Your Symptoms Are Consistent

When I was twenty, I sat in a grey room. I was there because I had needed stitches for a cut too deep, and they had released me on the condition that I see a psychiatrist for what would not be the first time, though it would be different from all the others. Perched on a plastic chair, facing big books on a short, mahogany bookshelf, thousands of pages about child psychology and trauma healing and dialectical behavioral therapy. Her desk was L-shaped, separating the two of us, something like a barrier, something like a metaphor. She asked a lot of questions that had been asked of me before, though my answers had always been largely ignored. Or maybe just misinterpreted. Or maybe I hadn’t yet told the truth.

“Your symptoms are consistent with bipolar II disorder.” Her eyes were wide and unflinching, puppy dog brown.

The first thing I thought was “duh.” This sense of obviously flooding my every pore, this sense of could it be more glaringly evident? A paralyzing urge to roll my eyes into the back of my head.

The second thing I thought was “thank god, someone has finally recognized this thing that I’ve known.” Overwhelming validation flooding my body, a legitimization of everything I had ever felt. In a way, what others thought of me was more important than what I thought of myself. I have never trusted in my head particularly much; it betrayed me too many times. Hearing a professional tell me what I had known for years felt like confirmation, the beginning of trusting myself.

The third thing I thought was “oh my god I can’t believe it took this long for someone to see me.” Exasperation meets disillusionment. Suddenly this thing that was supposed to be a climax in my life was perhaps a development, but nothing more.

All this in a split second, in a whirl that I wouldn’t be able to decode for years.
And then

“You will likely spend the rest of your life on medication to treat this illness.”

I waited over six years for this diagnosis, this confirmation. I would now, apparently, have to spend the rest of my life combatting it.

Outside, I sat on a park bench. The green line dropped me off in the Boston Common, where I was wearing a purple scarf, and the breeze kept blowing it up. Golden and open; the opposite of the grey room. Sun was blaring, but not hot, and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight.

Isabel, my platonic soulmate, texted me back saying that the idea of taking medication “for the rest of my life” probably wasn’t true. And Jon said he didn’t think it was the worst thing in the world even if it was true. And I sat there on that park bench feeling lonely again, dense and dazed.

Dread. Because as long as there was nothing wrong, there was nothing for me to fix. I could revel in the disease: indulge in the desolation and exploit the frenzy.

The last thing I remember thinking was “now what?”

Now medication monitoring and keeping track of several pink, white, and blue pills, and therapy once a week then twice a week, and support groups, sitting in circles in rooms with grey carpets and white boards, and lots of research and reading academic articles on my porch trying to understand my brain. Now I didn’t want the diagnosis. Because now there was work. Now struggle. And failure and fear.

But that’s the easy answer, only part of the truth. The other part of the truth is that once I hauled my brain out of doom and gloom, I was utterly and irrevocably relieved. Okay, now there were all these difficult things, sure. But all these difficult things were promising to make my life so much easier. I’m a solution-oriented person, always ready to take action to make something better.

To name the pain was to alleviate the pain by giving me a way to target the pain.

 

Amelia Clare Wright: “I am a recent graduate of Columbia’s MFA program in nonfiction creative writing. I have work appearing in Variant Lit and The McNeese Review, among others. I grew up in Baltimore City and now live in Los Angeles. I am currently working on a memoir about pain and trying to decide if I want to be a coral reef or a tree when I die.”