Polar

By Andrew Coleman

Autobiography of the struggle of living with the dual diagnosis of bipolar mood disorder and alcoholism. Follow the ups and downs of this author and poet's perspective of his life journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781792327575

Book preview

12

Preface

I made the decision, on a Wednesday afternoon, to end my life. I have been told my whole life that I am opinionated but this really isn’t the case. I have a simple sense of taste. I only watch movies alone so I can walk out if it is a terrible piece of cinema. I will leave a plate of food nearly untouched if it is poorly cooked. I have little tolerance for that which offends me, and so on that Wednesday afternoon I took a hard look at my existences and determined that my life offended me, and to continue would be to tolerate my life- not live it. I spoke to a friend and writer and he told me I was depressed. I explained to him I was making a logical decision and I was not sad or depressed, and my decision was not emotionally based. He told me I needed to expand my definition of depressed. He told me I still had a project, and it wasn’t done. He said life wasn’t to be enjoyed but experienced. As much as I love a good philosophical argument I decided not to engage. To the hospital again.

So, here is the project, my friend. If I want to end it after its completion then he better have a new argument.

Snapshot background. I am diseased. I suffer from Bipolar Type 1. For any reader who is unfamiliar, this is the most severe type of Bipolar. It is characterized by an emotional state that tends to swing from mania to depression. When manic I am a man on fire with a lust for life. No sleep, rapid speak patterns, ideas flood faster than the dam can hold them back. Everything is beautiful and every thought painted with pure genius, over sexualization, risk taking behavior, impulsivity, and bliss. These feelings usually only last a few days, a week or two if I am lucky (and I do consider it luck) but neurotransmitters deplete and the pendulum swings. Bipolar depression is a state I almost lack the words to describe. The mind and body become a prison. Sleep is the only escape so eighteen hours of sleep each day becomes the norm. When I do step away from the bed everything hurts and every task becomes a marathon. Showering becomes a monumental event; things like haircuts or shaving sound like torture, and activities that might help to alleviate the symptoms are unthinkable, like exercise or socializing, or keeping doctor appointments. The bad part is that the depressive cycle has much better staying power then the mania; it lasts months at times. The part that is truly grueling about type-1 is that I have very few periods of stability. I am usually operating in mania or depression or in a slightly less dramatic version of both categorized by the MD’s as hypo. The precise cause of Bipolar disorder is not known. There are theories that the individual suffers from either an over abundance of specific neurotransmitters or a deficit of the same. When the precise medical problem is not clearly defined, the solution becomes extremely troublesome. As this is written, most of the medications available are not specific in their effects. More problematic still is that the medication that show these possibility of positive effects also have a primary action which is also unknown. That is correct medication with action unknown. I always found it hard to believe in this day and age that when applying for a medication patent in the section for action of effect can read Acute action unknown. I compare it to trying to sell a new computer chip to Intel, and when asked what does it do? saying, Not sure. But it’s promising! Perhaps even more accurate would be fishing with dynamite. I hold no animosity for the pharmaceutical companies. They do the best they can with the information they have. Unfortunately their best is a dismal. So that is disease Bipolar. Yeah, I won the genetic lottery. In addition to the Bipolar I am an alcoholic and drug addict. The occurrence of addiction is much higher in those with mental illness population than in the general public 1 in 4 with mental illness suffer from addiction. Whether there is real causality there, or it’s just a poor attempt at self medication, that is for the academics to argue. For me, it doesn’t matter. I got them both; finding the root of either at the moment seems unimportant, but statistically speaking I will be an anomaly if I die organically, or indoors. A notable percentage of the homeless have Bipolar in addition to being addicts and alcoholics. So, knowing I will most likely never collect social security, I better tell my story now; good, bad, or indifferent. This is not intended as a medical text, most of the information is anecdotal and no more than an individual case study; my case. If it entertains, great. If it educates, even better. If it moves someone to help my brothers in arms, then it has all been worth it. Like one of my heroes once wrote: I’ve never met a man I’d rather be.

Chapter 1

The Making of a Madman

A moment on ancestry, although I am as much of a genetic mutt as most white folk in America. I do know that I am primarily the end result of an Irish immigrant and a Native American, though we have been unable to determine the exact tribe. If this has anything to do with my life experience, I am not sure, but having Irish and Indian blood surely presented a life prone to alcoholism.

