Manic Truth

Love, Your Angry Ballerina

2010-11-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

LolasRoom at Etsy

In another language
you tell me I am only dancing
in your room for you;
you tell me I am a stamp of a woman,
elegantly abstract
across your stage of equations,
silly in my shoes.
I watch myself in your iris
and I shrink into pose;
turning for you I
want to say
See? See
how I slip behind a curtain
tearing your flowers?
My body speaks in tongues
as I give petals.

Black Butterfly

2010-10-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

It beat at my back at night
the wings of it
that I gave flight
it used to swallow all light
when in the corner I dropped the leash.
Caged. Dropped. Disected. Given
to a something else
as vague as air.
To let it go means breath
and
the grief for what I was
dissipates to the beating of wings--
a faint song--in the night,
too broken, too translucent
to damage my dreams.

The Double Image by Anne Sexton

2010-06-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

The Double Image by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

John Updike on Writing

2010-06-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

(taken from Fresh Air: Writer's Speak with Terry Gross)
"...you can take painful and bad experiences and somehow just in writing about them you get rid of the pain...Writing as a release, a kind of therapy...when you write about something in a strange way you become lightened of it. Writing is my sole remaining vice; it is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. In the morning light one can write breezily without the slightest acceleration of one's pulse about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in a panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning, of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all nature and scenery, and the bright distractions and furniture of our lives; even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing and making the world light in distorting, pitifying, verbalizing approaches blasphemy. ...I think there's something demonic in the complete writer...an ideally nice person would probably not become a writer...we are cruel beings and all of the shadow sides of one's self-knowledge goes into writing and in a way energizes it."

A Little Ode to Summer

2010-06-14T14:27:00.001-07:00

in a haze of strung days/the world is sound beneath my soul/barefoot in shadowed grass/iced tea and Kate Chopin’s case/dizzy in the menagerie of doves doves in my head/summer opens up cages/summer drenches your thirst only to reveal more desires/summer can hurt between lovers and blossom fierce in torrents between friends/summer is the naked days of slipping into pools in the Delta, sand stuck to your ass, bruised lips, piano key blues drowning out the whisper from the mouth of your secret that you trace with hot fingertips

To Virginia

2010-05-24T11:23:00.001-07:00

I would have met you at the water if I

were then without a daughter; I would have

held your hand–I’ve known you before.

I would have decided on the hour–on

instinctual impulse–when the lower

haze of swaying moods send me down.

I would have called you I bet,

and the moon would’ve been full and

I would’ve ran barefoot in my nightgown

to meet you at the edge.

We would’ve known, I think, not to speak

about blue darkness and moon shafts shifting

across pale dandelions between our toes.

But chemistry comes in capsules now, Virginia,

and I dare say it’s like breathing under water

in a beautiful menagerie of imagination

where thoughts come with a reign and scale–

for weight, not matter.

But sometimes

I fear my words are pebbles,

I risk giving them meaning and shape

and find shame from their sudden emptiness,

I fear it’s left me

until I think of you–my shared reflection

in the water, you with so much more grace,

but I can only build you up as a writer

and a fighter

and I drop a little stone to wrinkle you away

and I see my face, blurry and rippled,

brilliant in the moon.

