Route 410: Part Three

I often look around and find myself surrounded by no friends but empty chairs. There’s a Larkin poem where he says that and it’s always stuck in my head. Coming out of wards isn’t just coming out of wards, essentially I have to choose what to do with my life. I want to cut out meat and cut out alcohol but nothing seems to absolve the guilt from my mania era. I’ve struggled with being good and bad my entire life, as a teenager my mental health allowed me to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t for a while and I guess that never really stopped. Even though I’ve got real-life experiences of the things I used to lie about as a teen, I still feel like a liar when I tell stories, it doesn’t go away. Maybe it’s normal to feel emotionally stunted, to never get over what happened in our teenage years, there are enough movies and books about it. I’m growing up late, I know that for sure.

It’s like if I find the right words, maybe the people who had to leave me behind will come back. There was a man on the wards who used to do his wedding dance (to ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’) by himself, blind to the truth that his wife had left him. Sometimes I feel that way, as he didn’t understand why she wasn’t answering his calls; I’m waiting on messages that will never be sent; the truth is that I’ve lost some people forever and that’s what I deserve, I was manic and formed obsessions with people who, under varying circumstances, didn’t have room in their life for that. Nobody has room for that in their life. 

I was engaged in the wards, I moved on and found somebody and now they’ve had their phone taken from them for months and it’s the same feeling, it’s possible to mourn somebody who is still alive. Perhaps the more applicable Elvis song would be ‘Return To Sender’, I wrote letter after letter to my old friends and I’ll never send. Even when I was manic I knew that that would be a bad idea, I mean, at least I hope I didn’t send them. I don’t remember. It’s a confusing feeling having done wrong and not knowing the full extent of your wrongdoing. It’s hard to measure the guilt I feel obliged to feel; I can’t sustain it because everything from that time is blurry with the mix of Zoloft, alcohol, and my mind going thousands of miles a minute. I was told I’d go on flights of fantasy when I was manic; it was easier than facing reality, that’s for sure.

This may read as depressive, but instead of a great sadness, I don’t feel anything. I’m on the highest dose of mood stabilizers and it has cured my obsession with various men, but it’s also left me without many emotions. It’ll be changed in time; at the moment, it feels like all I do is wait for things to happen. I doubt I’ll ever write fully about that time; part of the reason why I know they aren’t coming back is that I shared things about them I shouldn’t have, telling people’s secrets and then taking a virtual high horse about honesty.

I get flashbacks all the time and it’s hard to distinguish between real and not real. There’s a Violent Femmes song where they sing “I don’t even remember if we were lovers or if I just wanted to,” and that holds for me, it’s so blurry I’ve had to infer between what happened; there was one who had just left his girlfriend and certainly wasn’t ready for me imposing myself, and there was one who had a girlfriend that I misread kindness as flirting. It hurts because I’ve always been someone who is alone, and had individual friends but never a group or friends who moved away, and I finally had something that was equivalent to a group of supportive local friends and I sabotaged it. Despite all the harm, I caused I suffered alongside it; as I say, there are people I won’t be getting back. I’m not writing this so people pity me either; it’s just how I process things. It’s been that way since forever, I grew up as a reader with few friends. 

However, amidst all this loneliness there is possibility. I’ve got friends I haven’t seen since I was manic and I’m so excited to see them again. University will be starting at the end of this month. My weight will stabilize and so will I. It’s all out there for me; at 24, I’m able to build my life back up. “You’re so young,” a nurse told me “People will forget and move on,”. I wish I could forget, but I will move on. I have moved on. There’s nothing but potential out there, I remember saying that to a doctor and apologizing that it sounded manic “that’s not mania, that’s just ambition,” he told me. In the notes of my tribunal, they said although I was clearly still manic I was an intelligent young woman. This was the tribunal where I told the doctor he had blood on his hands and that he should read Deleuze. That wasn’t even that long ago; even two weeks ago I was too unstable to be let out. I’ve recovered quickly, and though I feel like my discharge was a little premature it’s still given me hope.

One day this guilt and enduring loneliness will be a thing of the past, I’ll be a story to some people and I can’t change that. “Remember when you met that mad girl?” The stories will remain but I will have changed; I am no longer crazy. I’ve got a reputation for myself; I remember a friend being warned to stay away from me because of how I am. The thing is that there’s no such thing as ‘the way you are’ and though I’m probably always going to be insane in people’s memories, the current me wants to be sane. They are looking at lessening my meds so I know someday I’ll be able to feel again. In the time before eight o’clock – meds time- find myself happy and laughing as the mood stabilizers wear off. Someday soon I’ll be stable enough to continue on a lower dose and joy isn’t something that you can just find one day, it’s something that you can make. I could let this guilt consume me or I could choose to be something I’ve been waiting to be my whole life; happy.

[This was written as part of a collection of short essays, the other two can be found on my blog. Route 410 will continue]