Erica Wheadon

Tag: bipolar

cavalier as fuck

I don’t know what to say anymore.

I knew what to say about ten minutes ago, when I was pegging damp clothing on the line at four in the afternoon. I carry no false illusion of any of it drying before tomorrow and yet that’s all I can think about now, rather than the flashes of insight, the debonaire prose that now eludes me. It’s almost cruel. Like a dream dematerialising as you awake. Like truth, I suppose, every time you recall it. I hold stubbornly onto a phrase, knowing that I lack the mental room for another. Before I flick the kettle on, I run to my desk and scrawl it on a notepad. The rest will return, I believe. Cavalier as fuck. What’s new.

It’s been six days since I handed in my thesis. The only thing that has mattered to me for two and a half years and now it’s over. The whole time all I could think about was the result – justifying my career choice with a grade, proving that I deserved it. I hit a wall in the final four weeks – creative artefact in pieces around me, questioning my decision to not only take three research subjects within the space of a trimester but changing my research question at the eleventh hour – essentially meaning that I had twelve weeks to research and write 20,000 words. The downside of being a big-picture thinker is that it is difficult to fine-tune the signal – especially with anxiety running interference. Somehow I found my second wind, and made it to the finish line, two days before my extension date. I don’t know if it’s any good. I bat away requests to read it from well-meaning friends with “Maybe” and “One day”. The truth is, I don’t want to even look at the damn thing again. Maybe ever.

What I didn’t account for was the freedom on the other side. Do you know what matters on the other side of your thesis? Fuck all. At first there is sweet relief, that you believe initially to be indulgent. Sleeping in past seven a.m. Late breakfasts. Taking pleasure in reading again. And then the questions begin. What’s next for you? Look, I know people mean well – but I can do without my reverie served with a side of existential crisis, if that’s okay.

So, I journal, I finish my current roll of film. I draw lazy circles with my feet and stare off into the sky. As if on cue, my latent creative energy rushes to fill the vacuum. I humour it. The revelations come, sometimes at speed, and I grab at them, let them hoist me towards their dizzying heavens where I exist for a time. I’m fortunate to have friends that know this process, and act as spotters, cautiously encouraging me, nodding that yes, it’s a good plan, an excellent plan. Groundbreaking, revolutionary. They are eyeing the ground, calculating whether they are any match for the inertia of my downfall. New post-it notes make their way onto the wall and I eye them critically, satisfied. No one is surprised when I can’t get out of bed the next day, equilibrium eluding me as it does. Hours later I feel the low-energy ebb. These smaller cycles don’t frighten me anymore. All I can do is try to navigate them with a modicum of self-awareness.

And so here I am, waiting for new paths to materialise, waiting for a grade that doesn’t even matter. I’ve spent the day creating work far more eloquent than anything I turned in. Sorry fear. Maybe expectation is the mindkiller after all.

Rattle and Hum

Well the coffee and lithium cocktail landed me with mild-to-concerning adrenal fatigue. Cockiness, as it turns out, gets you nowhere. I am now on a diet of magnesium and water and abstaining from caffeine.

Well it was fun while it lasted.

Having anxiety/PTSD on lithium is like being kept awake during brain surgery: my fight/flight impulses just carry on causing havoc yet I can’t do a damned thing about it. The body knows though. It always knows.

On the upside – new meds. On the downside, long-release lithium has to be weaned. I should be in the safe hands of Lamictal by the time my final trimester begins. I’m told it will lift the fog. I just pray it can carry me.

It’s ironic, I have always abhorred stoicism. January however (physical responses notwithstanding), has brought with it the kind of quietude I have always resisted and railed against. My impulses are bridled, my moves deliberate. I tend to my brain like a garden. As if my life depends on it. Because it does.

It’s the hardest and most frustrating part to explain – and what I, myself would never have accepted even a year ago – I thought that if you went off your brain, went off your meds, you only had yourself to blame. My retort to that now (other than don’t be so fucking stupid) is – if you wouldn’t blame a diabetic for their levels, then don’t blame a manic-depressive for theirs. End of story.

