Y’all know I usually hate this kind of thing, but Hillary over at The Second Forty and I were looking for a November blog challenge and she found this one we kinda like.

Today is something I’m grateful for In Color.

Pink. The cake my three children made for Mother’s Day.

Sylvia Plath would have been 85 last week. I thought I’d write something about her.

Sylvia Plath was a great poet. Like most poets, she was a tortured soul. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that most writers are tortured, I only know myself and what I’ve read about other writers. Psychiatrists debate over whether Plath was Bipolar or Depressive. What I know is that in the last 6 months of her life she attempted suicide in several different ways. She was a resourceful girl. I’ve read a great deal about Plath. One article I can’t get out of my head said “died by her own hand,” which is stupid because that makes it sound like she slapped herself to death. In the weeks before her suicide, she had someone coming to help take care of her two children everyday. She was seeing her psychiatrist everyday and he had tried to have her hospitalized for weeks, but there were no beds in London. He put Plath on an antidepressant days before her suicide, but antidepressants take a couple of weeks to start working. Maybe if she had started the antidepressant a month prior she wouldn’t have considered suicide. Maybe if there would have been an empty hospital bed. Maybe if she and her husband hadn’t been estranged. Maybe if she hadn’t been in London. Maybe if…

Depression creeped in early for Plath. She attempted to slit her own throat at 10 years old after the sudden death of her father. Her father died after having his leg amputated due to gangrene due to an infection from advanced diabetes. In a stanza of her most-noted poem, “Daddy,” she wrote:

I’m sure there were other factors besides her failing to get into a writing class at Harvard that prompted her suicide attempt at 20. She gashed her legs open before seeing a psychiatrist who started her on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). After that she hid under her porch, swallowed all of her sleeping pills, and fell into a coma before her family noticed and brought her to a hospital where she was brought out of the coma and sent to a psychiatric hospital. She stayed at the psychiatric hospital for four months and was given a course of ECT, insulin treatments, and psychotherapy. I can’t imagine four months in a facility. I could hardly stand six days. At 23 she went back to college at Cambridge, where she met and married her husband, Ted Hughes, the following year. Later she taught at another alma mater, Smith, but found it hard to write and teach simultaneously. She friended other writers —Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell — and began a more confessional type of writing (sort of what I do on this little blog). She was transparent about her suicide attempts and struggles with depression and self-harm in her writing. As I’ve said many times, writing is therapy and Plath self-medicated in this way — but of course, it wasn’t enough.

Plath’s mother said Sylvia’s favorite words were “always” and “never,” which is telling. To me, those words are so Bipolar — very me. Everything is extremes. That is what this disorder is.

We have to remember that this was before the modern anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, anti-everything drugs we have now that much of the time aren’t the wonder drugs that a lot of people without mental illness think they are. If it all worked, we wouldn’t still have psychiatric facilities. Anydrug, Plath seemed to be okay for awhile (because we with mental illness CAN be okay, but still have depression). She and Hughes had children, she miscarried, they moved a couple of times, and she wrote. Once she crashed her car in an attempt at suicide. That’s kind of the thing about Bipolar Disorder and Depression. Like I said, you can seem okay, but not be okay. You can function, but not be functional. Everything can be alright and then suicide ideation comes up and you crash your car or take a handful of pills. She published the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar to mostly positive reviews. Much discussion was made about the semi-autobiographical themes of the novel and Plath herself. If you’ve read the novel and know much about Plath, you can’t help but draw comparisons. Only a month after its publication in the U.K., Plath committed suicide. Before the publication, Plath intercepted a phone call from her husband’s mistress. They separated.  She moved into the former home of poet William Butler Yeats. She went on with life, with caring for her children, and with writing. She was fine. Then on February 11, 1963, knowing a nurse would be coming at 9 am, while her children were sleeping, she opened their bedroom window. She left food and something to drink in their room, closed the door and stuffed a towel underneath. She went to the kitchen, again stuffed towels under the door and sealed it up with tape. She turned the gas on and put her head in the oven. She was 30 years old.

 

My favorite poem by Sylvia Plath is “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” This is it.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

 

 

I really love the poet Lang Leav. Please read the poem to the left (or wherever it is on this page if you’re on your mobile device). Her words are haunting and cut deep.  This poem is honestly all that needs to be said about a soundtrack for rough patches. I can’t add to that or say it any better, but there’s something I stumbled on about a month ago that I thought I’d share.

