclinations I left it feeling more whole than I had ever felt in my life. I’ve expressed to you my gratitude for what it brought to me academically, but I had never told you the complete story to what your class and lectures have meant to me. I was finally able to understand what it was that was taken away from me, the actors who took it away from me, and the mechanism in which my power was wrenched from my being. Through your teachings I was able to reclaim a power lost, for that I am eternally grateful.

Governmentality Meets Bipolar

I love the autumn and I especially love my walk to school every morning. It’s my time for myself. Its that time of day where I feel that everything I see was given to me. The leaves change their colors just for me, just so I can see them and enjoy them. The light trickling through the branches is mine, the shadows flitting across the floor, yes, that is also for me. The grey rocks arranged along the path were just what I needed. I and nothing else exists, I barely notice the joggers with the black LCD screens strapped to their arms, measuring their heart rates, or the teenagers with their acne cutting school and making out. It’s a good time for me to connect with how I feel and what I want to get away from. It’s a time where I know I can get away from everything and yet that I cannot get away from myself and I am forced to look at this disobedient defiant self, who refuses to be regulated, who refuses to be governed.

I’ve come to know that if I want to keep people around me, if I want to be respected and if I want one less reason to feel self loathing, one less reason to give other people the right to make choices for me, to tell me what can and cannot go into my body, to become medically regulated, to become socially regulated, then I need regulate myself and my bipolar. It must not be displayed, I walk around imploding, and I feel rage of unknown origins. I draw it in, tightly sealing and containing it, it simmers as I conduct its conduct and it conducts mine.

Restitution

It’s the fourth night that I haven’t been able to sleep. I lie in bed and I try to be aroused. I try and feel something, something to remind me of a connection we had. I stay up to masturbate so it helps me sleep, but then it just keeps me awake. It takes so long to be aroused, different memories, from long ago. Memories of a time when it was passionate when I would just look at you and my vagina would clench, arousal that was painful, that consumed me. Just standing next to you close enough I could smell you, your smell would make me dizzy, it would be difficult to breathe. I would hold my breath just to keep your smell inside of me. Just as I grasp a memory and just as I start to feel aroused, a memory of you digging your nails into my back as you orgasm and it makes me orgasm, reality is quick to snatch it from me, with images of the repetitiveness of sex that I would rather be flossing or clipping my toe nails than having. I lose the memory and I lose the arousal. Minutes tick away and I can’t fall asleep because I need to masturbate to fall asleep, which means I need to be aroused to masturbate. I try quickly to conjure another memory of a time where I enjoyed it with you. Do I really have to think this hard and think this far back? Maybe this was the inevitable that such a powerful passion would burn itself out, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to keep it going or maybe I tried too hard? My thoughts keep me awake, and I try again to find restitution. I hear your voice in my head telling me, “Everything is fine, you just like having drama, because you’re pmsing”. Another memory, another moment lost to a past that’s irretrievable. I remember my hands used to tremble before I would touch you, and when my fingers would find your skin they would burn and that burning would consume me. It’s so far away, so long ago that it feels like it was someone else. A someone that is not this cold clammy body that I find myself touching and not feeling anything. I forget about you, which isn’t hard since you are sleeping in the guest bedroom. Tonight is because I said I needed the bed to spread out in, but really it was because I wanted to masturbate, other nights were because I snored, because I moved, or because the cats were making too much noise. I wanted to masturbate and I wanted to be aroused and the only thing that arouses me is our past. Its hard remembering a past when the present is right there next to me reminding how far away I’ve gotten from this past. I finally find a memory that I can hold onto, I deny the present and detach myself from it completely, and I can finally orgasm. Before my orgasm is over waves of sadness run through me. I find myself crying quietly, my chest painfully tight. I’ve disconnected myself from the present and put myself in a past that doesn’t exist anymore, and when it starts to fade away, I do not know where I am.

