With my husband's permission I am going to write out the story of his breakdown and diagnosis of Bipolar 2 in the first year of our marriage and it's effects on our life since. This story will be told in segments. The stigma of Bipolar is enormous and has not begun to decrease in power as it has with other mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety. This story intends only two things: to be entirely honest in it's telling, and for that honesty to help break down some of the stigmata of it's truth. In writing this I am assuming a level of respect toward my husband and his story in the comments, as well as an understanding that this is a man I love deeply and have committed myself to.
The words accrue- breakdown, psychosis, unstable- until the person in the chair, hands sweaty and folded in his lap, feet pressed together, head lowered- progression, irrational, medication-feels sure he is entirely made of this hardened skin now, just these words- chronic, genetic- forming layer over layer in a reverse scleroderma, thickening from the outside in, hidden inside of a disease both corrupt and stigmatized.
IN THE BEGINNING
One year into a marriage, he wakes in the morning, puts on his workman's shoes, pulls up the half cut green shorts and collared tee, grabs his lunch, looks at his sleeping wife and feels nothing. Oh, he thinks, I don't love my wife anymore. He looks around his house, all the objects unforgiving, cold, pointless, and realizes I don't want this. In the back of his mind a small voice is turning, turning, whispering something he leans inward to hear but cannot dredge the concern to wait for. Turning from his wife, his children, his house, he steps out of the door and is overwhelmed with the engulfing certainty that he is stepping into a vortex, an entirely different emotional life and reality that before had been hidden, but now in his dry, clear assessment is as true and pointless to avoid as the leg he must move in front of him to get to the truck which he will move to get him to his job.
The day moves quickly and he is thinking quickly and jokes fly out of his mouth in loudspeaker, his points are sharp and his comebacks sharper, his laughter at one point rising so high that he stops, wondering for one moment- but no, he moves on, working, laughing, talking, sure that when he gets home he will sit his wife down and explain to her that he cannot and does not love her or this life they have made, and that it is right. Then there is lunch-break, where he pulls out the turkey, spinach and mayonaise sandwich his wife has made for him and takes a bite before gagging on the thing rising from his abdomen, a grief as great and senseless and shapeless as the certainty of the day had been hard and clear and purposeful. His hands are shaking and his eyes are filling with humiliating tears; he grabs a napkin- she has scribbled I love you on it, like he is a goddamn grade schooler- and presses it to his face, feeling the working of his cheeks and the grinding of his teeth against this thing. He is gripped with the desire to bang his head into the cement pavement, until his skull is cracked and the thin white fluid of his brain leaks out it's yolk.
The sun moves over his short cut hair and the trembling stops. He takes a deep breath, another, holds his hands out in front of him. They are still. He lifts the sandwich to his mouth and begins again.
At home, his wife is holding the baby, the two boys rolling on the couch. Dad! Dad! They shout, and he is happy to see them, happy to high five them and rough their salty hair. His wife's face makes him feel sad. He remembers how he used to love her and reassures himself it couldn't have been just yesterday- this must have been coming for a while, he was denying it, he is now stronger and can face the truth that he does not love her or want a family life. He looks back at her with this reminder on his tongue and feels a great anger. She makes this so much harder than it has to be, he thinks. She is exhausting. No sooner does the thought enter his mind than he feels exhausted, leaden, his arms and legs pulse with deep fatigue and a hard ache, his eyes droop and he yawns.
I have to talk to you, he tells her. She brings the baby to the kitchen table. He sits across from her and begins to tell her he does not love her, cannot do this anymore, and wants a divorce- only after cannot do this anymore the look on her face sends him swimming in that vertigo and the vomit rises again and he cannot say the words. He watches her fingers turn indigo in her grip on herself and travels from the fingers to her face and shakes his head yes in answer to her questions. She is sobbing and the boys are silent in the next room. The baby begins to cry.
She pulls out a heavy breast and nurses the baby as tears curl round the baby's blue eyes and fingers on the breast from her mother's face. He looks at his own hands. He looks at his wife's hands. What is wrong? She is asking, and he shakes his head. I can't, he says, I can't. She is saying words about love and commitment and when she sees those words are bouncing from his shape like pebbles from the side of a dam, she moves toward him, cupping the baby's head in one hand and taking his with the other, demands him to look at her, look at me, she says, sweetheart, my sweetheart, please... And he stands and leaves the room knowing in this thing he is a bastard but not knowing why and not able to feel it, feel guilt or shame or care, not able to feel anything but the great rough and suffocating confusion and vortex of the yellow yolk and thin white fluid of the thick of the center of his brain.