My parents grew up in the south in the sixties. I often ask my mother about civil unrest, the civil rights, and the opposition to the Vietnam War. Her response is almost cutely naïve; she just says, I don’t really remember much happening. It only happened on TV. Alabama will never be awarded for being on the frontlines of forward thinking. Though, even being raised in that environment, my mother is an incredibly brilliant, creative, and tolerant person. There is not a racist bone in her body, although from time to time she will say something vaguely inappropriate, but there is no animosity behind it. It’s just the residue of a different time in a part of the country that closed its eyes to advancement. My Grandma is a different story, she still uses terms like nigger toes when eating mixed nuts, and she still thinks the Cubans ruined her neighborhood.

My father couldn’t be more opposite to my mother. He, too, is a brilliant man with amazing abilities. His focus in those early days of the 1980’s was singular; his piercing eyes always landed on the bottom line, the almighty dollar. I don’t fault my father for this, My grandfather was a difficult man, a career company man who instilled in my father an ideal of success that could only be found on a financial spread sheet. When it came to decisions regarding career choices or money, the two nearly came to blows on several occasions. My father lived in his father’s shadow, as so many men do. He adopted an interpretation of success that could be easily quantified.

My parents married young by today’s standard; they were both barely 21. My mother was a registered nurse and my father was a promising up and comer for IBM. You might call me a Tech Brat. My father was an incredible provider. He had a work ethic that was unparalleled; sixty-hour work weeks were the rule, not the exception. When the opportunity to move forward in title or compensation was offered my father’s vocabulary contained only one word: yes. We moved a lot. Before my first day of third grade my happy home had moved from Rochester, Minnesota, to Del Ray Beach, Florida, to the woods of New York, to the suburbs of Los Angeles, and finally to a little commuter town called Tracy in 1987 about sixty-five miles from San Jose and the site of the new gold rush, the Silicon Valley. I would later learn that my mother had laid down an ultimatum to my father: Move again, and me and the kids are not coming with you. I didn’t notice most of the moving. I was too young to remember much of it, but I imagine the toll was greater on my older sister Amy. She was three years my senior and pretty outgoing. She had to say goodbye to several best friends.

The few memories I have of those early years include my mom’s never-ending kindness and patience, my sister’s God-like presence, and my father in his cowboy hat, his beard smelling of Coors light. When my father was grinding out his spot at IBM we were lower-middle class. I never went hungry, but I remember my parents fighting about money. I knew very young that not having enough of it made for an angry father and crying mother. I was so acutely aware of this that when I was five years old I decided to save my folks a couple bucks by cutting my own hair. It didn’t end well. We ended up shelling out the money anyway so a barber could fix it. We never took a family vacation, and I am not sure if that was because funds were low or if my father was afraid of losing clout at work.

Thanks to my mother we never were bored as a result of tight purse strings. She was a never-ending source of free entertainment. She would take a couple of spools of yarn and make a web-like matrix out of the backyard; it seemed otherworldly at that age. She never tired; even after a graveyard shift at the hospital she would make us breakfast, usually eggs and bacon in a smiley face. To this day I don’t know where her strength comes from. If I held any belief in the divine she would be the evidence I based that belief on. My mother did have a lot of help though, in the form of her six foot tall, pale, redheaded little brother: my Uncle Paul. He was the best friend a kid could have.

A little background on my uncle Paul: he is a certifiable genius, and I am not talking borderline 130 IQ. He is pushing Einstein numbers. You would never hear it from him but my mom told me I had a little bit of his brains. Paul is an artist, a true artist. He produced paintings, stencils, music, computer programs, animations, and sculptures. There was nothing he couldn’t do, and do well. I remember he did a portrait sketch made entirely of single pencil dots. It looked like a LaserJet printer had done it, though that was fifteen years before we even knew what LaserJet was. My mom told me how he was always in trouble at school for turning in half finished math work with beautiful drawings all over the back. It was a compulsion for him to create, as it often is for those with great talent . It stops being a choice at some point and becomes a necessity, a biological imperative drowning out all else. My uncle was my hero when I was a kid because he was fun; he was my hero during my adolescence because he understood me and the pain of growing up in a hostile world; today he is still me hero, for his brilliance, painted with such a such grace and a sensitivity I find myself lacking.