On the upside, this newfound euthymia has sailed me through my Summer internship. Editing, as it turns out, is second nature to me. I enjoy taking apart people’s words, like a mechanic. Fixing syntax, checking facts. Tightening sentences so that they purr and hum. My creative project has recently evolved and it’s feeling attainable. I just need to run it past my supervisor and come March, I’ll be in hibernation mode, in preparation for my last academic winter.

I am stashing hope in tins and labelling them carefully.
I never want to leave myself short again.

—

Reading: O Fallen Angel (Kate Zambreno)
Watching: Sex Education (Season 2)
Listening to: Jenny Lewis

The paradox of privilege

It’s hard to not associate gratitude with guilt, the closer we get to the belly of the apocalypse. Future generations would probably tell me that we’re nowhere near it. That it happens long after I’m dead and gone. This – this is just the start of the showdown. That I can go about my day with my recycled bags and my mindful energy consumption and feel relatively smug. I’m told that I still have to live in this world, still have to navigate its pathways with my very human emotions and my very real sensitivities. The plates I spin require precise calculation as it is. Self-care for me looks like not adding another plate even when the ten I have are spinning so splendidly.

I’m trying, Earth. I could try harder. My friends down south are wearing facemasks to work. The places I lived and loved in 2018 have been decimated. I look out at my blue skies and clean air, at the crisp green grass, still damp with rain and I marvel, albeit with a whimper, at the fate-tempest that delivered me back here.

South-east Queensland is a utopia compared to the rest of the country right now. When the floods hit us in 2011 – we used the words ‘unprecedented’ and ‘catastrophic’. Images of houses floating away filled our screens, the death toll rose sharply – all we could do was watch on in horror as people drowned in drought-riddled country towns, helpless against the deluge. There were no protests. Climate change was bandied around but dismissed as rhetoric. Every time I walk along the river now, marvel at the new laneway bars or playgrounds and water-features, I remember that not so long ago, it was our turn. How quickly we rebuild and forget.

I am grateful for my blue sky. For my flourishing plants. How when the weather hits 40 up here (and it does), I can slide into my pool and glide across its cool waters and pretend that this is just normal, this is just Summer. This is not normal. This is the new normal.

I am grateful for this life that I am re-building, for the abated storms in my mind, for medication (no matter how imperfect at times), for my cornerstone and rock of a husband, for my daughter who grows and thrives more every year. For my family. For music. For my accessible education. For work that appears when I need it.

I watch, I read, I educate myself, I donate. I despair. I survive. I try to live, despite that fact that others do not. It feels shameful to envy the dead at a time like this and yet guilt is a useless emotion that I am slowly coming to terms with.

In therapy, we talk in metaphors, of demons and wolves. Of normalising what haunts me. We talk about self-forgiveness. How every time I am tempted to move back to either coast, or to go back to what broke me, I’m to make a list of what I’d be missing: my favourite Italian bakery; my favourite cinema; short drives up the mountain; forests, steamy after the rain; the currawongs that have finally migrated, their songs now mingling amongst the chorus of wagtails and stormbirds and cockatoos.

I know, deep down that it’s taken a whole year to be on the other side of this madness, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m home. But I also tell her how it feels like survivor’s guilt. That I do not have the right to love this life. She reminds me about how hard I have fought to be in this space. And that the world needs me alive, and thriving so that I have more choices, and the more choices I have available to me, the more I have to give. The paradox of privilege.

“But it’s good to be alive
And these are the choices
We make to survive
You do what you can”

– Sheryl Crow

Resolution

I started to write a new year’s post but it just felt glib – especially in the wake of the country literally being burned alive. In it, I took stock of the good parts of 2019 (there were more than I realised) and tried to project myself into the future – to figure out what I’d be writing about at the end of 2020, once the shine of optimism wore off and the momentum faded. This time last year I was about to be triggered into a cycle that lasted six months. There were a lot of things I didn’t know then. And some that were fast coming to light.