You Take My Breath Away

You take my breath away. I say this and I sigh. I say this and I fill my lungs with air. I exhale loudly. Freely. I feel my chest expand, my spine curve, my diaphragm reach its utmost extent and quiver, tremble, almost a yawn, almost a sigh and almost an orgasm. I exhale loudly as loudly, as I need to. As loudly I can now that you are watching me. I left the room to breathe freely. I left the room to explore my breath and how I have been holding it. I left the room to try and understand what it means to say you take my breath away. You are here now. I’m not sure why. You are not the faceless, nameless intangible protagonist, subject, object that I hide in my words, you are real and you are in my life. You are ***. I have named you. Now you’ve came out of the room to sit with me and I cannot breathe as loudly as I want or as freely as I want. I censor, I censor my breath and I’ve censored my words. I censor my words and I breathe at about 10% of my previous capacity. My diaphragm does not expand to its utmost extent. I breathe silently. You’ve taken my breath away.
I will not end this piece of writing here, hide the ugliness of myself, or hide the ugliness of you through literary dramatization and mystification. I will say this. You take my breath away. I hold it. I regulate it and I make it as quite and subtle as I can. I flare my nostrils, pull back my soft palate and slow it down. It’s my trade-off, so I can be near you. To breathe freely and fully means that you will be irritated, to curl up to you and let my breath come as it wants to, as loudly as erratically as it needs to, means that you will not want to be curled up next to me. That is the trade-off. We all come with our baggage and mine is that my desire to be near you takes precedence over my breath. In that way, you take my breath away.

Writing Block

It’s been so long since I wrote. I write and it’s clunky. I write and it’s contrived, its forced. I try to let the words flow; I’m scared that they are pretentious. How did I string the words together before into sentences that were not derivatives, plagiarisms of someone else’s expression?
I look back and think it must have been someone else’s writing. I read things I wrote and I’m so impressed, maybe I am stupid to be impressed, maybe they are just as bad as this clunky clumsiness, but they freed me and this doesn’t.
The words flowed. It was always about flowing, flowing not like water, but like air, flowing effortless frictionless.
I write and reread and its clunky, clumsy, word after word. Hesitant.
Pause, is this pretentious? Or is this lame? Is this pretentious so it’s lame? Or is it lame that it becomes pretentious. I have to laugh at myself because once I’ve asked that question in that way in this prose then that it was it has become, pretentiously lame and worst of all uninspired.
There is no rhythm for my words to dance to. I would have liked to use reverberate because that is the word that sounds right, not dance, but reverberate does not have the right meaning.
How many times have my words, my heart, my chest “danced” how many times have situations, thoughts, desires “sung”?
A few words strung here and there used, reused till they have lost all rhythm, all element of surprise and inspiration. Uninspired. The same worn pack of cards, you know what’s coming next, you know every bend and fold and which card it corresponds to, there is no more game to play, it is predictable, the excitement contrived, the excitement forced. My words are words, my emotions are not expressed in words, and they become contrived by my words. Clunky, silent and clumsy, awkward post-modern and pretentious. My expression not just my words are predictable. If I say it’s contrived, I know it will be followed by me saying, thinking or writing forced. I try to edit myself, to sound a bit more original to myself, but then it feels contrived, it feels forced.
I talk about you, again and again, always you, you the faceless, the nameless, the abstract, the hidden masked love. You change outside my words, but in my words you remain as you, eternally, unchanging, you. You were the transient, the fleeting. Once again predictable words strung together. If I say transient, then it will be followed by fleeting. You were the transient, the ethereal, the fleeting, but today you become the stagnant and the stagnation. You remain hidden in my words, but if I must write then you must become something other than you. Something unhidden and unmasked. You must become un-air-brushed, your ugliness exposed, your abstractness denied. You will be made tangible. My heart must not “sing” or “dance” or “quiver” with its love for you, but rebel, scream and free itself with its hatred towards you. My words must expose your ugliness not just mine.

Depersonalization

You call it:

Depersonalization,

Dissociation,

Detachment,

Disconnection,

Or a Dream-like state

A Diagnostic criteria for the DSM-IV to the define the disorders of the undeselfed self

You describe the causation:

Deep trauma that results in a deselfing of the undeselfed self

Damage to neurons from drug use

I have lost connection with my self. I have no connection with my past experiences. I have no connection to the people in my past.

