Through my eyes: My bipolar journey
06 December, 2018
"She has blue eyes." That was the first thing my dad said about me when I was born. He had blue eyes. It deeply saddens me to think that he was already looking for something that we had in common from the first moment he saw me.
All babies have blue eyes at birth, but mine turned hazel. As long as he lived, my dad never knew that we actually did have something in common. We both had bipolar disorder.
When I was a kid, my mom told me that my dad had "manic depression." To me, that brought to mind a pot of boiling water with the lid vibrating and steam escaping, ready to explode at any moment.
My dad would spend thousands of dollars on Rolex watches and high-end stereo equipment and then lock himself in his bedroom for days. One day, he would affectionately tease me until I giggled. The next day, he would angrily snap at me for no reason.
He had outbursts that terrified me. I exhausted myself trying to make sense of his actions, always taking them personally. I was the girl with daddy issues, which undiagnosed bipolar disorder made more complicated.
Growing up with bipolar disorder
I have always been outgoing. My first word was not "mama" or "dada," it was "hi." As soon as I could talk, I said "hi" to everyone I met.
In elementary school, I was full of hyperactive energy and had a hard time sitting still. My teachers often sent me to the principal's office because I talked too much in class. In high school, I filled my schedule with extracurricular activities and social events, leaving barely enough time to do homework.
In college, not only did I have a full schedule of classes and a job, but I also threw myself into activist groups and partied every night of the week. I was constantly making new friends, and I slept with more people than I could count.
My thoughts would race from one thing to another. I swung back and forth at the mercy of my impulses. I jumped between relationships, apartments, jobs, and even sexual identities. I was riding on a runaway locomotive that was going at 120 miles an hour with no sign of stopping.
In my senior year of college, my mom left my dad. He had been buying guns and shooting holes into the ground. He would drive for hours to cheap motels far away and call her with threats of suicide. He had taken pills and had his stomach pumped.
He washed and dried my mom's work suits in the washing machine, shrinking them and hanging them back up on the same hangers. I imagined little doll-sized suits, wrinkled and mangled beyond recognition, and my dad — a deranged lunatic — standing over them.