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.

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

Learn More

Roll over this ad to find a checklist that helps

Identify common symptoms so you talk to your Doctor

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

Paper Clips

Have you ever straightened a colored paper clip? Have you ever made little bends and twists in it? Have you ever rotated it slowly between your thumb and forefinger? Have you ever watched the shapes, the angles and length change as you rotated it? Have you ever spun it really fast and watched the tracers? Have you ever spun it really fast and watched what was under the tracers stain with the color of the paper clip? Have you ever changed the bends and twists and then rotated it between your thumb and forefinger? Have you ever spun it really fast and watched the tracers? Have you ever spun it really fast and watched what was under the tracers stain with the color of the paper clip? Have you ever looked at your hands while you were spinning between your thumb and forefinger a straightened colored paper clip with twists and bends whose tracers stained what was under them with the color of the paper clip? Have you ever had your hands be so far away? Have you ever had your hands numb and senseless? Have you ever had your hands look like they weren’t yours? Have you ever had your hands with all the scars that you carved into it look like they were someone else’s? Have you ever sat there staring at your hand as you spun a straightened colored paper clip between your thumb and forefinger as the tracers stained whatever was under it with the color of the paper clip not knowing when all this happened to you? Have you ever sat there and had your body feel like it was not yours? Have you ever sat there and had your body feel numb and senseless? Have you ever sat there knowing that this body you have loathed was not yours? Have you ever sat there knowing that all the memories that you regretted are not yours? Have you ever sat there knowing that this life that you have hated was not yours? Have you ever sat there with a straightened colored paper clip between your thumb and forefinger spinning mourning a hated life not lived? Have you ever felt a huge wave of sadness suffocate you? Have you ever felt the huge wave of sadness engulf you and drown you into apathy? Have you ever been so apathetic that the energy for suicide was not there and you sat there with a straightened paper clip between your thumb and forefinger spinning? Have you ever watched the apathy sever the ties that may feed a desire for life? Have you ever sat there loving and hating, hating and loving, spinning a straightened colored paper clip between your thumb and forefinger? Have you sat there with a straightened paper clip between your thumb and forefinger with all its twists and bends hating your pathetic existence? Have you ever wanted to die so much that it had already started to happen? Have you ever wanted to die so much that you sat there with a straightened colored paper clip with bends and twists between your thumb and forefinger spinning with the tracers staining what’s beneath with its color?

Parturition

The first time I did it I was 12. Prep 2, Home Economics. I don’t know what did it. Maybe it was being forced to be in the kitchen, cooking, more like over-cooking a pasty pasta. Maybe it was the smell of oil. My incompetence as a female to enjoy, the sounds of a scraping knife against a cutting board, or the sizzling of the oil, or the fact that I always felt I carried a deep dark secret that weighed on me through every moment of my day. They can see it in my eyes, everyone knows. I avoided him at school, wondered if his fingerprints would always be imprinted on my body. If I died, in the autopsy would they be able to tell where his hands went from lifting up the fingerprints. Home Economics, I had to be something I didn’t want to be. Don’t know what it is, but it was stifling. Just as stifling as wearing a skirt was. Every skirt was an invasion that cut straight to my center. Shook me and left me humiliated. I might as well be naked and for everyone to touch me. My hairless peepee, my completely undeveloped boobees. The skirt exposed them, the kitchen exposed them. The emptiness sliced through my gut. My head felt light and I felt I was passing out. I was passing the kitchen knife to one of the students. I wanted to help, but every time I tried, waves of shame would just take me under. I snuck the knife, outside the kitchen in my pocket. I took it to the bathroom. Locked the door. I sat on the toilet seat and stared at my feet. I was wearing different a shoe on each foot, a green shoe and a red shoe. I stared at my wrists, the knife, my feet. I pressed the knife to my wrist gently; as I pressed harder some invisible hand guided my hand to my palm. I cut deeply across my lifeline. It took a few seconds before the blood appeared. Shyly through the opening. Peeping, then a torrent. I breathed. I have connected with myself. I wiped the blood off my hand, wrapped my hand with toilet paper, and stuck it deep into my pocket. I returned the knife with out cleaning it. I watched with satisfaction, almost a euphoria as they struggled through their tears and runny noses to cut the onions with the knife that had cleansed me.

