Being Normal

My life has been a long and strange pursuit of “seeming normal.” I think I’ve gotten good at it at this point. But it took a long time to learn to hide it this well.

I had a psychotic break when I was 16, but I had (undiagnosed) early onset bipolar…symptoms showing shortly after birth, definitive symptoms by 2-years old… They documented them, but the “early onset” hadn’t yet become psychological knowledge, nor had “bipolar II.” And so I was undiagnosed, though my childhood was filled with periodic rounds of testing, experiments, trying to deal with these varied symptoms than left my parents feeling frustrated, impotent, and…at times, like failures at parenting.

It wasn’t their fault. They tried. Took me to doctors. Read books. I don’t remember a time through my childhood when my mom wasn’t reading a book about raising children, gifted children, special children, troubled children… But none of them had the answers.

When I was 10 years old we watched one of the Planet of the Apes movies. I don’t remember which one it is, only that there was a mother ape and a baby and human soldiers killed them at the end of the movie. I flew into a rage. I screamed until I tore up my throat so much I was coughing little fine sprays of blood. I pounded my fists and feet and head against the walls, the floor… I ran into the bathroom and ripped the towel bar from the wall and threw it into the bathtub… I ran out the front door and ran through the neighborhood sobbing and screaming in the darkness while my father followed a discrete distance behind me…

When I was six, my mom said we would make zucchini bread that morning. Something came up, we had to shift it to afternoon. I have a distinct memory of lying on the floor behind the couch, on my back, screaming, crying, sobbing so hard that my face had gone pins and needles with hyperventilation…

I didn’t grow out of the tantrums like the doctors told my parents I would… I just matured into better ways of hiding them from the world, better at “passing” for normal. When that apocalyptic sadness, terror, and rage would rush over me like a tsunami, I would run… Out into the forest… up the mountainside… run until my mouth tasted like copper and darkness would encroach on the edges of my vision… tears streaming down my face, wheezing sobs making harmonic sounds in my chest… I would run until I fell… stay on my knees until I had caught enough oxygen to get up again, and run some more…

By middle school I knew I was seriously different, though I’d always know that… my brother didn’t get tests all the time, didn’t have EKGs and lights flashed in his eyes, didn’t have doctors running pinwheels under his soles and palms and asking him to remember five words only to be asked to repeat them back five minutes later. My brother didn’t have to drink soy milk instead of dairy. My brother didn’t have to eat carob instead of chocolate, my brother’s diet wasn’t changed with every new doctor and the words, “Well, try it and see if you notice a difference…”

The worst thing was when it came over me at school… in class… That terrible feeling of it coming on… Sometimes I knew, there were triggers, though I didn’t have that language at the time, days when the schedule was going to be different for an assembly, the change of the school quarter when we’d be going to a new “specials” room (art, then music, then wood shop, then P.E.). Changes. Uncertainty. Irregularity in the routine… I would try to fight it, but I would feel it coming over me, terror, sadness, drowning, impossible… I would run to the bathroom… So many memories of crouching in a stall and fighting to keep the sobs silent so no one would come in and find me…

And that wasn’t the only trigger… I was hypersensitive to interpersonal interactions, perceived criticism, even if it wasn’t there, could send me over the edge. And when it was there, even the gentlest rebuff would wreak devastation in my mind. I was well-behaved not because I was particularly, inherently good… but because the mildest rebuke, even a stern look was poison in my veins, was crushing agony, was the end of the world.

I went on to high school. Fully in therapy by that point… my parents started me full time when I was 12, though the therapists didn’t really know what they were doing or how to help. Another doctor had me pricking my fingers four times a day to record my blood sugar variations… plucking at straws, seeking explanations… and still… I made it to high school with none.

I wasn’t ordinary.

I learned languages freakishly quickly, read All Quiet on the Western Front, in German, after my second year. I devoured geometry, did extra problems from the textbook, just for fun… I liked the logic of it, the “this has to be true because this is true and that makes this next thing true.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but in the chaos of my mind, logic, sequence, one step following from the next, no subjectivity, no emotion, no doubt… simple, sequential, logical truth.

I played chess, gathered trophies and titles and put them on my bookshelves, filled in crosswords (everything in neat boxes, everything everything cross checked with the letters of crossing words so there was never doubt about an answer’s validity or error.

I sought activities of order.