My past is every second which is not now

Your face is new,

It does not evoke an emotional reaction

It does not evoke a visual familiarity

You are not part of the deselfed self, you do not constitute a part of my deselfed self.

What we have shared does not constitute a part of my deselfed self

Then what does?

My memories are there, flitting across my mind’s eye like faces of strangers in the windows as I stand on the side of the Metro tracks

Inconsequential

This is not amnesia, I remember

Why does it scare me?

Why does it trigger paranoid ideations that I am another being in this body that does not belong to me?

In this life that does not belong to me?

What if I wasn’t scared?

Can I accept that this deselfed self is another fleeting manifestation of transience?

That what You tell you me the undeselfed is, is not?

Is not, that is why it doesn’t constitute my deselfed self?

If I know that I am deselfing Your construction of what my undeselfed is and not my self,

Then What am I scared of?

Rabid Special ver2.4

I did think I was a better and more evolved version of bipolar, the new and improved bipolar 2.4, a rare edition of the self aware non medicated calm maniac.

I thought it was one of those sometimes I’m not bipolar phases.

I thought I was better, because I knew my psyche and because I knew what the signs were.

I really did think I was better than the rest

Because I am not on medication,

Because I can articulate this obscure fluctuation

Because I can accept my loss of control without losing it

I thought I had beaten it, I thought I wasn’t another bipolar

I wasn’t another psycho freak

I thought I was special

I still thought I was special the limited edition version 2.4 as I gnawed through my arm like a hungry rabid dog

I thought I was special because I currently am going through a depressive episode and I am totally aware of it, I am working out my issues, I’m not just another bipolar, I am an enlightened bipolar.

I thought I was special because I understood that the rabid dog had to feed and I could control it with applied behavioural motivational therapy, no no no not control train through a series of positive reinforcements. I accepted my rabid dog and I respected my rabid dog.

And it respected me.

I thought I was special because I thought I was better

Better than you, better than every bipolar, better than you nonbipolars because I have the bipolar edge

When I cannot control my voice

When I cannot control my actions

When I cannot control my tears

When I cannot control my drama queen

When I cannot explain it anymore

When I am humiliated by a self that I do not know

I know I am not in control

When I am no longer there, but I am

When I cannot accept this part of me, but it is

When the rabid dog wants to feed and I do not want to give it an arm

When I want to put it down

I am not better

I am not special

I am another A bipolar

I am another A bipolar who cannot accept it because I think I am better

Because I think I am special but I am another A bipolar who isn’t better and who isn’t special but thinks there are, who cannot accept it they are A bipolar because they think they are special and that they are better,

when they are just another A bipolar who isn’t better and who isn’t special

(wow, I just realized how I have been using my "illness" to feed my ego, wow aren't I special, aren't I better?)

Contemplate Driving

You drive and you drive and you drive.

You see the shapes flitting across your windows.

You don’t feel your body but it moves in perfect coordination.

Foot, brake, hand gear, foot accelerator, eyes, rear view, foot clutch. You glide through the traffic jam.

Foot, brake, hand, foot, eyes, arms, steering whee.l

You glide.

Shapes flitting across your windows.

Your heart breaks inside of you, shatters in ways more dramatic than two long lost brothers in a bollywood movie who find out they love the same woman, who ends up being lesbian and hooking up with their long lost sister.
Contracts within your chest, tightening around itself, trying to make its self smaller.

You don’t like the drama, but what the hell are you supposed to do, you’re a superstar right now. You are evanescence in all her tragic glory.

Contemplate the physical sensations of emotional pain.

Contemplate driving off the bridge.

Contemplate driving into another car.

Contemplate driving off into oblivion.

Contemplate the transience of your neurotransmitter levels.

Contemplate your carbon emissions because that is way more long term than your little mood swings.