Obsession is a strong word, but I’m a little obsessed with podcasts. Mostly true crime, but also one I heard about called The Hilarious World of Depression. I know, it sounds like my autobiography title. Anyway, the podcast’s host interviews funny people who have depression. It’s fantastic. It’s refreshing. In between the first and second season (that just started with Wil Wheaton as the first guest) there were “placebo” episodes. Two of these episodes were listener’s favorite songs for coping or just songs that help.

I’ve used music as medication since high school. Psychedelic Furs, 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M., Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, and The Lemonheads. Those were my top six. Six because a top five would be pedestrian.  Those were my go-tos.

A couple of the bands have changed. I wouldn’t say replaced. Singers and bands don’t come and go in my life, they are added to the playlists and the soundtracks of my life. Everyone has them. You have them. Whether you recognize it or not. What are the songs you turn up? What are the songs you repeat three times on a nine minute drive because you just need it? I have those. I’ve had a playlist on my ipod for years called “Angry Day.” It’s appropriately titled. That’s not the current soundtrack. Sometimes I think “if John Hughes were here he’d know exactly what angst-ridden song to drop in right at this moment. It would be The Smiths or PFurs. Or New Order.

Lately I’ve had several on repeat. Just because. I haven’t titled this soundtrack yet. It’s a hard one. “Rough Patch” doesn’t fit.*

*I’m calling it the “Redhead Walking” soundtrack because no matter what, it will be ok. And this redhead will be walking.

Here are the songs, some of the videos, not all because we’d be here all afternoon. Guess what? A few are by Ben Folds. “A little predictable, KBF?” No, not really. Not if you’ve been paying attention and not if you’re not all that familiar.

 

“Learn to Live With What You Are” Ben Folds

“Somewhere Only We Know” Lily Allen

“Song for Zula” Phosphorescent

“Your Ex-Lover is Dead” Stars

“Redhead Walking” R.E.M. (0k, one super angry song, but it’s one of my theme songs)

“So There” Ben Folds

“Break Your Heart” Natalie Merchant

“Positively Lost Me” The Rave-Ups

“Keep Breathing” Ingrid Michaelson (if you don’t know Ingrid, what are you waiting for? Her music has helped me as much as Ben Folds and Counting Crows)

“Four Days” Counting Crows

“Selfless, Cold and Composed” Ben Folds (I requested this at the Paper Airplane Tour – he played it)

“Bruised” The Bens (I requested this and he played it as well – even if it wasn’t my paper airplane, still and it’s one of the songs)

“Murder of One” Counting Crows (man, this has been with me for twenty years)

“Somebody That I Used to Know” Elliott Smith

“If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” The Lemonheads

“Find the River” R.E.M. A good one to end the soundtrack for my past couple of months.

This is by the brilliant poet Lang Leav. 

This is me. My awakening. 

Thank you to those of you who have Facebook messaged and emailed. Yes, I’m in the Hurricane Harvey effected area. No, I had no damage to my home. But our little club here knows there is always more damage on the inside. 

That’s my brand. 

So, tonight my husband is watching football and normally I’d be fine with all that and play on my phone, but they keep mentioning the hurricane and that 7 members of the team are from the Houston area. Then a commercial came on showing men pushing a truck out of the floodwaters. And so I put on my earbuds and turned up Ben Folds. But after a few minutes later I dropped my phone and it went back to all the song in my phone. And what was on was OK Go. And it was the song “All is Not Lost.” And I listened twice. And I thought maybe, no all is not lost at all. 

“But when they say that all is lost/All is not lost, all is not lost/But when they say that all is lost/All is not lost, no all is not lost at all”

So, here’s the video of the song I prefer which was recorded as the NPR Tiny Desk series moved into a new NPR building — across town. I love this. 

I’m posting music for a while until the words come. They will come. But for now, it’s only life. 

I’ve loved this song since 1986. I sought it out because it was missing from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack (a major misstep in my opinion) and fell in love with a band called the Rave-Ups. 

I’m feeling this one today. 

“Samson” by the lovely Regina Spektor. 

Probably more than any self-help book, article, or therapist, Carrie Fisher helped me to understand mental illness and specifically our shared mental illness, Bipolar Disorder. Although I’m Type 2: Electric Boogaloo and she was Type 1: A New Hope.

