A Memoir of Love and Madness. Living with Bipolar Disorder PDF
Preview A Memoir of Love and Madness. Living with Bipolar Disorder
Living with bipolar disorder Living with bipolar disorder Rahla Xenopoulos Published by Zebra Press an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd Company Reg. No. 1966/003153/07 80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town, 8001 PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.zebrapress.co.za First published 2009 Publication © Zebra Press 2009 Text © Rahla Xenopoulos 2009 Cover photograph © Jonathan Harris All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer MANAGING EDITOR: Ronel Richter-Herbert EDITOR: Roxanne Reid PROOFREADER: Ronel Richter-Herbert COVER AND TEXT DESIGNER: Monique Oberholzer TYPESETTER: Monique van den Berg PRODUCTION MANAGER: Valerie Kömmer ISBN 978 1 77020 025 8 (Print) ISBN 978 1 77022 189 5 (ePub) ISBN 978 1 77022 190 1 (PDF) To Jason ... my beginning, my middle, my everlasting Contents Acknowledgements Foreword Prelude 1 The Happy Potter doctor 2 The old man 3 Family Fenster 4 Unwillingly to school 5 An awfully small, awfully silly adventure 6 My silent knight 7 What dreams may come 8 Lights, camera, action 9 Cutting remarks 10 A dirty, self-loathing sickness 11 My heart belongs to Daddy 12 Backwards into the darkness 13 More Happy Potter 14 Prometheus unbound 15 Suicide notes 16 Falling blossoms 17 Trawling for Tallulah 18 Tallulah talking 19 The sea monkey moves into the tummy 20 Tallulah sings her rainbow 21 Hillbillies, Godot and distant siblings 22 Tallulah gets closer 23 Counting sheep 24 Tallulah safe and sound 25 Hurly-burly Epilogue Glossary Acknowledgements pninadavidgigijonty-lviahgerald, the Fenster family for their divine inspiration and humour The triplets, Gidon Greg, Layla Tallulah and Samuel Jacob, my daily reminder that there is a God and that miracles do occur Anne, the angel of my every word Shauna, Mary, Ronel and Roxanne, my shepherds Dr Leigh Janet, for introducing me to life in this world Foreword Rahla has a very serious disorder – I know from personal experience, when she set fire to my closest friend. It is a miracle she was able to lift a pen rather than swallow it. So, just for being able to sit up for so long, I think she deserves to sell if not one, then at least three of her books. Please, I beg you to help her – she might be a genius. Considering she’s nuts, she can write like a dream. As someone who comes from the dark side mentally, she makes me feel not so alone. Ruby Wax Prelude It’s 4 a.m. and my brain is buzzing, ideas swarming and galloping through my head, bombarding me with their imagined brilliance. I’ve been up all night, writing poetry and dancing to the Waterboys’ ‘The Whole of the Moon’. I’ve tried phoning everyone I know, but everyone I know is asleep. All around me is silence – even the birds are silent – an overwhelming stillness that provides a startling counterpoint to the hullabaloo going on inside my brain. There’s no one out there, no one can touch me, I fly too high, I wear a shield of mania. Just a few days later and I crash into darkness, a resounding fall. Thud. No poems, no ideas, no energetic dances. Nothing inside me but the ache of sadness, stagnant, silent, reverberating from my stomach throughout my body. Each sound, the tip-tap of the dogs’ paws on wooden floors, the phone’s incessant ringing, the whoosh of passing cars, every sound is an assault, a shrill shriek puncturing my fractured nerves, flaying them raw. I’m shut away in a place too dark, too narrow for anyone else to enter. I crouch behind a macabre wall of pain that no one can penetrate. I am empty, desolate and utterly alone. I can’t say that bipolar disorder has made my life easy, but it has educated me, and it has certainly humbled me. It’s made me vulnerable and forced me to tell the truth at times when lies would have tripped more willingly from my lips. But sickness is our cure. On days when I’ve thought, ‘So this is it, surely now I can’t take another breath,’ I’ve discovered that illness comes with inner resources and a strength that none of us knows we have until life forces us to find them. It has cured me of inertia and it has compelled me to live a healthy, disciplined life. It has thrown me into violent chaos and forced me to be a serious person, when I wanted to be a homecoming queen. Some days, regardless of the weather, it has compelled me to see gloomy grey clouds outside my window … and on other days, it has had me, a mad person, flying about, chasing summers long since past. So, while sickness certainly has not been a pleasant companion these past forty years, it has somehow been poetic. This book is about a girl who grew up in a warm and eccentric family of brilliant people always committed to helping her. Even when no one knew what was actually wrong with her, they carried her through anorexia, bulimia, episodes of unmanageable mania and financial ruin. They held her close through deep depression, three suicide attempts and years of self-mutilation. It is also the story of a girl who fell in love with a tall, dark stranger from a faraway land, a stranger whose arms became her home – a home in which she danced, sang out loud (with an abominable voice), cried even louder, laughed, and struggled for years to have a child. This is the story of a girl who was on Ritalin from the age of seven, who had dyslexia and remedial problems and was hyperactive. After failing two years, she dropped out of high school to become a career psychiatric patient. But then, of course, love arrived, as did a doctor with the correct diagnosis, a combination of drugs that worked … and, finally, the call of blank pages that wanted words on them. In the story that follows there’s no rigidly chronological structure. It is a collection of the themes of my life, because this is how my mind works, how I remember things. Now I fear the time has come for me to read what’s already been written, and I’m afraid I’ll be put off writing because of the awkwardness of the sentence structure, the clunky vocabulary and the frivolous self- centredness. My trembling hand will never again find the page. It’s such a tenuous thread, the yarn that keeps me writing, as tenuous as my link to sanity. But then the sun comes out, the camellias blossom and the empty page beckons. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this story about madness is a sad one. No – it’s about love and happy endings! I wasn’t a writer when I set out to write this book; I was just a girl, at times too sad to brush my teeth, at times too insane to eat. At times I was amused, but always I was in love and, most of the time, I was grateful. Popular psychology teaches us to aspire to a state of balance. How to do this has always confounded me, because there’s no balance in the known world. Not in its seasons or geography, or even in our very bodies with their strange biorhythms and propensity for growth. Life doesn’t meander along on a well- balanced, staid path. For the best and the boldest of us, it’s a hell of an unpredictable ride. This is in no way an apology for the structure, or lack thereof, in my life, but the truth is, as much as I’d like to have written a neat, concise story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, well, my life just hasn’t afforded me one. Instead, my life continues on its insanely, predictably unpredictable path. Dreams fail me, and dreams come true.
The list of books you might like