I had a new secret now, one that set me apart from everyone else. One that no one could know about. One that made headaches go away, loneliness go away, that crazy feeling that my chest was going to explode and splatter all over the walls, go away. One that no one must know about ever. I either hid it well, or no one cared, but no one knew. After knives, came sharp pointed object, from cutting to scraping away, repeatedly. From dead skin flaking off in a powder, to epidermis that would gather at the sides of the cut, to dermis searing hot collected around the tip of metal. To blood, to breathing, to pride, pride that this was mine, pride that I didn’t need anyone, pride that my secret was mine, it wasn’t a secret shared by two people. It was just for me. To burning, to blisters, to punching, to whipping, to biting.

When I look at my hands now, 13 years later, I feel proud of the scars, when I get close to someone I share the story behind each scar with them. It brings me closer to people, to share something that was so painful. I don’t share new wounds, I hide them. I will not be reprimanded. I will not give explanations. I will not be labeled. I can see you look at my hands, I can see you acknowledge them. Acknowledging my desperation, not judging me, Thank you for not judging, fuck you if you are. It has to be my hands, I have to feel it with every action, I have to conceal them. It sets me apart now from people, with shame that 13 years later I’m still 12 years old, that probably in another 13 years I’ll still be 12. It has to be my hands, because it’s the only part in my body that I can comfortably put into my mouth. Bite through, continuously, taste the skin and blood, gnaw and tear with my teeth. I feel better, but I probably will not share this with you, because I don’t want to see you look at me in disgust, to think I’m a freak, to look at me with pity, try to help me, I feel the rift between us because I will not share. I will hide it, make up stories about it, state it matter of factly devoid of emotion, allude to it, but this is mine and only mine and no matter how much you think that I'm sharing. I will not share it.

Recall: Emptiness

“Where did this emptiness come from?” I ask myself, playing the role of the therapist. I’ve been to so many, I’m at number 12 and still counting, I have the jargon down, the intonations, the gestures and the facial expressions. I smile at myself compassionately.

“Well, I guess it’s because I wasn’t nurtured by mother” I state matter-of-factly, devoid of quivering lips and tearful eyes. Well I must have said this a million times. To at least 12 different therapists, constantly repeating the exact session with a different therapist

Sometimes it would be repeated with the same therapist. I guess, sometimes they run out of paper, or pencils and don’t take notes and just don’t remember

I raise one eyebrow in response, “What about your lovers? Don’t they nurture you?”

“Well, yes they do”

“So?”

I reflect on nurture. I hate nurture. I crave nurture. I hate it because I crave it, I resent you when you give it to me, because I want it. I don’t want to want it and most of all I don’t want you to give it to me.

“What do you mean by nurture?”

“I don’t know?”

“What does nurture feel like?”

“Warm”

I recall nurture, radiating warmth. Abstract, far, different in every context. Different from one person to the other. In a sense it is not there, cannot be boxed. Fills up and assuages chronic feelings of emptiness. Recall, reminding my cells how it feels to be in contact with your cells. You being, the last 3 people I thought I was in love with. Allowed our cells to communicate. I recall and the screaming emptiness is pacified. Temporarily. Appetizers, leaving me somewhat satisfied, but craving, more, cellular communication, cellular warmth.

“Is there a way to completely fill that emptiness?”

I go back into my memory, my grandmother nurtured me. My father nurtured me. I feel grateful, but I am looking for something else. My mother, a mixture of holding me close and pushing me away. Cliché? Maybe. I feel insecurity. I remember insecurity is not a feeling. I feel insecure and helpless. I feel warm, then I feel empty. I feel compassionate. Something happened, I want before that time, before the ambivalence. Before she would love me and then push me away. I feel it, fleeting an instant. Recall, the instant where the infinite regression halts. Where I am no longer searching, I hold onto it. My mother, no cigarette between her lips, fresh soapy smell. No smoke hanging around us. She can love me because I just am. She can love me because the fucking therapists can’t label me. She can’t label me, she can’t judge me, because I just am. I am filled.

Infinitely regressing. I let go of this fulfillment, I want to go deeper, I am curious about my birth. The glaring lights. The latex gloves. My mother holds me, takes me in her arms, exhausted. My father holds me up. My memories are tainted by cognitive biases induced by captured Kodak moments. I remember the pictures, the one where they handed me to my mother, the one my father holds me, and the one my father passes me to my grandmother. I cannot recall, but I can pretend I do. Somehow it seems important to remember the moment I came into the world. To recall, why it was I made this decision to come here, that there was some life affirming drive. That I wanted to beat all odds to come out of my mother and live. There had to be a choice to live, and I had to have taken it. I need to recall that choice, affirmation to live. A deterrent to recurrent suicidal ideation.