Vapor

2010-05-24T11:20:00.001-07:00

this body’s breath

caught sharp and held

I hold it and like water

it escapes my fingers and spills

over my toes

when I am thirsty

asking too much from my body

when I am not enough

I give it tea and fruit and poisons

I exhale the fumes of the vices

herbal or smoky and fine

licking at these wet fingers

that let a pen scratch

let a word be plucked

from a curl of steam

this body’s breath

will learn it can’t hold what is borrowed

and maybe then stop

cupping and drinking

hold and take nothing

it’s enough just to breathe

let the vices unthread from the seams

of the spine into origami wings

taking flight in paper vees

and leave it in the water

enough

The Panic of Peace

2010-05-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Flat affect. What a depersonalized symptom to give the hider. Yes, let’s play, you seek. You seek out your DSM and professional books among the cranberry-colored spines with gold writing, or solid, knowing, black fonts. And inside pours out six. Six disorders I have because I fit the criteria like a glove. I was better off not knowing. Yet it was something, a list, I could point to, aim the finger away from me. I wanted to say “of course I have flat affect, I’m fucking stunned that somebody with six disorders can hardly be funny anymore.” No I’m not dissociating at these times. I’m very real when I am angry or crossed or hurt or doubted. It’s when I’m scared or set by a sound or smell or the mind spins manically in and out over itself, that I calm down to dissociate, where I sit so terrified that they say “flat affect” and I’m so scared I don’t know what’s on my face. I dissociate when I panic that I am calm. That’s how messed up this body is. I’ve stowed away inside again, that’s what we do, us big kids. We’re an army– an army given cheap guns, yet known to be armed to the teeth with devices that a soul shall never ever pass, and they never will. Security lock down—it’s a brilliant defense, this dissociation, but it comes back for ya. You have to pay for it. It comes back when you’re almost thirty and thinking about a diet and reading the classics and going to school to become to become to become. And then, wham, shot down. It’s the early-on, unknowing that is most terrifying. I was sure I fucked myself up beyond repair, that back in the day, I’d done some irreparable damage and I was going to die. I saw death. I breathed my grandmother’s name and practically ran to mental health holding my head, to stop the black images popping up with red eyes. To catch my short breath, and the taste in my mouth…it was coming…the flashback. Blindfolds, blood, and sex. I’m a five year-old in heels, smashing my makeup on the ground, crying in the corner, banging on the locked yellow door.
So that’s the beginning, or shall I say, my first day, of PTSD. Drove my ass right to the bin. It was my first time but I always figured that I’d show up there some day. I don’t know why. I’m not one to prod my weird thoughts. That’s asking for mayhem. They shot me in the ass with meds and I cried all night and day after day. I remember thinking that this was it, that it wasn’t so bad, they’d fix me of course, and I’d never be back again. That was the baby version of PTSD, when the “psychotic episodes” or flashbacks were so minute they barely counted and I always came out of it squeaky clean, like it was a bad, dirty dream. Soon, after my stay there, these “episodes” began to creep into my mornings, I started dissociating more when the panic rose when triggers were set off, my legs went numb, I tasted rubber in my mouth. The flashbacks or episodes were lasting forever, on and off, at a moment’s notice. Strange, scared thoughts and ideas whipped me around on a fucking roller coaster and flung me out of its seats at the peak of the ride. Nothing was real. I called to my fiancé who seemed like an oil painting and we were all dissolving and he’d never reach me. “Talk me down. Help me. Talk to me.” I’d demand with my voice in total control. I couldn’t let anyone see that helpless chaos on my face. It was like seeing your own death. Yet you believe death would be easier. You don’t trust yourself in the tub with the pretty pink razor. What?! You’re screaming what to yourself because now the suicidal thoughts listed in the “DSM” are scrolling off the page and into your ears. Oh shit. The book. The stigma. You think as you sink “I’m one of them”. Depersonalization disorder, dissociative amnesia, panic disorder, PTSD…there’s one more (besides the bipolar) but I can’t remember. At this brief interjection of a strange paragraph I’d like to say “Gee, thanks. Thank you step-father. I have seen the light; the dark; and now I can’t see anything but exist as this open wound because of your own tormented soul. Thank you for the lesson, thanks for not beating this one into me. My flesh could’ve handled it better than my head, but could you have known?”
Anyways, death. Death. But what’s left? It got worse. They couldn’t help me. I was seeing things, feeling things, things were lost, demanding their recapture, and I couldn’t see them. I’m five years old, sitting in the crook of my fiancé’s arm, with flat affect.
What the printed, sacred documents of the doc’s don’t tell you is that there is something very key to survival…as they end their chapters in comorbidity and the morbid–suicide rates. They fail to mention the elements of two things that will save you: hope and love. Now why would a book about the mind involve such artificial, baseless tones to their story? You gotta figure it out for yourself, because each persons’ fate is different. These two elements cannot be captured, their purpose lays in secrecy as they fill us all with blessing. Hope is that last shred of light you see; it’s that part of your brain that drives you to the hospital for help, instead of into the tub. Hope makes you wake up and face another day, giving you clues and signs everywhere that there is more, so much more…to life. And in those signs beams love. The love of the fiancé who holds you to his chest and waits for you to get better, knowing more than you do that you’re going to make it. The love of the mother who doesn’t even have to speak, but sits at your side until your episode is over and you can look her in the eye with gravity. The love of the sisters, who allow you to wail out your fear and struggle through your belief that there is no future, just nothingness and death. They cry too, and you feel love because you’re not breaking alone. And the love of a friend, a long-ago best friend—agent of dreams—who tells you as you sit back in the bin again that you’re not alone, she said “tell her I am with her.” And she was. This intricate web of hope and love has shown me something not many people get to see—just how undeniably soulful it is to have each other, and to love each other—unconditionally. There is a greater purpose that must be so simple we can’t see it, but sometimes get a taste of it. It’s so simple that your heart becomes light and made of pink love that streams through your blessed body that heals; it’s so simple that the mind can find a moment where it is at rest and calm and knows peace. It can’t really be written—the love I’ve seen.

