The Look of Mania

Funny how similar mental hospitals all look. They have these fluorescent lights that turn almond skin yellow and accent all the imperfections of your body. The scar I’ve been made fun of my entire adolescence for is bright red down my forehead.  The long diagonal scar below my left eye seems fresh but the incident that left me with a stigma worthy of a Bond villain happened years ago. The scar straight down my left wrist is this odd brown like the color of cheap lunch meat  I’m almost happy to be restrained because the straps around my wrist that bind me to this god-awful excuse of a bed cover the shameful reminders of my suicide attempts and high risk behavior.

The drill is the same in every one of these mental hospitals. Wake up. Take Meds. Watch movies. Go to group. Smoke break. Lunch. Another movie. Then, maybe some volunteers come through and gently serenade the group to death with some god-awful self-help lecture. These volunteers get to go out in the world and put a check in the “I did a good deed,” box.  Be a lot nicer if they just brought you cigarettes. Then we eat dinner and go to bed. Not tired at 6pm? That’s ok, because Nurse Ratched has what the doctor ordered! With a dose of Mothers Little Helper you can sleep for about 12 hours straight! You might not even notice the Licensed Vocational Nurse who saw the rest of her life advertised to her as a career on daytime television in one of those god awful 9 month college commercials do her hourly rounds throughout the night. Why they need to shine a flashlight in your face to know it’s really someone sleeping is beyond me.  I’m pretty sure the guards at Alcatraz were less thorough. Amazing part about this futile attempt to address the dual diagnoses I have, coupled with god knows how many other personality disorders and chemical imbalances, it’s all free!  Insurance picks up the tab for every Spaghetti dinner we eat and every VHS we watch. And guess what America… none of it fucking helped!

If I had to add up every penny my diagnoses, disorder, illness or whatever you call it has cost my family, county, state and even federal government it would be in the millions!

I am a Million Dollar Manic!

I will be for the rest of my life. 

The Beginning of the End

I was adopted by some nice people.  They paid my biological mother 50k to carry me around for nine months. Then, without knowing anything about who I would become, raised me. No questions asked. I moved around with my adopted family for several years. We lived overseas for nearly a decade. Then the United States. When I was about 16 my family handed me over to someone else to take care of… I’ll explain later what that means. I can’t remember the very first time I did something that caused my parents to rethink their $50,000 purchase. My mischievous antics did not start becoming a huge economic burden until much later down the road. So… I’ll start small.

            I was taken as an infant to live in Kinshasa, Zaire until I was three. I then moved to India where I had trouble speaking for several years. My first two languages were Lingala and French. When I came to New Delhi, India I couldn’t communicate one iota. Nobody spoke those languages. So, I would just point and yell until I learned English. That didn’t cost my folks very much money. It was just extremely annoying.

The first big bill I remember tacking on to my parents ongoing “maniac habilitation fund” resulted from an incident that took place when I was five. I was accompanied by my older brother, Barry. My brother (I should mention I have two brothers and one sister) was athletic for the first several years of his life. 34 years later he’s about as agile as a sumo wrestler on a floating log. He had what I thought was an incredibly admirable talent that involved a school bus, some small rocks and ten windows. As the school bus would drive away from dropping us off in front of our New Delhi residence, my brother would very meticulously throw rocks into the open windows of the moving bus.  It took skill, patience, a sense of timing and a good eye.  It also took a complete lack of maturity.  I had some of the same abilities, especially, immaturity. It also doesn’t help my diagnoses entails a lack of impulse control.

            I watched my brother and thought, “Why throw one or two rocks into a moving bus window when you can throw ten or twelve? Right!” This might have been my train of thought that day I decided to match my brother’s athleticism.  However, I’m pretty sure it was just an impulsive tick.  In my infinite wisdom and complete lack of impulse control I grabbed a huge handful of rocks. I stepped back and arched my arm like a World War II grenadier throwing an explosive into a Nazi bunker. I then let loose what must have been twenty or thirty small pebbles at a now moving school bus. 

Every other marble sized pebble seemed to find a different window to explode! Windows were turned into what seemed like millions of tiny glistening stars. The bus immediately began speeding off into the distance. Accelerating as if attacked by a mob! The bus driver must have panicked and floored it.  The sound of kids screaming in confusion on board, evaporated down the street. I was immediately pulled toward my house by an even more confused maid. Oh yeah, we had maids, cooks, drivers even guards!  The window breaking came with an ass kicking from dad and what was a small price tag in comparison with what lied ahead in my life. It’s a small example though of the damage the smallest, random, out of the blue action I make, can cause. That’s my talent as a manic depressive. The smallest mistakes or lack of thinking associated with an outburst can be catastrophic.

I’m going to fast forward here a little bit for two reasons. One, my incredibly young age might be one of the variables to blame for earlier maniac moves.  Two, the huge price tags come later in life and manic depression is theorized to veer its head during a child’s teenage years. We’ll stop here and calculate the price tag of one adoption and several broken windows. 

Price for adoption: 50,000 dollars.

Price for broken windows: 400 rupees (about 4 bucks).