Buttering Cats on Mars

I tend to be notorious in my classes for two things: raising my hand all the time when I am present, and for frequently, to some people alarmingly, not being present at all. The first is simply because I enjoy class discussion. The second takes a bit longer to explain.

Contrary to what some people believe, bipolar disorder does not mean you change emotions suddenly and violently (unless your medications have been prescribed improperly or you are not taking them the way you're supposed to), and it does not mean you are necessarily more dangerous than anyone else. My own version leans more towards the cyclothymic, which is a milder, more rapid-cycling manifestation. It's a predictable pattern by now, six years after I first began treatment. I spend two to three weeks fairly stable, my emotions directly related to things going around me the way it is with people considered normal.

Then I have three or so days of mania, the "up" portion. It's a bit like being tipsy all the time, I'm told when I describe it to people, though I don't know firsthand because my medications can't be combined with alcohol. Everyone around me seems a bit more attractive. I become obsessed with sex. I'm extra-hungry. My mind fills with racing thoughts and ideas that, however reckless, seem fantastic at the time. No, sublime! No, the best ideas that anyone has ever had in the history of human idea-having! I have to take measures to keep myself from buying too many things online, the cravings for shopping super-intense, ones that have made me fall into overdraft more than once, spurred me chasing after freelance writing jobs in order to support them, and made me the University's record-holder in packages received through the post office. All the while everything in my head tells me that I'm gorgeous, brilliant, brave....Sometimes I laugh for no reason at all. It's fun, somewhat, but there's an undercurrent of danger, and it is exhausting after the first few hours.

Depression for me lasts longer, from a week to around ten days, depending. That's when I'm the most likely not to show up in class, and the main reason I have disability accommodations to reassure professors that I'm not just skipping for the sake of skipping. I want to spare all of you some of the ordeals high school's more stringent attendance policies caused: me sobbing uncontrollably in class over getting a low grade on a test or someone making fun of me, panic attacks of hyperventilation and stammering, the almost irresistible compulsion to curl up in a ball under the desk. Not only do I not learn things very well in such a condition, but no one else does either. A friend who has similar issues once joked with me about the difficulty she has excusing herself to classmates who want to know where she was: "I had to go to...Mars...to...butter my....cat." We've since made that a code when one of us is having a day like that, because sometimes it's difficult to talk directly when you feel like your blood has been replaced with cold paste.

My defenses against these things are many. I take seven pills a day, at different times, and avoid alcohol and significant amounts of caffeine because they might make the medication less effective. I deal with the shaky hands, dehydration, fatigue, and excessively vivid nightmares the medications have as side effects as best I can. I walk downtown to have an hour of talk therapy once a week. I also talk to a psychiatrist on the phone once a month so he can keep prescribing my medication. I crochet, or write, or call a friend, or play silly and mindless games to take myself away from the darkest hours. If I want to scratch or bite myself, I draw (or have a friend draw) butterflies on my arms that I name after loved ones, which I must keep alive by avoiding self-harm. I remind myself that there is a real me that is not chemicals in my head, that is a constant thing even when layers of confusing emotional noise muffles it, when I feel lost and doubtful. Most of all, I never let myself be ashamed, and hang onto hope that each day will be a day I can survive.

Creative Nonfiction Piece #1

Mind the Gap

You grew up loving nights like this, your Khun Yai, your maternal grandmother, lying in bed next to you and your favorite cousin close by to talk and giggle. But you are now in your teens and so is he, your Nong (term of endearment for younger person) Bom growing tall and quiet and out of that nickname. You will never call him anything but Bom to his face. It would be too much of a break from the children you were, nestling in a cave under Grandma's desk with a pillow barrier and a blanket stuffed partially into the drawers to hold the makeshift curtain in place, chasing one another with Super Soakers to celebrate the Thai New Near where everyone splashes and pours on each other, nationwide all-out water fight for three days. You still call him Bom, an initially meaningless syllable, combining his parents' nicknames of "Burm" and "Om" into a portmanteau that is for you a symbol of fitful communication but slow and steady love. He is getting to be Jakrapon Sanguansook, though, on university entrance exams and military draft forms and a driver's license. You are not sure how you feel about that.