Soul Thief: PTSD, Bipolar, and the Bin

2010-05-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

The mirror above the sink is made of metal or tin, like a baking sheet flipped over, bolted to the wall. I don’t resemble much in the scratched reflection. There is this pointy, hollow, puffy-faced woman with black circles around her eyes. I see a physical creature, held hostage. Far, far away I think I remember her, at least a trace, for a moment. And a deep saddness fills me–fills me up to the jagged edge of sweaty palms, a burning stomach, a fluttering in the chest. A noise creeps across the floor. I think maybe I have to stop getting so close to that girl, because it brings out my disease–makes me nearly quit breathing–or I want to quit breathing. It makes me run for the nurse, who’ll give me a blanket to hold and lay me down on a heating pad and softly speak to me about the facts of PTSD. Facts calm me down. I won’t be able to breathe when I first lay down–I’ll close my eyes and scratch at my face for the blindfold I feel wrapped around my head. Then I’ll feel blood, hot and sticky, coming from some kind of hole on my cheek. She gives me a pill. I’ll smear the blood away and look at my hands at the peak of the flashback, and not see red fingers; no blood. And I can see; no blindfold. It’s all just my mind, like a dream. I’m shifting in and out of different planes of reality if I’m not dissociating. I have no control. The monster never reveals himself, just the shame arises and I am naked everywhere inside-out;skinless. I’m a little girl. Just another little face that cowers before a perverse hand and leaves this place. “Fear is not your monster. Don’t give it a name. We are here to show you that it’s not your monster, it’s your teacher.” I wash my hands. I am nauseous. I can’t get it away–this blood of mine on my hands.
Focus. I stop spinning in my head by saying aloud the word Focus. I can focus for about a minute. Sixty seconds of bliss as I touch the objects around me and describe them, which should supposedly help me from sliding off the ledge into dissociation. I stare out the thick window, I stare at my cot, my twisted white sheets, my balled up blanket I hold close at night like a teddy bear, my plastic pillows, my untouched books, an old journal that looks at me during the long afternoons. Then I’m speeding up, frantically saying as I grab at random “soft, smooth, hard, cool, squishy, solid, rock, concrete…” and my pace is what scares me back into a panic and I feel myself step away–in one, loud thunder-step she’s gone, leaving me empty again. I don’t stand a chance here, I think, the only place where there is help. And I sit and cry in an empty shell.
Days pass in what feels like a month. Happy New Year I laugh to myself. Just days, I say, just some days and I went so far. How do I travel so much in a few days, locked in one building, the mirage of help where the nurses sit in their glassed-in office, watching us, laughing, sharing chocolates and Christmas cookies and new diets. How many shifts went by for them? I’ve become dependent on Nurse Jo; she’s the one person I choose to show my absolute bottoms to, and she brings me back to the room in the quiet building under the street lights that reveal showers of snow, gently, outisde. At night, after supper, I stare out the glass door by my room. I stare at the soft knolls of rounded snow, imagine the buzz from the halogen street lights, the crumple of weightless snow singing to the ground. I can’t go out there and touch it. I think of the recycled generations and VIP’s that have spent the same kind of nights here. I cry (that’s about all I can do). Hard. I cry because I’d wanted someone to carry me, carry me like water–as Saenz says. But I’d run through their fingers. I cry because here I am trying to carry myself, and I’m just so tired; I have no faith left inside. No faith in tomorrow, or even the coming night when it gets bad. I realize how alone I am and that I’m falling with nothing to catch myself on. Am I destroyed? Did I blow it? Will I get her back? I stop crying and stiffen up. I’ll find her. On my own, dammit. I’ll get her back. I won’t carry myself. I’ll push myself. I’ll fight for her, because she was once so lovely.