I liked music, not for the musicality, but for the order, the beat, the count, everything came down to the count, even the most complex rhythms could be broken down, slowed to beats and fractions of beats and fractions of fractions… as long as you kept counting… you could do anything. It was simplicity, purity, absent of subjectivity. Of course, my instructors were always telling me to “feel” the music… the one area I always struggled in. “Feeling” music didn’t make sense to me. It was math. Logic. Precision. Those WERE the feelings for me. But when I tried to make people understand this, they gave me blank looks. The math IS the beauty, I’d tell them, and they’d say something like, no, what does the music make you feel? What does it make you see? Do you feel happy? Do you feel sad? Do you see lakes or mountains or people dancing? And I’d say… I feel the beat… I see the count… Happy and sad are messy, complicated, out of control, muddy, unexplainable states. Music is peace. It is logic. It is beats and counting. They gave me blank looks.

I don’t remember when I learned to cut… Sometime before I was 16, because I already knew how when I went to the hospital. I just didn’t know other people did it, too.

I had a psychotic break. My mom had cancer. I took care of her through her surgery, her chemo, losing her hair, puking… They finally declared her in remission and then I fell apart.

I remember only bits and pieces of it. I remember the moment when I lost my language. Couldn’t speak… couldn’t keep my thoughts organized, linear, long enough to form a sentence from beginning to end… I’d start and lose what I was going to say, and then realize I didn’t know what I’d already said… I was hallucinating… And I was crying. I remember crying. Endlessly.

I remember sitting in the doctor’s office, my parents got me in for an emergency visit. I remember crying in the emergency room, a sense of terrible embarrassment, a vague if wordless understanding that I was behaving strangely, but I could do nothing to stop. Just sit, crying, tears streaming as if my body held an endless supply… although by the second day my lips were starting to split and bleed, the moisture for tears now being stolen from other reserves.

I remember the doctor acting worried. He gave my parents another name. A psychiatrist. They got me in the same day. He was arrogant, he said something rude to my father who didn’t take well to being confronted, but… some part of me understood my father was scared, for me, not of the fat, arrogant psychiatrist with greasy hair… because he backed down. My father never backed down from a slight. Some part of my mind that was still functioning in vague shapes and feelings understood that this interaction was unusual for my father… that somehow that unusualness meant he was terrified for me… But I still couldn’t speak, or think, or stop crying.

My parents gave the doctor my history, my childhood behaviors, everything I’d been tested for. I don’t have actual memories of this, just a visual memory of the inside of the room, and the faces of the people there. The actual words spoken flowed through my brain like a river, touching for moments and then moving on, transient and fluid.

The next day they put me in a hospital.

Finally a diagnosis. The wrong one, but it was the first time anybody really acted confident about what was wrong… They called it Depression with Psychotic Features, dosed me just short of drooling in my soup, and kept me for six months.

They added diagnoses, MPD (now DID) and PTSD. I was alphabet soup.

And I wasn’t different anymore. In fact I was one of the “sane” ones. There were kids way worse than me. One boy came in speaking word salad. He was only with us for a day before being sent to the state hospital… That’s where the cases that needed “specialized treatment” were sent, but amongst us wardess, the common understanding was those were the people who were never going home again.

One of the other long-term patients was a boy a year older than me. He had early-onset schizophrenia. His medications were so heavy that he always spoke extremely slowly, and the muscles around the corners of his mouth would slowly contract, pulling his face into strange smiles and grimaces.

Another girl had five other personalities that flitted through her like a roll of film in a projector.

I was a cutter, but a girl next to me in group one day pulled up her sleeve and her entire arm was a graffiti of blood… She had carved “help me” into her skin over and over and over until there was no undamaged flesh. I felt, strangely, inadequate with only my dozen or so webbing scars.

Yet another girl had been raped for years by her step-father. She had flashbacks so vivid that bruises where he had squeezed his hands around her throat would reappear on her skin as we all were watching, as if ghost hands were strangling her again.

Two of the boys were gang members who had seen people murdered, who still talked about doing it themselves, who would throw chairs and furniture when they went into rages.

Another girl would rip her clothes off screaming in inarticulate rage when given an instruction by any male staff member.

The worst I ever did was scribble angrily in my notebook until the ballpoint pen shredded the page and the one underneath it. The room monitor was on the phone at the time. Without stopping his conversation he stepped over to my table, took the pen from my hand and gave me a scented marker. It didn’t tear the paper to any degree of satisfaction.

In the hospital I was normal.

More than normal, I was boring.

It was the only time I’ve ever been normal.

The rest of my life, I pretend.