The contractions in her womb scared me, every contraction reminded me of the choice, I can choose to stay or I can choose to leave and live. Every contraction I had to decide. Every moment of indecisiveness led to a surge of oxytocin and another contraction prompting me to make my choice. My mother said I slipped right out, her contractions were short I came out with ease. In the last minute I try and stop coming out. I wrap the chord around my neck. Her vagina opens easily, like the trapdoor on a hangman, the chord tightens around my neck as I slip out from between her legs. Till this day I can’t bear to have anything around my neck. I can debate whether it is because this is a constant reminder of my utter failure at my first suicide attempt, or a life affirmative survival instinct.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant till the sixth month, when I was going to lose you” Many times my mother has told me how she didn’t know I was there till she nearly lost me, many times I’ve told this story to people. Hoping someone would find some significant hidden meaning. I hid in her womb for 6 months. Recall, warm, encompassing, private. A secret sexually transmitted parasite. The panic is unleashed, not mine, hers, her adrenaline passing through me, widening my vessels and pushing my thimble sized heart to pump faster. She was losing me, she didn’t know she had me, but wanted me when she was going to lose me. I wasn’t scared.

I was being private, curled up secretly in my mother’s uterus, another survival tactic, maybe. I was being secretive when my fat ugly maid Rabha, which means breadwinner, would pull me by my ankles, the fat rippling on her arms, her breasts sagging down lower than her waist. She would pull me by the ankles off the bed. I would hit my head. She always smelt of a mixture stagnating sweat trapped under synthetic material, Samna baladi and Lemon fragranced Prill. She takes me into her arms, she’s sitting cross legged. It felt good her body soft and squishy. Arms enclosing me, layers of flesh covering me like blankets. No matter where I would lay my head, it felt like a soft breast. Recall, warmth, nurture, a spoon between my legs, arms enclosing, warmth, my glow in the dark plastic sword pressed on my clit, rubbing, raw. Recall…

Infinitely regressing, my undeveloped neurons do not fire to the external stimulus. I don’t feel the warmth, I do not feel. Recall, I am aware of my physical body, tiny floating in her sac. Aware but cannot feel, no decisions about living, just hanging there.

I wait for the split in my consciousness. The zygote regressing to an egg and a sperm, to an “n” and an “n”. My consciousness splitting into an “n” and an “n”. My consciousness remains intact, perception, sensation and awareness of the physical do not exist. My consciousness does, remains, as is. No more infinite regression. No more regression, no more progression. Just my consciousness. Recall, infinite chronic feelings of emptiness.

I believe in DSM

I'm not sure why I would want to blog about my bipolar, but I guess I need to start this blog with some kind of first post.

I want to throw my emotions out at everyone, I already do that with people I know and people I just meet, and there is a certain excitement in being able to do that with even more people. My emotions have been the source of so much drama in my life and so that might be a good explanation for my indulgence. Its not much of an explanation for my exhibitionism, but when I think about it. Growing up, so much of who I am, what happened to me and things I believed in had to be hidden. Society loves the secrets, so people can get their little thrills with their expose' of other people and can feel a bit better about their own secrets. I hate the silence and I hate the shame. Exhibitionism is my big FUCK YOU to everyone and everything that has every made me feel ashamed of any part of who I am.

Maintaining this blog is going to be very inconsistent. I expect that there will be days where I might post a thousand million times and othertimewhere I just won't for months.

Depending on whether or not I'm having a day where I'm a DSM believer or not, whether or not I acknowledge the existence of bipolar. If I believe in the DSM then I believe I'm bipolar.

This is how I feel* about being bipolar:
1. Isolated (from the people I care about)
2. Alienated (from general society)
3. Flawed (unable to perform academically)
4. Angry (I don't know where to start or where to end with that one)
5. "Poor me" (Not too hard to figure that one out)
6. Desperate
8. Frustrated
9. Fed up (that this is something I'm stuck with)
10. Confused (about what it means to acknowledge that I am bipolar)
11. Scared (that another episode is just around the corner)
12. Optimistic (that some manic high will enlighten me)

(I love parathensis, the content becomes optional. One can read it or skip over it. Its an after thought, a clarification, but best of all it's optional)


*Please note that the use of the word feelings to describe the list of words is incorrect word choice. Some of the words listed below are not feelings. For an inventory on words that fall under the category of feelings go to http://www.cnvc.org/feelings.htm.