Eric Clapton - Cryin

2010-04-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

PTSD Survivor’s Speak: Just a Thought on Labels and Healing | Guest Post: Survivors Speak | Heal My PTSD, LLC - Your source for symptoms, causes, and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

2010-04-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

PTSD Survivor’s Speak: Just a Thought on Labels and Healing | Guest Post: Survivors Speak | Heal My PTSD, LLC - Your source for symptoms, causes, and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

behind dissociation

2010-03-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

there is a piece I lost
a great, big piece I lost
and I don't know where I am.
I slipped away once upon...
I stole inside where touch and sight
could never reach me.
It was, truly, a brilliant escape
but it had a high cost
I can't suffer the balance.
There is a piece I had to give
I don't know which or how
but there is a piece I lost
and I spend all my time
searching for it
and that's what makes me
so very very tired.
So tired that I forget where I am
and all the other pieces
keep crashing into each other,
losing their places,
looking at me,
waiting for me to fill the space.

Don't Keep Secrets

2009-11-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

Manic-truth. I tried to blog about it. I can’t help but wonder if it was just post after post of fixed mania and a sense of slipping. You try to watch for the slip—so carefully—because it is the number one fear above all others. But the trick is in the trade—because living with bipolar (among anxiety and many other disorders), you have to play mind-games with yourself to survive. You have to stick to hope while knowing the next time, it might be gone; hope feels out of your hands. Hope is something you know you have when you’re sane, and something you pray you have when you’re fighting for your mind to come back. Hope tells you that you have a mind to come back to. You have to create the manic-like cycle of psychotherapy and go to the appointments even when you’re on top of the world, because that’s all you have to cling to when you find yourself in the mental hospital, crying on your cot, dark images popping behind your eyes; images you’ll never share. And what trips you up are tricks. A sudden flash that nothing is real, while you’re playing with your four-year old and supper’s in the oven—is it a mind-game?—or is it the delusional part of the illness pushing its way through. Will it always push its way through? Will I break again? Can I get back up again? I have to believe: yes. Yes yes yes I will get up again if I fall. Again and again. I look into the eyes of my baby girl and know I will get up again. If I start to slip I have to catch myself and pray to God that the doctor’s in. Because sometimes, it feels like you won’t last one more moment, one more second, inside your head. And your mind is the fighting-force that decides whether you’re ok or not. This is a battle. It’s harder than I ever imagined it would be. It’s dark and sneaky and mean and as tangible as breath. The thoughts on those low nights: God give me breath; God let me wake up tomorrow; let me fall asleep tonight. Bipolar takes you down, down, down there in a wordless, sinking labyrinth where broken synapses whisper to you and loved ones wait on a separate plain. They can’t reach you. They can only help you from the outside, in a world you can’t exist in when you’re down there. I don’t want to be down there again. The anxiety only increases after a bout, for fear of falling again. I have to and will be so careful with myself. The ugly manic-truth is: no one can help you in this but you. You have to learn yourself inside out. You have to question certain passions and fears and follow the guideline of a crooked memory to know what’s real. I have to find a source for my faith. Because I have it, somehow, in love. I have to self-medicate myself with reality and take my medicine. I have to be another patient for the rest of my life--and I intend on making it a long one.

Loving From the Poles

2009-11-13T23:18:00.001-08:00

Even if I chose to be well do you really think you could tell the difference in me? I do as well as I can and I can't show you the gray carnival I see around me in that unloving place; I can't show you the rain that looks so lovely on the green blades of grass like magic baubles, crystal balls when I am in love with the world in my teeth. I understand why you have to go, I understand I can't mirror that love I have inside--you could have tried to take it, I'd have let you steal it. I shouldn't have to apologize to you that I can't feel you when you touch me. I didn't opt for dissociation; I didn't opt to meet you when I am such an aftermath of abuse. You grew up in dandelions and cartoons, you never knew secrets and the pain of dark. I can feel the fresh breeze on my skin; I can see me as a new woman who discarded that sad, ugly girl. But you didn't want to love her and she's a part of me. Yet all I can think is I'm Sorry Im Sorry I'm Sorry. I'd love to wrap myself around you and tell you how scared I am and how brave I am, but I've tired you out I think. You say "maybe with some time..." and I gave you back your ring. Sometimes, when the great breath of hope exhales, I think I will always be alone. And I have to learn to make that okay. I can't choose to be well but I can choose to inhale this "bipolar" disorder as a part of me; it's who I am. In my eyes, someday, I'll be enough.

