Truth or Taunt?
I am bipolar. I have bipolar. I have been diagnosed with Bipolar Type I. I am bipolar, and one particular aspect that has plagued me, for what feels like my entire life, is black and white either/or thinking. I laughed then cried at this eloquent line from Ricky Bobby’s father in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby:
“ If you’re not first, you’re last.”
In some ways, I am grateful for majoring in English in college: analyzing literature helped me understand and articulate nuance. I just don’t, or can’t, apply it to myself. As my mother succumbed to her own mental illness, she’d call me “the bad daughter” and my sister “the good daughter.” Instead of understanding that this is an immaterial distinction, and also just a fucked up thing to say, I internalized it: I am the bad daughter. A bad person. If I am bad, I cannot be good. I wish I was good, that I could be good!
Because some part of me still understands that “all or nothing” is not a viable lens for viewing the world, I never thought to myself, “Well if she thinks I’m bad, I’ll show her bad!” It took a lot of therapy to unravel those parts of myself, that I contain multitudes, etc.
Richard III is my favorite Shakespeare play. I read it for the first time in my freshman year of college. And maybe that saved me, or at least cushioned my brain. In his opening monologue, Richard explains:
“And therefore since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”
I embody this sentiment, but I have also learned how to pull it apart. Richard had other options besides these two, but in the play at least, a lifetime of verbal abuse (at best) and physical difficulties created a broken person. Shakespeare’s Richard didn’t have therapy, but he could have found a different way to spend his days. But just as Richard could only so see two paths, so I struggled two. I wasn’t a good person, but I wanted to be a good person, so I acted like a good person.
So, even now, sometimes I have to talk to myself like a child. “No, Natasha, that’s not true that if you’re not first, you’re last. There’s value in trying at all, there’s value in coming in second. Just because you came in last this time doesn’t mean you will come in last always. People will still love you even if you don’t come in first.”
I have a very clear set of instructions for sleeping. For sleeping like a normal person. Instructions from a doctor who emphasized trying, doing my best, if I stumble, to keep going anyway. But my brain says, “Well, you stayed up too late, you slept in too late, you took too long of a nap. You’ve ruined everything and you’re back to square one and you’ll just suffer forever.”
This was a problem when I was sick with shingles. I needed rest. I couldn’t sleep because of pain. Everything was a mess. And my brain felt it was a good use of resources to berate myself for straying from my sleep schedule. Guess what? It was fine. I got the rest I needed, I recovered, I was able to return to my sleep schedule.
Now my sleep schedule has been interrupted again. I’ve been busy with work, and exhausted. But if I get extra sleep, I’ll mess up my schedule and be a complete failure, and never get back on track. I’m a bad person.
Last week, I woke up from a long nap. A nap I’m not supposed to take, medically. A memory rushed to the forefront of my brain, and I had to check my text messages to confirm it was a dream and not real:
A long nap, so a long series of dreams on the usual themes. But in the dream, I read a text message from my husband. It said, “you're doing well, you're doing well with your sleep schedule, it's okay to get some rest." He is my biggest support, and this is something he would say.
But my brain conjured this. The brain I have implored to just be clear in my dreams, instead of giving me cryptic symbols and repeated visits to grocery stores. Did my sleeping self finally give me the permission I need? Or is this some kind of taunt, bait from my bipolar? Why should I start trusting it now?
Either or, right?