Round the Corner

I'm driving too fast
I know its round the next bend
I want to park here
But I can't
There are no parking spots

Cheese from the heart

I am silently screaming to you
Please love me indefinitely
Despite fears of looming inevitable endings
I will presist to love you
Like the fruit flies in my kitchen
From the hole made by my cats in the screen
It feels bipolar in its fluctations
and dramatic determinations
to endlessly challenge me
Indefinitely
(both the love and the fruit flies)

Define: "Body Issues"

My stomach tightens, I am a flower that sings and dances circles around Snow White. I wanted to be a dwarf, I wanted to be Dopey, but I got stuck being a flower. Pink paper petals surround my face. My mother on the side watching our Kindgergarten Snow White performance. I watch the witch’s mother, skinny, in tight clothes. Snow White’s mother in a short white skirt, skinny as well. I look at the mothers, all are skinny with one chin. My mother the size of two or three of them and has two or three chins. My stomach tightens. I can hear their thoughts when they look at her, “The elephant lady”, I’m telepathic, my grandmother taught me. She’s there too. She’s overweight, but that’s okay, because she’s a granny. She’s (my mother) in turquoise with golden sequins and turquoise eye makeup. Telling everyone look at me I am a circus elephant. I do not want to talk to her when the play is over. I am hoping no one will know she is my mother. She is an elephant. Age 4

My third hot dog dripping with mayo and ketchup. My stomach hurts I cannot eat anymore. I look at the two hot dogs left on my plate. I stuff the third one in my mouth and swallow. I shovel the other two faster than my stomach can tell my brain that it will burst

H shows me where he will build the glass elevator in our garden. He is white, like a moving piece of lard. He eats meat for breakfast, rare and loves the fat. His skin smells like uncooked meat. He shows me the wall where the glass elevator will be. He grabs my bony wrists and pins me up against the wall. Pressing his mouth on mine, his cheeks cover blocking my nostrils when I try to inhale. He lifts my shirt and traces my jutting ribs with his tongue. His hair smells like fat. My ribs remember. Age 7

Holed up in our darkness, we quarrel. She leaves for class. I call Pizza Hut, they will not deliver till another hour. I order a New Yorker with extra cheese. I finish it in 6 minutes. I lie down feling the energy pulsatting in my stomach, radiating all over my body. She comes back to our darkness, she touches my breasts. We quarrel, she leaves. I order another New Yorker with extra cheese. I lie down by the door next to two empty boxes of pizza. I touch my stomach. I touch my breasts, I close my eyes and I rest

I am the daughter of a red indian. Like the chief from Peter Pan. I have a long headdress with red feathers going down my back. I am wearing a leather vest opened. My chest exposed but its okay because I don’t have breasts yet. I am tied up, wrists behind my back to the bed post. H is a cowboy he has a beard painted on his face. His hands touching me all over feel like they don’t have bones just flesh that smells of fat. Age 8

She ties the strings of her leapord print corset, tightening them around my waist. She traces her fingers across my clavicle. My pussy dries and her’s drips I held my breath and her’s got heavier. “You look so sexy”she looks at me, I look away. The door is locked so her father doesn’t come in, I can’t get out.

Pink with golden glitter and a frill around the waist, the swimsuit around my body. French cut. I feel my like everytime I walk I’m going to get a wedgy. My uncle in a black tight swimsuit is on the chaise long. He has boobs that he doesn’t cover. I have boobs too. He has three stomaches when he sits down, I have only one. My boobs are the size of pingpong balls half embedded into my chest. I cover them. “You look so sexy”.

“What’s sexy?”

“It means people want you”

“What does people want me mean?” Age 11

A boiled gray chicken infront of my mother at the dinner table, my father and brother’s plates overflowing. Everyone has breasts and their bellies are hanging. A napkin is laid out on my lap, I secretly drop the food on it. I have no belly and I have no breasts.

