Okay.

When I read Gone Girl, I thought it was a good book. My friend hated it because she found it imminently predictable. I did see what was coming pretty quickly, but what I liked was the concept of the unreliable narrator, the person telling their own story as if they were a saint when all along they are the worst kind of sinner. It started me on a search for more books with unreliable narrators, which led me to Before I Go to Sleep.

It is apparently also a film, which I have no interest in seeing since I know how the story ends and who the most dangerous players are. But the book is interesting in that it is told from the perspective of a woman with bi-polar disorder. She has these horrible episodes that oscillate between blinding, omnipotent clarity and utter futility and despair. Anyway, she is a suspect for a murder of which she has no memory and she is racing the clock during her manic phase to figure out her involvement. Booklist described the writing as such:  It is both an affecting portrait of the profound impact of a debilitating illness and a pulse-pounding thriller whose outcome no one could predict.

I liked it. I described it recently to someone looking for a good read and that person said, "Oh, interesting. You know, I'm bi-polar."

I was all but stopped short. 

Bi-polar is not something one admits to. Isn't that the way our society operates? I'm not sure why. Someone with BP has no more control over their disability than someone with Downs. But somehow, we look forgivingly on someone with the latter; the former, we draw away from. As if bi-polar were catching. 

And it's the worst kind of hypocrisy that I was taken aback, because I know what it's like to live with mental illness. I don't have bi-polar disorder myself. (I know this because I insisted on being given a comprehensive battery of tests at the hospital the last time I was there). No, I have what doctors can only agree in labeling as "mild depression" (when I'm doing well) to "severe clinical depression" when I am not.

I wish that not wanting to be alive could be looked at like having a broken leg. That people would help you and give you flowers instead of looking at you automatically like I looked at that friend, involuntarily, like Why would you admit that? Don't you know that's Not Cool? We don't talk about that here.

I would be okay if I could be. I've tried awfully hard, in the 12 years since I first started taking the twenty or so different medicines that I've tried. I don't want to live the next 50 years like this, but I don't know how not to. In our society, you don't talk about mental illness, unless it's the innocuous kind like ADHD or OCD. But you don't talk about how it's hard for you to even keep breathing everyday because you feel so much despair. Trust me, I know. I get that if I were just more open to "seeing the Lord move" in my life and "being filled with the Holy Spirit," I could get better. And that just makes the despair worse. Because the truth is that no matter how much of a Christian I purported to be or how much medicine I take, my body will just keep adjusting and rejecting.

If there's a silver lining here, it's that I have good friends. Mer, for instance, drops everything to rush over in her pajamas and tuck me into bed. And Sarah and Nicholle and Christie have sat with me while I cried, too. But sometimes, I get tired of asking people to help me pick of up the pieces of my broken mind. I just want to be like others, the ones who enjoy being alive. I spend a lot of time wondering what that's like.

Don't worry, I have no plans to off myself. I just wish that mental health and physical health could be seen the same way. I wish that it was okay to be not okay. I am the unreliable narrator of my own life. I describe everything as dark and ruinous because that's the way it looks to me. I don't mean to be a Negative Nelly or ungrateful for the good things in my life. I just can't seem to process them somehow.