It all started the moment I was born with a predisposition to being moody. I was apparently a difficult and demanding baby and child. I can remember being and feeling very sensitive to others even as a toddler. I know “they” say we cannot remember that far back, but I do not believe that. I can remember the house that I first came home to from the time that I was about two. Obviously, I do not recall being an infant, but I can remember my younger sister as an infant which would put me at about 2 years of age. I can recall her nursery. It was the early 70’s, and she had shag carpet in her room. I vividly recall stepping on a toothpick in that room, and she was still in a crib. I recall feeling rejected when she didn’t want to play with me, and crying as I played alone. Loneliness and being or feeling alone are both very prominent in my life, and have been for many years. There really is not a feeling that is worse than that sense that you are alone even when you are with someone. Well, maybe there is, but I have not experienced it yet.
So, I was born with the genes that predisposed me initially to deep depressions, and finally a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. My paternal grandmother was a manic depressive who went untreated. Since the first approved treatment for Bipolar was Lithium in 1972, she would have been undiagnosed and unmedicated for about 63 years. One can only imagine the living nightmare that would have been. Well, actually, I can imagine it as I lived it for many years not knowing what was wrong. Or, more specifically what was causing the nightmarish shifts in mood. Perhaps she was allergic to lithium as I am, but I really think she just didn’t know what she had. There really wasn’t a diagnosis for manic depression when she was growing up, getting married, having children, and living her life. Besides I do not think she thought anything was really “wrong”. My grandmother typically would be in the manic phase of the illness, although she and my grandfather did not share a room for whatever reason (perhaps depression or extreme mania that he needed to get away from). She was always flitting around barely able to keep still making sure guests had everything that they needed or could want. She was very social during these episodes. She was also in the early stages of Alzheimer’s which also has a genetic component. That scares me due to the fact that it is her genetics that partially contributed to my mood disorder. The maternal side of my family has it’s own history of depression. So, I got it from both sides.
I think the first time I can remember being truly depressed was when I was still in grade school. I had few friends and the ones I had tended to drop me fairly quickly. In fact, I do not remember having a “best friend” that was another little girl. My best friend at the time was the step son of a man my father worked with at the University. Seems like every time I think about the friends I have had over the years all have been male. Anyway, I had one good friend, and the rest were to be avoided at all costs as they bullied me relentlessly. Perhaps that is why I tend to be a bit closed off. Or maybe, I just had not encountered The Art of War yet.
I remember not wanting to go to school, and pretending to be sick so I could stay home and be by myself. I think I was about 10 years old when I first really recall being depressed in a clinical sense. I wanted to be a cat more than anything in the world because they seemed to have it pretty good. They were relaxed (unlike dogs who need a lot of attention), they just wanted to eat, sleep in the sun and be petted. It appeared good to me.
At the time I was in the “gifted” program for students who had IQ’s in that range, and needed additional educational and creative outlets. We got to leave class for an hour and go do neat things like dissecting frogs or doing research papers on an assigned topic. I had been in the program since the age of 7, and we were all pretty much outcasts because the other students did not understand why we got to leave the regular class room. I knew one kid who could solve a Rubik’s cube (no matter how messed up it was) within about 5 minutes. He was probably a genius on some level.
Moving on….I was 10 when I first recognized that my moods and perceptions were different than others. I thought that no one could possibly like me, I was pretty convinced that my parents didn’t love or want me (I was a birth control failure), and I had an overdeveloped fight or flight instinct when faced with something that I perceived as a threat to me. If I was teased in any way, I ran. If I had to give a presentation like a book report, that triggered a strong flight instinct. I ran from almost everything, and could be counted on being found crying on the swings in the back of the playground. I appeared weird, and “not cool” to the other kids, and topping it off was that I could identify and perceive adult emotions, but I could not process them. I was too young. So it all came out in emotional outbursts, anger and aggression towards others, etc. All of which are classic symptoms of depression in a child. I also had, in my mind, decided that if I were to die that nobody would come to the funeral. Suicidal ideation in a child of that age? Probably. I could see it so clearly. The casket, the flowers, and the very random people of which there were few that actually cared to come. I definitely wanted to be if not invisible to others, then dead. Everything hurt too much. I just wanted out. I was 10, and I wanted to die more than anything in the world. My first attempt at leaving this world behind came when I was 12.
Nobody knew any of this was going on in my head; not my parents, not my teachers, not my few friends. I kept it to myself because I honestly believed that I would be better off dead, and I did not want to tell this to anyone although there was clearly something abnormal about my mood. Kids that age typically play with one another, and all I wanted to do was be alone so I could read. At the time, I was reading a lot of Nancy Drew books, and I wished I could be more like her. I could read two or three books in a day. I really do not know what my parents thought. They weren’t really around. My mother was busy as a full-time Law student, and my father did a lot of traveling for work. Of course, now I can look back and see that I was probably delusional, and operating on some form of psychosis. I just recall feeling really bad about myself and my worth as a member of this planet. Like I said earlier, I was 12 the first time I tried to kill myself. I drank ammonia mixed with soda after being disciplined by my parents for using a curse word when the soda fizzed up and out when I took off the lid. I look at it from the perspective of an adult with mixed episode Bipolar with psychotic features, and I can see how inherently pointless it was to try something like that for getting “talked” to by my dad for cursing.
Since my word count is already in the 1300’s, I will start the next part in middle school when everything gets worse than I thought it could get…….
A Bipolar Journey Through The Rabbit Hole 