Metro Pulse/Cover/Bi-Polar Disorders

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The ups and downs of bi-polar disorder: Nobody’s idea of a joke

by Donna Johnson

It is Thursday morning in early January and I am in the breadline at the Baptist Center, one of the many food banks in Knoxville. It is, in my opinion, the best food bank in Knoxville, operating out of Western Heights housing project on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. They don’t ask for proof of income or rent receipts, just give you free food, doughnuts, coffee and a smile. The volunteers here are mostly elderly, hardworking Christian folk who make me ashamed to be on the receiving end rather than on the serving one.

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked for 30 years. The last 11, I worked as a caseworker for the Department of Children’s Services/Department of Adult Protective Services. It was hard work and often all-night work, when I had to go out with the police and remove screaming children from their allegedly abusive parents, while neighborhood gangs surrounded my car and threatened to shoot me. So, you might say I’ve earned this respite from the nine-to-five grind. Still, sometimes I wonder if it’s the right thing to do.

Two years ago I was declared unfit for regular employment by my psychiatrist. The human service agency I worked for backed my doctor’s decision after they found me rifling through the memos on my supervisor’s desk at 2 a.m. thinking there was a conspiracy against me. There was some truth in this, though probably not enough to warrant my midnight vigils.

Another symptom of my illness, unobserved by anyone else but my boyfriend and a few intimate friends (who are no longer friends) was rearranging the house several hours a day. You know, the bed in the dining room and back, the couch in the bedroom, which was now a study, which meant shopping for matching rugs and accessories at the thrift stores all day long. Then there was the painting. Murals from top to bottom of the dining room walls—murals of extra-terrestrials, murals of the Virgin Mary, life-size portraits of myself. Eventually I’d have to paint over them before the landlord could see. I was happy, happy, happy all the time. After the frantic manic, which would sometimes last for days and nights with no sleep, the sleeping sessions and depression would begin, during which I could not even raise myself out of the bed to take a shower, let alone think about a purpose for my life, which might or might not include a job.

A diagnosis of “bi-polar disorder, Type I” sealed my fate. I was officially on the dole. Since I quit working and started “drawing a crazy check,” as some call it, I hang out with my friend, Robert, who has schizo-affective disorder, and get free food and talk to other people who are out of work.

Today, a man in a rebel cap walks over to me. He has been hitting on me for weeks, despite my utter lack of interest in him. “Hey, baby,” he says.

“Don’t mess with me,” I say. “I don’t feel good.” Actually, I feel fine. I just don’t want to be bothered. It is the law of the land here that you can say anything you want as long as you can back it up. Rebel flag walks away and a young pregnant girl asks me for a cigarette. I lie and say I don’t have another one. She knows I’m lying and I know she knows I’m lying, but this is another law of the land here—nobody gives up their cigarettes.

I ask her when her baby is due. “Next week,” she says, rubbing her stomach proudly. When I was still a social worker I would have thought she was having a baby just to get a check. Now I think maybe she just likes babies. Either way, I don’t really care anymore. When you’re drawing a check yourself you become a little less judgmental. I see the scorn in people’s eyes when I pull out the food stamp card to buy an occasional steak. I just smile merrily and say, “I just love a good steak, don’t you?” But I know exactly how they feel. It is irritating to work all week at a job you hate and then see someone in front of you in the Kroger line get their groceries for free, when you’re having to put groceries back because you don’t have enough money. Fate has a way of making us bow down to that quality or behavior we have scorned in another.

I go downstairs and wait on a bench outside the clothing room. It is crowded, and I might be in a foreign country, as no one is speaking English. Finally they open the door and we stampede in, pushing and shoving to get ahead of one another. I take six or seven white tailored blouses off the rack and a couple of Calvin Klein jackets, just in case I decide to go back to work. I then grab a few pairs of shorts, a 1950s coat with a fake fur collar, and go into the household goods room. Though I have no less than thirty sets of curtains in my trunk at home, I am compelled to take another pair with blue and white checks. On a good day, I will only change the curtains three or four times. On a bad day, I might change the curtains 16 times, cutting up skirts and coats to get more fabric. Then I’ll start on the furniture, sometimes arranging it, sometimes painting it all colors of the rainbow. No one works harder than I do on those days, which might go on for 48 hours, or until I check myself into the hospital.

The woman volunteering in this Baptist Center room is so pale her facial skin looks almost transparent. She wears a blue paisley scarf over her head to hide her thinning hair. Going for weekly chemotherapy appointments has not deterred her from coming to volunteer. I am not unaware that something is wrong with this picture, and I think with shame that if she can work here, surely I could, too. It’s hard to justify an illness you cannot see from the outside, though certainly it wreaks total havoc in my life when it manifests. I try to tell myself that my paintings and stories bring gladness to the lives of others, but during the 1950s when I grew up, only a shallow person could indulge in the arts. (Music was OK as long as it was played or sung in church and no guitars were played.) Still, aside from the guilt I feel whether I work or not—it’s my Southern Baptist heritage—I am enjoying my life outside the confines of nine-to-five bondage and would not think of going back to a detested job, meddling in the lives of others because of some sort of acquired virtue I don’t believe in anyway.