Panic

2009-11-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

it sounds like a circus back there,
behind me where I can't go, trapped
in my mute carnival
and I'm suddenly alone
in a huge wide world, a
spinning playground and the people
are paper cut-outs with empty expressions
and painted souls like balloons;
there is no love in this place
and it makes me so sick

Sick Mother, Pick Flowers

2009-11-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

she is busy beside me not with me where
dandelions break and tea's never drunk and cigarettes are smoked
and guilt plays in strums that pluck at my nerves that hurt what I'm
too afraid to touch

The Point of My Blogs

2009-10-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

So one of my symptoms is"grandiose optimism and self-esteem"...like that's a bad thing. I wonder if Voltaire had a bit of the bipolar too, writing Candide in supposedly three days? I can see the fever and restlessness. I've learned to not just accept this "label" of being bipolar but I've come to rather like it. Clearly I'm medicated, but that's beside the point--if it weren't for my genes and really messed up earlier life (that led me to having anciety, panic, mood, and dissociative disorders, and PTSD--a fun little package, fruitful for my goals I used to think), I don't know if I'd be writing.
My creative nonfiction began in journaling many years ago, only I didn't know I was writing it. Journaling first helped me, but then it made me look at the ugly facts with a growing mental illness/disorder, so I began creative nonfiction--taking my entries and making them sound poetic but real to me. Writing CNF eventually saved my life from that low some of you know. Maybe many of you? Anyway I do like to think I've remained an inner nut-job with optimism who can now control my content's weight--not matter (and I truly believe having bipolar adds to the spectrum of ideas--maybe they're not good ideas, but there's lots of them!).
Creative Nonfiction. Isn't that a cold phrase for so much sweat and tears and heart? It reminds me of standing naked in cinderblock shower in a blue basement (I'm not sure why). But what I've come to discover so far are two things (though nothing is ever truly found...infinitesimal): we write the kaleidoscope of emotions and matters that we, at the present time, were unable to wrap our arms around--that magnitude of moments says more than our minds and hearts let us comprehend and there's a truth in that spark--because it's been there, silent, before. We recognize this spark or single moment and seek it out, white like crazy, knowing we saw the truth for a fraction of a second. We engrave the details of the moment into our eyes, memorizing memorizing.
Secondly, my greatest fear did not happen--I did not lose myself or my passion or my zillion words piecing together in my head like I thought I would if I treated my Bipolar. What it did for me was stop the waves from hitting me in the face--I still bob in the water, always will. I still struggle with it, but all it did for me as a writer was smooth out the landscape a little, which helped A LOT. Dealing with truths--the ugly and beautiful--and sharing them in the best ways we know how, now that's writing. Some are so big in your heart that you write at 3 am in a frantic rush and don't really know what you're writing at fifty miles an hour. Some call that being open. Some call that manic. Some call that mad artistry. I call that the simple truth. It is what it is what it is. Writing cnf, poetry, short stories, and flash fiction (billions in progress it feels like) was and is my therapy. Sure I'm anxious, have flashbacks that I refuse to share, occassionally feel like Fraggle Rock's "Red" on speed, I have heart murmurs from past stress, I scare so damn easily, still see my psychotherapist (usually when I'm stuck in a piece, I'm stuck somewhere inside). She helped me to re-raise myself and to learn how to love the aftermath of me. Self-destructive--alittle, but not so much--not so much of all of this as before because I'm not afraid of myself. The girl that used to write in private is now merely the bare black bones of the font, feeding me what I fed her. When I was first able and free to write about her as this "other", I lost a year in college because I was writing and writing and she broke out on the page in a fever and I couldn't leave my house. Panic attacks came back. She took some getting used to, but like with all things worth it, you have to be slow and gentle. Eventually that episode subsided, I felt better, stronger--and the words keep coming.
My focus lately has been flash fiction, poetry, and lots of reading--but behind all that, late at night, like drums down the hall, is my story in a billion pieces--good pieces and solid on their own--but they're part of a greater whole I can't find a vehicle for yet. Or I'm afraid of/dreading a new one because I've exhausted some of them and I fear acting motifs but love them more than anything. So that's me, why I'm here. This is my uncreative nonfiction piece. Thanks for reading and please share!
Amy