Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.
Gabriel García Márquez
I didn’t mean for this first entry in glorious Texas to have really nothing to do with Texas. My old blog, Bluebirdy, is in some kind of WordPress update purgatory so I couldn’t post this entry there, so here it is, standing out on its own like a strange dark fowl in a green bermuda pasture dotted with white cowbirds. To be fair, Texas has been wonderful to me, a childhood dream realized of horses in velvet fields and sweltering sunrises and warm nights filled with the music of cicadas and southern friendship. I feel at home here, as if I’ve always lived here, as if the memories of places past are many lives lived and completed in another age and another version of me.
I came out here, I sometimes say, to escape California. In reality though, we only leave behind a place and take ourselves wherever we go, including all our history, our flaws, our vices, our fervent hopes, our lingering desires. If one is optimistic, as I have been since moving here, these ills and blessings that have followed me here will manifest themselves differently, because I choose it. And thus far, they have. There is, however, one outrageous bedfellow that has accompanied me everywhere that I never talk about in public and seldom acknowledge even to friends. I used to call this thing my muse, as descriptions of such things are elusive even in literature, and I thought why not, that’s what it must be, as it endows me with magic and creativity and enormous powers of introspective thought. It also drags me with caliginous fears, ruinous sadness, and a despondency so heavy I would do nearly anything to avoid it. This contrast is vexing as hell – on the one hand I feel I need this bright shadow, this black light. I cannot imagine who I would be without it, because it’s part of me, all the dreams and horrors together.
These days, it’s considered a disability. When you self-identify when applying for jobs, there’s a little check box asking if you have a disability. Some examples are listed, and while I never considered myself disabled, there it is now, “bipolar disorder,” right near the top of the list. Despite the assurance of confidentiality at the top of this form, I feel terrified to check this box, as if now the world will know that my muse is nothing but some misfiring neuron in the front of my head. Can a person’s whole identity be reduced to a mental illness? Who am I without this thing? Am I that sedate, pleasant, medicated creature in real life, or am I brilliant and dangerous and miserable?
I used to think it a fine coincidence that I had so many friends who shared this odd trait. I would run into them everywhere and think, well this can’t be an illness, I know at least ten people with this very same feature! But then I would realize we are drawn to each other, not like moths to light, as that is much too simplistic, but more like treasure hunters solving each puzzle and avoiding each booby trap, stepping gingerly and speaking softly only to find the sparkling prize we ourselves are all too familiar with. You, we would exclaim, you are touched by fire, my friend. We are boisterous, articulate identities who feel all ethereal things as if they can be held in the palms of our hands. Time has a color, and love a sound, and when you leave me the reverberations break all of my bones, and the splinters fall through the cracks in the floorboards. I pity the people who have never hurt with such fury or loved with such heart bursting bliss, but at the same time I would never wish it upon my worst enemies. This is the contradictory genius of my dubious muse.
The tragedy of this muse is its insidious and disorienting nature. It will take you on a seductive ride through circuitous logic and machiavellian connections. Eventually you will end up at the utter despair of ruined opportunities, failed relationships, and a waxing regret. The lost things pain me. They still do, many years later. I won’t make it sound like I’m blaming some divine commandment from a mountaintop, though. For every misplaced word, every cruel glance, every soul crushing blow that I dished, I now take full responsibility, a pledge I never could have made in the past when this illness ruled my every waking hour.
Texas has, ironically, tamed me, or perhaps it has achieved the opposite and simply set me free. I’ve always written as a therapeutic device, even with no audience, whether in my blogs or my memoirs or my fiction. I haven’t written a lot since moving here. I could construe this as bad (I’d like to finish my memoir), or good (I’ve been too busy enjoying my life), or as simply neither of those things, which I’m now understanding it to be. I’m writing now because this thing I call a muse has come up again in a most startling way, and I finally capitulated and resolved to stop ignoring it and hiding it and otherwise pretending I’m just like everyone else.
Most recently, a fellow bipolar identified me, much to my horror. He said I told him this information, though I can’t remember it after all the wine, but it is probably not such a stretch that he would figure this out on his own anyway. With us, and our muses, no telepathy is really required. There’s an aura about us that is both wonderful and wild, menacing and hazardous. “We are fire together,” he said, and gushed intimately about his adventures and desires and treacherous decision-making. He was lustrous and splendid and deeply sad all at once, and it triggered that dormant muse in me and I felt that little burst you get when you lean out of a car window at speed and all the air enters your lungs at once and fills you with passion. When you are us, though, this feeling is always tinged with trepidation, and you have to ask yourself is it too much, am I feeling too much, should I stop now before it gets out of hand. It is a shame to have to stifle yourself, as I think no “normal” person would ever think to curb their own happiness, but it’s a constant question we must ask ourselves to stay within the confines of an inflexible reality.
More surprising to me than his ability to identify me were his wide open battles with this illness, publicized for all the world to see in his writings. I have kept it under wraps myself for years; he thinks everyone should know about it. I know he’s right, but my fears continue to run savage and unabated. One day he held his phone as he read, and his hand shook, and I felt fragile and small under this beast that grips us both and that I refuse to say anything about. That is, until now.
The quote by Gabriel García Márquez is from his novel Of Love and Other Demons. I have always felt that García Márquez wrote love stories about bipolar people. After all, who else could love so absurdly deeply, so fantastically and with such pure devotion? I remember years ago reading Love in the Time of Cholera, and when I put the book down, I turned to my friend (and his muse, of course), and said, “So he spent his entire life preparing and waiting for this woman, and then when they are finally together they are very old?” And my friend said, “But of course Jess, how else would he have done it?”