Though it’s true it has its ups and downs, being diagnosed with bi-polar disorder was the best thing that ever happened to me. It has afforded me the freedom and time to be creative after years of slavery to a system (Department of Human Services) that clearly was not working anyway. I am careful not to express too much happiness, as happiness is only evidence of a nature steeped in sin and irrevocably tarnished by the world.

Having filled a hefty bag full of clothes, I make my way into the food bank. Usually a man will be singing “Amazing Grace” or “Just as I Am,” but today they are playing “The Westward Wind” over the loudspeaker. I haven’t heard that song since my childhood and it reminds me of family vacations out west, which brings to mind the embarrassment my family would experience should they find out I’m frequenting food banks.

When you go on the dole, a shift of attitude is required. When people ask what you do they generally mean what kind of job do you have. “Who me?” I say. “I write poems and drink espresso in the sun all day.” Or you can answer their question with another question: “What do I do about what?” Since you can no longer identify yourself by your job, you have to identify yourself with who you are. What a concept!

Then there’s the family thing. For months I told them I was still working, but eventually the lie caught up with me, as lies will, and then they had to adjust their attitude toward me. In a family of career successes there’s no easy way to tell them you’re on welfare. And what do they tell their friends?

What about your own friends? You are no longer interested in the latest gossip about your co-worker or supervisor, and certainly they’re not interested in the latest psychotic breakdown of your best schizophrenic friend at the mental health center. While you have been alone all day and are dying for a chat, they have been listening to people’s problems all day and are longing for solitude.

Most of my friends are loyal. When I confided to a friend and former co-worker I hadn’t seen for a while that I was on disability and was thinking of becoming engaged to Robert, she asked: “And what does he do?” My reply, head down, was muttered. “He’s on disability, too.” “How wonderful,” she said, with true splendor.

As for the element of time, when you have spent 45 years or so working or going to school, to suddenly have day after endless day stretching out before you with no activities dictated by the necessity of a job, it’s like having someone hand you a ream of white paper and ordering you to fill it with meaningful sentences.

No longer can you drift through each day mindlessly performing activities you have no respect for. You must choose what you want to do each day. You can either sit in front of the TV watching soaps, where other people perform meaningless activities, or you can decide to carve out a life for yourself that is authentic to the person you are, as opposed to what other people think you are.

For a while I went to a mental health center during the day, but I didn’t fit in there either because most of them had never worked, and sitting around with other mentally ill people—fondly called by ourselves, “the sub-culture of St. Mary’s Tower”—talking about our doctors and meds gets old after a while.

Luckily, I met Robert, another writer, at the center, and we pretty much see each other every day, sometimes critiquing each other’s work. In the summer we pretended the little grassy knoll outside his basement apartment at Isabella Towers was the beach, and we spent the summer reading Truman Capote, Somerset Maughm and Evelyn Waugh. Isabella Towers is a high-rise apartment building for the disabled. The word “vacation” takes on a new meaning when you are on disability. As Robert states it, he has tied his raft to mine and we sail towards the open sea as aimless as a message in a bottle that no one will ever read.

On Friday night, I visit Robert at his apartment. On the porch a man in a wheelchair waves his cigarette at me. An elderly woman gives me a grin that is more grimace than smile. She is almost always on the porch and is always dressed in white from her socks and shoes to her eyeglasses, and she watches my comings and goings as carefully as an agent from the FBI.

I go and fetch Robert, and we go into the lobby. Everyone thinks I am Robert’s mother, but in fact we are best friends, just turned engaged. Though I am 20 years his senior, we are the same age, soul-wise, and are a perfect fit. It is Friday night and there is a gospel sing. An out-of-town gospel group claps hands and urges the residents of Isabella Towers to sing. Some do, but timidly. Religious gatherings can be a dangerous trigger for Robert’s illness. During his last psychosis he believed he was Jesus on his way to be crucified. He even had a group of devotees at Peninsula during the three weeks he was being treated there. He called his parents at their condo in Arizona.

“Mom, Dad,” he said. “You’re going to be so proud of me.” He then proceeded to tell his astonished parents that he was Jesus Christ, coming for the second time, and that a limousine would soon pick him up so they could bear witness to his pending coronation. Another of his delusions was that a doctor at St. Mary’s was giving out Xanax in exchange for sexual favors from his female patients. When Robert stopped another doctor in the hall to ask him if he had heard of this ghastly act of malpractice, the doctor replied: “It’s only hearsay at this point.” Robert’s family never mentions his illness, except for his brother, who is raising his small son alone. “I wonder how mentally ill you would be if you had to raise a child,” his brother says, or asks really, as though Robert had chosen to be born with a serious mental illness in order to get out of work and parenting.