I wore my mom’s bikini from the 70s, its cool. It has these funky circles and its yellow, green, purple and orange. Its not much just a few strings tied together around my body. My breasts fill the cups. The bottoms are a little bit loose. I wander as I always do, my diary and a pencil. I am trying to find a special place. Somewhere no one has seen. Somewhere I can record something profound and significant. I find a pool and next to it a big net. The kind you can fish things out with. He comes up from behind me. I don’t know him. I feel his arms around my waist I look down his hands are dark and his knuckles are chaffed. The synthetic material of his shorts makes the skin on my back itch, but his belly cushions my back. One hand cups my breast the other one slides into my bottoms. In broken English he says “You are so sexy”. I don’t record this in my diary, but I never wear a bikini again. Age 14

Not a paperclip

This is not a paper clip

It’s a plate

With white rice, ensheathed with oil

Catching

A reflection of light, but nothing

Else

Compacted grains

I take a forkful then

Push

The

Grains

Back

To

Maintain

The shape

This time I don’t watch my hands

Because this is not a paper clip

It’s a 4 fingered metal extension of my hand.

It has a pattern

It’s made in Japan

And it doesn’t have scars laced with memories

Its pretty dumb this whole utensil thing, except right now it’s saving me from having to wash my hands.

A cafeteria means:

Someone cooks and someone cleans

And that someone is not me

I just have to stand behind the counter load my tray and pay

Find a table

On any other day I would have probably ranted about our alienation from our food, today, I’m just fucking happy that I don’t have to do jackshit

Lessons of Impermanence

If anything, the greatest lesson learnt was from my bipolar disorder/order. Everything was fleeting, changeable, always impermanent. First manifested in my moods then spilling over to every other aspect of my life: My emotions, my desires, my thoughts, my perceptions, my beliefs, my relationships. At first it was hard; trying to maintain some kind of consistency and stability in my mood, my search for neurotransmitter permanence, resist the constant influx of mood changes. Failed attempts at mood stability, spilling over and allowing an acceptance of the transience of everything else: My emotions, my desires, my thoughts, my perceptions, my beliefs, my relationships. The ephemerality bred my “grain of salt” mentality. I have ceased to take anything seriously, my militant opinions, my dreams, my revelations, my realizations, my oh so intense emotions. Impermanent. I wait for my feelings towards you to fleet, I wait, I wait, and I wait. I’m still waiting. This scares me, I’m still waiting. When I woke up today, I realized they just got too damn serious and I couldn’t take them with a grain salt anymore. It’s been a long wait for how I feel about you to fleet. I’m still waiting.

Abandonment Angst

I was talking to my friend today, I was feeling very distant from myself.

So we reviewed my mood chart. The online daily record of my mood

Mildly elevated

Moderately elevated

Severely elevated

Baseline

Mildly depressed

Moderately depressed

Severely depressed

Mild anxiety

Moderate anxiety

Severe anxiety

Mild irritability

Moderate irritability

Severe irritability

Menstruating

Medication taken

Additional comments

Three weeks of my emotions recorded on the world wide web @ moodtracker.com right under

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Cymbalta

I was dis@&#@*co n@&#@nected. My friend who is psychic tuned into me. I was hiding in someone’s heart, she said. I said there was something under the surface, tickling, like scraping nails against a board, the inside of my chest. While I studied the cartilage and muscle of dog’s larynx. Every so often, the nails tickle my chest cavity, get my attention and then scrape. The noise is heard by every part of my body.

It’s 30 C^ooutside, I’m lying on my couch, my books surrounding me, a water bottle next to me, in front of my heater, wrapped in a blanket.

Phoenix my cat, climbs over me, like I’m not there. I watch a movie on my computer. The doorbell rings a few times. I do not get up.

I finish the movie, and in my chest her nails are scraping (I know anatomically the sensation cannot exist, but right now my consciousness perceives my chest as a hollow space with no organs). Her nails tickle the walls, moving against these tiny bumps, vibrating them, making them resonate in my chest in unison.

I vibrate internally

No thoughts

No feeling, only sensations

Physical

Simple

Panic triggered, I recall:

My best friend from high school.

Phoenix jumps up, someone is outside the apartment. The bell rings again. Her nails dig deeply into the walls of my chest.

I do not open, I recall:

“I can’t handle this, I can’t watch you doing this to yourself”

Moving on and away from me

My parents, their shields coming up holding me back at a safe distance

Mary (ex-partner who cheated on me) hiding deeper into her own misery to escape mine.