It was her books that inspired me in the way that I deal with my illness. She was and is an inspiration to me. She was the only person who put the illness into words that made sense – that weren’t clinical, besides faceless bloggers (like me) who write about their experiences. It was different to read about how one of my heroes (on screen and in the written word) handled her illness. The openness was refreshing and scary. Those words can describe Bipolar Disorder pretty well, actually.

Carrie Fisher was first diagnosed at 24, or at least in interviews she said a doctor tried to diagnose her, but she was doing drugs at the time and addicts can’t be properly diagnosed when they’re using. Then, at 29, when she was sober, she was officially diagnosed. I wasn’t properly diagnosed until I was 39. I can’t imagine how different my life might have been if a psychiatrist would have diagnosed me almost 10 years earlier when I first saw a psychiatrist. But then again, Carrie Fisher was diagnosed and treated, and died of “sleep apnea with other factors” last year. Her daughter, Billie Lourd stated, “My mom battled drug addiction and mental illness her entire life. She ultimately died of it. She was purposefully open in all of her work about the social stigmas surrounding these diseases.”

It’s the stigma versus the truth I’ve been writing about for the past few years. Most people assumed and still assume Carrie Fisher committed suicide or died from a drug overdose. And yes, drugs may have played a part in her death because drugs were found in her system.

When her autopsy was finally made available I was relieved it wasn’t suicide. Not because she wasn’t a hero of mine. Because after I was diagnosed as Bipolar I did what I do when I get any diagnosis or start any new medication: I Googled the shit out of it. I read everything I could find on it because I didn’t want to be the Bipolar You Know — the split screen picture of a woman who looks like hell and the same woman who is dancing on a table? Or those stupid drama/comedy masks? For the love of Fisher, they show up when you Google “Bipolar.” God, I hate those. Or Claire Danes in Homeland? Usually in the first paragraphs of articles about Bipolar you read a sentence like this: the suicide rate in Bipolar individuals is about 30 times higher than than that of the general population. Go, us! “Have a good day, honey! Try to be in that 70%!”

That’s a scary statistic. And it’s scary. Especially since I was in the 1% who had the worst reaction to a drug a few months ago. Why can’t I be in a good percentage? Like the extremely wealthy 1%?

Despite addiction and being Bipolar, Carrie Fisher had one hell of a career as an actor and an author. Star Wars was the first movie I saw as a three year old. I didn’t come to understand it until many years later, but I knew I loved Princess Leia. Then I loved her as Marie in When Harry Met Sally. “Someone’s staring at you in Personal Growth.” Then I delved into her novels. I read Postcards From the Edge and Surrender the Pink in high school and soaked them in. Even though I had no experience with drugs or the adult themes. In just the past few years I’ve read or listened on Audible to her biographies, and that’s when I got to know Carrie Fisher, the woman and the mentally ill woman. She writes about it with complete honesty, which I truly admire. Total transparency. It was what I needed to hear. She was my aunt who had been there and authenticated my thoughts and experiences.

An interviewer asked a good question to Carrie Fisher:
Q: What is it like to plan your life, and career, around mental illness?

A: I don’t. You cross your fingers and hope you don’t get gobsmacked by it in the middle of something.

And that’s the thing – being gobsmacked in the middle of something. Because we’re always in the middle of something. Bipolar Disorder is a one-two punch of a disorder. I can think I’m fine and that nothing is wrong – and nothing seems wrong – but friends can tell when I’m talking fast or over reacting. That’s the hypomanic part of my illness. I hate the racing thoughts.
I need to write this down right now because if I don’t I’m going to forget to tell Dana this story. Remember to get red spray paint, but not the gloss, get the matte. Download that book about who really wrote Shakespeare. Crap. I forgot the name of the book. I need to do a canvas of “God Only Knows.” Did I order a new Macbook Pro cord? Must order cord. Did I take my Lithium? Does Andrew have practice today? I need to make a hair appointment. I’m just going to get my layers trimmed. Maybe a Pixie cut. Yeah, I liked it when I had one. But I was going to keep my length. Maybe just a couple of inches. The salon is by Old Navy and I should get Molly new jeans. I don’t want to go in there, I can just order jeans. But what size is she? I have to take the dog out.
So, maybe I am crazy. What kind of person takes her dog outside and screams “STOP IT! THAT’S ENOUGH!” in their nightie from her patio to neighbors who are setting off fireworks in the middle of August then bursts into tears upon re-entering her house? That’s not normal. Nothing I do is normal. Normal is a place that doesn’t exist. The parts of being hypomanic are fantastic and scary. I enjoy the hell out of things. I get angry on the verge of rage at other times, sometimes it’s something to be legitimately angry about, sometimes not, but usually not deserving of the depth of anger I have. I play a song over and over dozens of times because of how it makes me feel. I’m quick to make Notes in my iPhone because I know I’ll forget the thought in 10 minutes, 10 seconds. The next day I’ll have no idea what the notes mean.