Robert has been stable for about a year now, but if he misses even one dose of his meds he will begin to show madness in his soft blue eyes. Shortly after that he will begin to preach: “Repent! Repent! You sin, you die! You sin, you die! You sin, you die!”

As we mingle with the other gospel singers, Robert begins a conversation we have often. Yet he speaks as if it were the first time we have ever had it.

“I’m thinking about getting a job,” he says earnestly. Whenever Robert goes into his fundamentalist Christian phase he believes it is God’s will for him to get a job.

I go upstairs to check on an acquaintance that I give rides to from time to time. When I took her to the doctor yesterday, she was given 90 hydrocodone and several morphine patches for her alleged back pain. She is naked under a pink robe and is so over-medicated as to be unable to speak. On the floor there are several pill bottles. I don’t bother to look at them, but let myself out quietly. I wonder if I should call Mobile Crisis. Surely I should do something. I do, of course, nothing. My social work days are over.

I wander out to sit with the porch people, who look as though they have just been told that everything good that was going to happen to them has already happened. Now there is nothing to look forward to but endless days of mindless talk in a place they don’t know how they got to, but that they know there is little hope of getting out of.

Fog alights on top of the grim parking lot and I head off to sit in the lobby on the sixth floor, where there is a beautiful view of the river and the Henley Street Bridge. While staring at the river, I wonder about my own life. Am I any more productive than the porch people? What, with my frenzied running from thrift store to thrift store and my flight from my own destiny, in which I am bound to no one and nothing? Although I tell myself I am living a productive life, what exactly am I producing? A lot of bad paintings and a few short stories that no one but myself will every read? Not to mention the drips of paint all over my rented apartment.

In the surreal, silver light of dawn I slop out the window and ride my bike to the top of the hill, then coast down with my eyes closed. By the time I arrive home, there are people coming out of their homes in dress clothes, and by this I realize it is Sunday. They are going to a church where they will know and be known by others. I feel an unexpected transitory longing to rush home, dust off my Bible—unused for years—and find a church where I myself might be known.

Instead I pick up the Sunday New York Times my neighbor gives me each week and look at the jobs in New York City. The jobs for social workers require a master’s degree, which I do not have, and in any case I cannot bear to go back to helping people who could be helping themselves. I think of Ayn Rand, who said all of these so-called do-good social services, and altruism in general, were crippling people. There is some truth in that. Obviously there are people who cannot care for themselves, and for them agencies are a godsend. I realize I am slipping farther and farther into the abyss of accepting from other people charity that I do not, in fact, need. It has become a way of life. It’s OK in the beginning, but after a while you don’t feel ashamed about anything.

My mind saunters on through the paper. The only thing that draws my attention is a truck-driver’s job. It might be fun sitting up high like that, riding around the country, King of the Road, Lord of the Highway. But wait, here is something of great interest. “Love to shop? Call this number!” I jot down the 800 number and go over to Robert’s, where I crash for 16 hours. I dream I am getting ready to take a long flight to a city and country I have never heard of in my waking life. It is Sept. 11, 2004. Feeling certain the plane for which my ticket is issued is doomed, I turn my ticket in for another. Too late, I realize that if only I had taken that flight I would have arrived safely. Now I know for sure it is the flight I have changed to that is really going to crash. I am trapped between flights and end up going nowhere, instead remaining paralyzed at the spot where I am on the ground. When I awaken I wander through the lobby to sit with the porch people. The white paper snowflakes of Christmas still hang from the ceiling of the lobby, and they dance merrily from the heat of the air vents.

Outside, the porch people are talking about a man and his family who where ambushed by the daughter’s boyfriend on their way home from church. The father was killed, the rest seriously injured. I am appalled, but the porch people do not seem overly concerned. The woman in white lights a cigarette, flinging the match across the lawn where two men are indiscreetly doing a crack deal. “Well, if you can’t be safe coming home from church, where can you be safe?”

I light my own cigarette and prop my feet against the railing. I gaze up at the sun, which is just beginning to creep out from under a cloud. Seagulls fly high in the sky and the light reflects brilliantly against their silver bellies. I imagine myself to be protected by an invisible net from the rest of the world—inside this net, made of silver gossamer, I will find the answer to what I am supposed to do next. The sun’s rays filter warmly through the net and I feel a joyful, sinful, stillness. I’ll think of what I’m supposed to do later.

For now I’ll just smoke cigarettes and watch the sun play over the trees, as though playing hide-and-seek with an invisible lover.