Resilient friends, who would pull away and return once the cloud of teenage morbid gloom lifts away.

I panic, because my current girlfriend (long distance), I’m not sure what else to call her despite the fact that that label throws me in a state of panic, is frowning at me.

Arms crossed, teeth clenched.

Well in my head she is at least, whether I’m projecting or not.

Lying pathetically on my side, not getting up. I feel this sense of failure overwhelm me. I can her in my head to the rhythm of the scarping lady’s nails, not blaming me with her words but the nails dig deeper and tear,

She says,

I really love you

Or

I love you so much

Or

I love you very much

Or

I love you a lot

But

I can’t handle you when you get like this, I’m sorry I can’t be with you anymore

Not an irrational fear based on past experiences with humans in close emotional proximity

I want to COMMUNICATE,

but the scraping lady’s nails plucked my recurrent laryngeal nerve and I

whimper

Manic Connections

Pages turning, pencils scratching on paper, I was sitting at the side of the lab on a stool, my back resting against a bench. I was watching my breathing, I was watching the students. Counting my breath to entertain myself while they took their anatomy exam. I was making sure no one cheated. Not like I would be able to figure out what to do if I caught someone cheating.

I was lying on the beach huddled up to the American Jew because it was cold and the car wouldn’t start. The (ig)noble savage who sings Dylan songs better than Dylan was on the American Jew’s other side. All of us huddled up together trying to stay warm. Both me and the (ig)noble savage hoping to get lucky with the American Jew. I fell asleep, my snoring kept them both awake.

I rubbed the American Jew’s shoulders. she was laying between my legs. The water rose and I saw a man walking on the water between the mangroves. The beer I had been drinking didn’t get me drunk, it just relaxed my constructs of reality.

I’m in my room in my parents’ house. Now once again my house, I’m listening to the same music I used to listen to when I was 16 and angry. Its loud. I’m screaming along. The door is closed and no one is allowed to come in. I have my Seroquel to bring me down from my mania and my Lustral to bring me up from my depression. Not sure which to take. I’m manically depressed right now. Morbidity vs. this word which means life that I can’t figure out what it is. My therapist labeled it.

These three students try to cheat. I panic, I don’t know what to do. I sort of glimpsed them, I don’t have any hard evidence. I feel everything dissolves around me the three students. Mary, Marwa and May. Cheating cheaters. I want to confront them but I can’t.

I wake up on the beach next to the American Jew. I don’t know if its Mary the cheater or Mona my friend who I am involved with.

I put the music down my cat is in the room, I don’t want to scare him.

I sober up on a bus making its way to Cairo, 11 hour bus ride. I have two hours to see Mona. The Egyptian intelligence is after me because I was hitchhiking with the American Jew and The Indian girl. We were trying to find a sea turtle nesting beach. The Indian girl’s last name means betrayed. The American Jew is a CIA agent. I have to see Mona. Nothing feels safe. Mary cheated, my co-worker is CIA and everyone is trying to fuck with my head. I know safety in Mona’s arms.

I left Mary, a million months later I discovered she cheated on me. I’m whiny and I’m not getting over it. Every story I write is about her. I want to curl up into her arms and to cry and for her to comfort me. I just want to curl up in her arms, feel her stroking my face. Kissing me telling me she’s sorry. I want to forgive her for cheating on me. I want to still be with her.

The antagonist in all my stories is called Marwa, this is my name for Mary in all my stories. She started cheating on me in May. I didn’t leave her because I didn’t have any hard evidence.

Between the mangroves the dugong lies being pecked by the Flamingo as the moon rises. My best friend isn’t speaking to me anymore. I fucked her sister, I feel everything I want to feel towards Mona as I rub the American Jews shoulders.

9 meters under the sea, it wets me with its tears. Another hotel up on the coast. Some Italian tourists are sun bathing on the first sea turtle nest of the season. 12 dugongs left in the Red Sea. One is hiding in the mangroves being pecked by that flamingo. The (ig)noble savage who sings Dylan better than Dylan sings:

“Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
Come in, she said,
I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”