The ebbs & flows of my inner oceans.
“Do you go crazy every year around this time?” a dear friend asks me. They are an astrologer. We are sitting on my back porch, but inside, on the couch, I have a bag packed for the psych hospital.
It begins around the time the Sun conjuncts my Chiron in Gemini. I am full of words & I want you to hear each & every one of them. I wake up at 3 am & write. Summer Solstice & my birthday brings a craving for more social connection, & I am beginning to make medicines from my garden.
I don’t know if I really have bipolar disorder but I do know that when the intake therapist at the community mental health center asked if I ever start a bunch of projects all at once & then be unable to sustain them I laughed. The zine i am working on is over 60 pages. I have been writing diligently & trying to be social with friends & do my herbal work & now I am starting to crash.
one time I wrote: “I am thankful for this beautifully broken body. I am thankful for this beautifully broken mind, without you I would never have done anything I am proud of. “
& I wrote it before things were “that bad” but maybe it has always been that bad, I was just dissociated from it & drinking so I couldn’t feel it as much.
I couldn’t really see your pain because I couldn’t really see my own.
Different parts of me feel different ways about getting back into the mental health system. I have had some traumatic things happen to me in that system. I was severely over medicated. I developed tardive dyskinesia. My faith in myself was diminished. I pathologised my every response & the things that make me feel alive. I am tired of performing unwell for the system to obtain resources.
I take meds & they help me a lot, though. Parts of me do resonate with the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, even if only as a way to connect across shared experiences. Parts of me also think that psychiatry is bullshit because it doesn’t even recognize one of my primary problems, which is developmental trauma.
When I first started trauma therapy in 2019 I jokingly asked a friend & long time supporter of my writing: “Do you think I will become a worse writer as I heal?” & of course he said that my well being was more important, but I was afraid.
Did I want to find out who I was without the defense of narration?
I have changed a lot in the three years that I have been doing somatics & internal family systems. Writing from this more embodied state is helping me integrate more & understand the reasons for my psychotic break.
It’s also very painful.
Because now, instead of using writing as a way to bypass my feelings, I feel them viscerally as I am writing them. I try to take pauses just to be with them. When I am able to do this, it is good. For me, & for the writing. I am able to write from my parts perspective, & the things I am unearthing are both beautiful & painful. For some of my parts, it’s been really helpful now that they have something to do. Rather than saying crazy shit in my head all day trying to distract me from the ache in my fucking chest, we can write, & know that we are an adult now & we are relatively safe to feel these intense emotions & we have way more tools than we did before. We have community mental health & pills & we have blue vervain, anemone, & motherwort. We have people in our life who love us. We can go for a walk or drive when we feel flighty, & a safe place to land when the pain & collapse response keep us in bed. We can make animal noises & sing silly songs. We can wiggle our toes & look out the window at the trees. We have therapy & mutual aid groups. We have more skills. We have the stars. We have more awareness.
I am trying to write a new story, & it’s okay to write a new story, & it’s okay to say fuck the story, too. Fuck the story, I want to live. I am trying to find some balance here. I keep on pulling Temperance. Can I write without going totally fucking batshit?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I am going to try though, because I think my writing is important. Not only to me, but to other people too. Not because it’s the classic bipolar symptom of delusions of grandeur, but because friends & strangers have told me it is.
Writing used to be one of the only tools I had to process intense emotions. I have so many other tools now, too. Before I flunked out of art school, I used to hate it when they said “it’s about the process” but I get it now. I tend to write big thick zines every several years, according to the ebbs & flows of my inner oceans, & each one has changed me. I used to think I tended to make zines at times when I was changing a lot, not that the writing itself changed me. Spending time with some of my old zines has helped me recognize patterns, & become open to writing a new story. One where I don’t crash hard when I finish this zine. One where I don’t clam up & hide again right when my life is starting to open up.
I want to be like a ballon tied a mimosa tree, able to spread out & explore & flow but firmly rooted so I don’t get swept away. I want to be able to show my gorgeous wispy pink flowers but still be able to curl up & protect myself when I need to. I want to be able to feel my pain without shutting down or relapsing. I want to let the love & care around me in, too. I want to work with my body & the Earths natural cycles instead of against them.
I’m still working on my zine, but I am taking a break. I might wrap up the writing part & finish laying it out & stop overthinking it & go ahead & release it soon. I’ll let y’all know when it’s done.