It's Been There All Along

My intuitive mind kept telling me something, and it caught me off guard. I asked how long I had been like this, and the answer that came back was: since third grade. That made a strange kind of sense. First grade, I was too little. Second grade, I had a genuinely good teacher, a woman, and we never got to keep the good ones for long. If they married, they had to leave. A married woman would get pregnant eventually, and back then no respectable woman stood pregnant in front of young children. So after her, every teacher I had in parochial school was a man.

The pattern in grade school always ran the same direction. Getting in trouble started with hot, stubborn anger and finished with me crying until I could barely breathe. From one mood straight into the opposite one, no slow fade in between. I would walk home knowing I had done it again. I never told my parents, because telling them meant getting in trouble twice, so I hid the notes the school sent home or tore them up. No computers, no cell phones in those days, thank goodness. I prayed to Jesus, and even that didn't keep me out of it. However ashamed I felt, however much snot I smeared across my sleeves and forearms, it happened anyway. I can still picture myself perched on a church bench, or maybe a folding chair, while my parents sat talking with my teacher about my behavior. And that was around third grade.

The label stuck fast. 'Trouble' was practically my name, and teachers kept inventing tasks to keep my hands busy and me out of mischief. The schoolwork itself was never the problem. I'd get bored sitting there while the teacher drilled the same material over and over for the kids who couldn't follow it. I was inventive. I read my way through the little classroom libraries, one after another. Art was my favorite. One Valentine's Day I made cupids for a display and left a bare patch between their legs, so I had to go back and add ribbons to cover it. Somewhere in there they gave me the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children. I suspect they ran out of other ways to make sense of me.

I'm 76 now, which is a long stretch to have been bipolar: periods of manic energy trading off with periods of depression, to keep the description plain. For most of my life it never occurred to me that the word applied to me. The only manic-depressives I'd seen up close were patients at the state hospital where I worked during college summers, and the term bipolar didn't really catch on until well after I'd finished graduate school. What those patients showed was far louder than what passes for manic or depressive behavior today. My second summer on the ward, there was a manic-depressive man who once pinched a nurse's large chest just to find out whether it was real. In his depressed stretches he folded inward and gave nothing in group therapy. That was when his wife came and took him home, because for her that was simply how her husband was.

My own 'manic' never looked like that. It meant being outgoing, up, easy with strangers, quick with a glib or funny line. When the depression came, I wanted everyone to leave me alone and had no interest in talking to anyone. They'd already had their chance before I went under. When I was up, I figured I was just being sociable, maybe trying to lift somebody's spirits. For years I assumed what I had was plain depression. I'd written about that feeling before, in a post I called Been Down So Long, It Seems Like Up To Me. Later I came to understand I had been sexually abused as a child, and that was the root of my fear of the dark.

It was only recently that I learned the word bipolar fit me, and that my symptoms lined up with the diagnosis. I'm still working my way through what that means.

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