Current Notes:

House – Learn to Live With What You Are
BenFolds5
Murder Book
Words on Podcasts
This is what happiness looks like in your brain
Hilarious World of Depression
Beck
Indigo Girls
Coffeespoons
2-55-0

I have no idea what any of those Notes are in reference to. No idea. But they were important enough in the moment to write down. Many of them are written during my racing thoughts as I’m going to bed. With my illness, during hypomania, I can’t hold onto a thought longer than your intelligent goldfish. That’s why I make notes. Or I ask friends or my kids to remind me to do something or to tell them something later. I obsessively check my texts as if I’m waiting for Publisher’s Clearinghouse to contact me. Sometimes I’m burdened with so many thoughts at once that I’m almost comatose on the sofa because I don’t know what to do first. Or I can’t remember what I was going to do. All day. A positive thing of hypomania is that my creativity knows no bounds. I write, I paint, I do typography, I paint furniture, I decorate, I make up witty quips for future use (not that I’ll remember what they’re for), I read everything I can get my hands on and Google the shit out of everything that crosses my mind. The second worst part of hypomania (the first being racing thoughts) is over thinking. Even more than the impulsivity, the over thinking is a killer. And the fear that the part of my illness that makes me productive will stop and the fear of depression.

Depression just sucks you into a dark place from everyone and everything you love. That’s all there is to it.

That’s my interpretation of being gobsmacked. I’ve never used the word “gobsmacked” in a blog post and look, I’ve used it three times. No cocktail of meds I’ve tried in the three years since I’ve been diagnosed have worked completely. But I wouldn’t expect that. Mental illness is a plug and play. Throw this at the wall and see if it sticks. Try a little of this, a little of that, increase the dosage on this, cut back on that. It’s far from an exact science and I know I’ll never be fine.

Not to take away from my sister-in-illness, Carrie Fisher, but in the Miami New Times in 2015, Adam Duritz said about his illness, “A few years after that, I realized I probably wasn’t ever going to be fine.When you have something wrong with you, you want to get better. You get strep throat and you expect an antibiotic to be healthy again. A lot of things in life work that way, but not everything does. That was a hard realization.” That’s kind of how I expected my medication cocktail to work, make me better and have no symptoms. What I learned it that it’s more like asthma, which I also have because of course I do. If you have asthma, you take a preventative everyday, but carry a rescue inhaler in case you have a flare up or an asthma attack. Asthmatics know their triggers. Mine are smoke, most perfumes/colognes, extreme cold, fresh cut grass, flowers, dust, etc. But that’s why you carry a rescue inhaler. That’s the difference between most illnesses and mental illness, there is no rescue inhaler – no nitroglycerine, no hydrocortisone, no adrenaline, no atropine (yes, I went to the Grey’s Anatomy/ER Medical School).

In his post-Carrie Fisher divorce album, Paul Simon wrote the song “Allergies,” containing a little gem of a lyric, “From what I can see of the people like me/We get better/But we never get well.” I think Carrie would definitely agree, after all, she was married to the man. And the album was about her.

So, Dear Reader, this was my love letter to Carrie Fisher. I’ve quite literally been working on it since January. And until today I quite literally could not get through a paragraph without tears. Her death made me incredibly sad; what I learned from her words while she lived makes me incredibly grateful. And it’s that gratefulness that will get me through that last book on Audible. Hearing her words spoken by her in my ear. I’m not going to be cliche and say “an angel from heaven,” because I hate that stuff, but definitely a brilliant woman who had brilliant things to say and to write and whose words have helped me in times when I needed them. And she also rose from Princess to General. And that’s pretty fantastic.