We spent countless days at my grandma ‘Eleanor’s modest home. My uncle would call in sick to work just to play monster with two tiny children. Uncle Paul had a degree in fine arts, he probably could have been a raging success in anything he chooses to apply himself to. Lucky for us, my uncle defined his success by the company he kept, and that was me and my sister. He had a part-time job at UPS so he could pursue success in the realm of the artistic and family. He was a freight loader, which I assume is loading packages onto trucks. The only time he worked full all day was during Christmas . One of my first memories is the way he would smell after work, it was clean sweat and exhaust; it smelled like safety, it smelled of freedom. It was so different than my father’s smell of faded cologne and domestic beer. My uncle live in a little shack, (I lack a more accurate term for it). It was filled with computer parts and covered in paint, I am not sure if he ever owned a TV. He drove an old ‘76 Camaro that would stall when you turned the radio on. I lived my first five years on his sloped shoulders. He would run full speed, my tiny hands covering his eyes, toward the kitchen door frame. It was certain death for us both but at the last moment he would duck me to safety. I would scream and laugh. My uncle Paul is the first and last man I’ve ever trusted.

The beach is the best thing about growing up in Florida. It is an amusement park for the working poor. I’m not sure if we were poor, but I do know we ate a lot of tuna casserole and boy, did we go to the beach. My father was there too. I still have a photo of him, Amy, and me, encircling a fire pit roasting hotdog. The water was always warm. I recall trips taken in December and we still hit the water. I followed my sister like a mosquito, and to her credit she had great patience. She took time out from her own world to introduce me to existence at large. She would show me books and let me share her toys, she did not consider me a novelty; she was not entertained by me, she had a loyalty to me that ran deep, and she’s rescued me on more than a few occasions. It was at the beach that my personality and general disposition began to manifest. I was constantly nervous and apprehensive about the world. My mother would caution me against jellyfish, sea urchins, barracudas, and the like. Instead of simply becoming aware of these minuscule dangers, I began to develop a hyper-vigilance that was intrusive, and still is. I saw Jellyfish silhouettes in the water where there were only shadows, I was sure if I went too far into the sea a giant barracuda would take my legs clean off. I became a permanent fixture on my mom’s hip, and even then I would scream out if she ventured too far into the water. My survival instincts had run amuck. It was then, and remains today, an unwelcomed driving force.

My mother was a health nut. At least by mid 1980’s standard. When the rest of the population was trying to pick Coke or Pepsi, our refrigerator never had anything but natural juices and water. I didn’t get my first slice of white bread until I was in elementary school through covert lunchtime bartering. She did it out of love, I know that. We were permitted one sugary cereal, of which we could have one bowl on Saturday mornings only. Desserts were unheard of; we had orange juice frozen in the ice cube tray with toothpicks.

It was at the age of four that I got the first taste of my own mortality. My Grandma had a dog; its name escapes me but it was nearly as big as I was. I remember the incident with amazing detail. I had been at the grocery store with grandma and I saw a plastic hamburger that squeaked when you squeezed it. I asked my grandma if we could get it for the dog. She agreed, and off to her home we headed. I unwrapped the burger in the kitchen while the grown-ups conversed in the living room. I remember facing the dog and squeaking the toy. I remember the dog growling ominously, it’s voice low and primal. I threw the burger but the dog didn’t even give it a glance. Then there was a flash of jet-black fur and a second flash of crimson, orange, darkness. In the next memory I am lying on my back. I see florescent lighting, paneled ceiling, and smell ammonia and stale piss. Voices, the sensation that I am moving at a great rate of speed by rusty wheels. I could only see out of the right eye, then a turquoise tarp was pulled over my head. I had seen just enough TV to realize that they always pulled a cover over dead people. Using my available logic, I concluded I was dead. This was incorrect. I had a two-inch, crest shaped gash that went as deep as my bone, a hair’s length from my left eye. My left ear was nearly hanging off my skull. The doctor had placed the tarp over me so only my injured eye and ear were visible. I later learned that the doctor that saved my eye was a Vietnam veteran and in turn could stitch flesh with a speed that could put the most experienced seamstress to shame. That doctor saved my left eye and put my ear back in place like he had the hand of God. Head wounds bleed like no other wound; my head would heal but my favorite Return of the Jedi t-shirt would not be so lucky. My mother later confided in me that even though she was a well-trained ER nurse, she was frozen at the time. The verdict was seven stitches on the eye and a little more than a dozen behind the left ear. The ear healed oddly and the skin behind it would break open from time to time if I washed it too hard. To