Despite the anti-resolution hype, January is usually a fairly productive month for me. It’s where I set up all the plans that I will inevitably destroy by winter. This year I’m being strategic – finish my degree and my internship, try to make some semblance of an income, knowing that I’ll be out of action when I inevitably descend into the underworld, to however many degrees this time. It feels weird to plan for it. Make hay while the sun shines, my mother used to say. I recently discovered that coffee cuts through lithium, so I’m thinking semi-clearly again, but unfortunately it has a Cinderella effect, and is starting to wear off faster. And both are fucking up my kidneys, so great. But hey (hay?). The sun is shining, and I’m getting shit done. I’ll take the win.

Shutting down my Facebook has been not just healing but liberating. It’s like being cut off from the collective (#treknerd), but in the best possible way. As my therapist says, if it’s making me spin my wheels, it’s to be avoided. So I’ve curated my Twitter and Instagram feeds, have unfollowed and muted anything that makes me turn against myself, and for once, I’m not overthinking. Last year I felt profoundly alone in a sea of noise. All of it fake, despite its intention. Now, I find, there’s nothing in these waters that interests me at all.

I’ve been thinking back to a time where we all used to be a lot more honest with ourselves and each other online. When we used to write volumes, instead of posting memes. Rants, perhaps, yes. But who cares? I fell in love once with a boy who wrote a blog. Before the word blog was even a word. He was lonely, like me, and he displayed such breathtaking, heartrenching honesty in the public sphere. I loved that about him the most, even if I didn’t fully understand the trajectory of my choices. Gradually that trait that I admired more than anything, shrank and turned inwards and became a cancer. He swallowed himself whole and secrecy destroyed him from the inside, leaving those that loved him in his wake.

I used to think writers were my kryptonite, but I’ve come to realise that’s not quite true. What fuels me is courage. Truth. Honesty. Of all the things I cannot bear, it’s watching people lie to themselves, and then watching the truth seep out through their actions. If you can’t be honest with me, then I never wanted you anyway.

So. 2021, if you’re reading this, I hope that I took my story and made something of it. That’s enough of a resolution, I think.
—

Reading: Book of Mutter (Kate Zambreno)
Watching: The Witcher
Listening to: Anna Nalik

Hue and Saturation

Lately I’ve been pushing each pill through its foil shield so hard that it breaks in two in my hand. I divide and calculate, and consider briefly what it would be like to turn up the vibrancy just for a little while. Nothing long-term. Just a slice to carry me over Christmas. Something to remember myself by.

I wonder if hybrid non-fiction can include part-cautionary-tale.

I write it down just in case.

Pattern interrupt.

I woke up, feeling like I was sinking. I had been dreaming about broken rope bridges that led to watery graves all night and when I finally opened my eyes, I knew I was on that old familiar downswing. Since my diagnosis, I have been learning to identify how to to stop spinning my wheels and implement a pattern interrupt, so I picked up the Pam Grout book : Art & Soul, Reloaded. There aren’t too many new ideas in here, particularly as I am already a devotee of Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield (whom she references frequently), but I also know that creative nonfiction involves remixing ideas and making them your own, and so I put my protestations aside and read the first few chapters over coffee.

I won’t call it eye-opening, or life-changing – but then, when did those descriptors become the gold standard? The whole point of the book is to create, no matter what, no excuses, even though it’s probably been done before. I was just about to close it down for the day when I stumbled across her chapter on blog writing. I smirked because already I’d had fantasies of shutting down what I’d started.

“Writing a blog is free, priceless, and, according to Seth Godin, one the best things you could ever do for yourself. He recommends writing a blog post a day… Don’t panic, a blog can be a paragraph or two.”

Don’t panic. Ha.

The trouble with blogging every day is that when you are a perfectionist, even the smallest ongoing practice that lands in front of others becomes a behemoth task.

Ironically – figuring out what to write is not my problem – I am an avid diariser. I could write for hours. It’s not the writing. But…the editor in me wants to cut and shape every word to perfection. Do I have time to publish a blog every day and deal with the potential emotional fallout?

Maybe that’s the point.

And yet – I’m competitive enough to rise to a challenge…perhaps even to prioritise it over fear. I’m not sure I want to do it alone though – so as soon as I can rope someone else into it, I will. How’s that for an excuse?

One or two paragraphs. That’s all. Sigh. We’ll see.