The hotel room is clean and chilled by overly aggressive air conditioning, you and Khun Yai on the large bed and Bom on the unfolded wheeled cot. There was a time when it was acceptable (and realistic) for all three of you to lie in bed together, or just you and Bom, poking each other and whispering jokes long after you were supposed to be asleep. You remember the last time you took a bath together, like the fall of Paradise and coming of original sin: suddenly, the naked bodies that had been so comfortable and easy, even if they were slightly different shape, had become shameful, and you had to hide from one another under bubbles and foam, fig leaves being in short supply in a Bangkok bathtub. American kids mocked you for innocently sharing such memories, differences in culture another reason why you have generally measured your social life in amounts of isolation, but that does not take away from your wishing sometimes that you and he were small again and could fit under the desk, in the bathtub, in the bed.

He's awake. You don't know why you didn't see it before. Khun Yai is doing her usual impression of a gentle chainsaw, so you shouldn't speak; she gets up at three each morning for some bizarre reason and needs her sleep now. It was always her job to reprimand you for telling riddles and stories too late into the night. Not much of a problem anymore.

You have so little time together these days. You live in America now, instead of closer like Laos or China. Your school holidays never synchronize, and his schedule is crammed with tutoring, special lessons, the army reserve training mandatory for all Thai boys and optional for all Thai girls. He is so quiet, now, too, reserved in his smiles. He might even have a girlfriend - he certainly does look appropriately hip with his skinny jeans and graphic tees, fingernails on his right hand grown long so he can strum the guitar with them. You don't know how much you mean to him anymore. He's one of the most important people to you in all your life and you spend perhaps twenty days out of the year with even a chance at glimpsing him.

So you reach across the gap between your beds with a tentative hand. He reaches also and takes it. The air conditioning tries to punish you for going beyond the crisp linens and fluffy comforter, but this is not important. The time is not important. You were allies against his parents and sister - she was always their favorite - and you were each other's anomaly, someone so far removed from everything else in your life and yet a great constant. A friend. His hand is warm. The fingernails press lightly into your palm, not enough to hurt, just enough to remind you that they are there.

Finally, you whisper, "You know you are my brother, right?"

And he says, "You are my big sister."

You are not sure how long you hold hands. The crickets and geckos continue their noise, but you do not say anything else. In the morning your hand is back by your side. You never speak of this to each other.

Keeping a Journal

I'm encouraged to keep a handwritten journal that I carry with me for one of my Creative Writing classes, so I finally gave myself permission to get a gorgeous one from a line that I've been lusting after every time I go to the shops downtown that sell them.

In less than a day, I've filled nearly ten pages. Now, the pages are small and my handwriting is large, but it still means that having a journal I like has made a huge difference in my willingness to write in it.

So that's fun. I'll let you know if I find any gold among the dross.

Persona Poem for Creative Writing

My therapist said they are delusions,

these ghosts that I believe haunt me

and that the “names” I hear whispered

are merely a child’s way of labeling the unknown.

Still, I cannot stop running, cramming my mouth

full of yellow cupcakes and fruit, yet never feeling full,

all food in sight devoured, making myself sick,

to calm me, to help me buffer the dread, give me fuel

to escape, to fly from them, the four neon ghosts

that meander through the maze of my life.

My wife suffers just as I;

differentiated only by clothing, not fate -

(she’s worn the same bow in her hair for longer than I can remember)

our estrangement from dual anguish tearing us apart,

even as our perditions are so similar.

We are trapped in our own labyrinths of darkness

trying to escape our personal hells, our Minotaurs,

our four private Horsemen of our own Apocalypse:

Inky, Binky, Pinky, and Clyde.

Writer's Trickle

Written for my Creative Writing portfolio.

A logical question to pose someone with multiple published novels at the age of 21 is why she would wish to take an Intro to Creative Writing class at all. My knee-jerk answers have been that this is a prerequisite for other Creative Writing courses that I want to take, I need the credits, I believe I still need plenty of assistance before I reach a level I want to be (regardless of where I am compared to my classmates), and that it's more fun than anything else I can see around here that will help get me to graduation. These are all true, but upon reflection there are some deeper things going on here. First, I am retaking this class to spite the universe for giving me a health-related catastrophe that forced me to withdraw last time. Second, I am struggling to get through the driest writing period I have had in six years, where I am writing more than most people do, yet all the while internally panicking about whether the well is running shallow.

It hasn't been writer's block, fortunately, because the last time I seriously had that it was the worst three months of my life. I've been able to eke out the little bits and one decent short story you will see in this compilation, though it's been like going from dancing to shambling in terms of ease. I'm also working on a one-act play for a different class. I even produced a few well-received pieces of one of my old guilty pleasures, fanfiction. So someone who doesn't know me well could look at my output and think that I am being productive.

I don't feel like I am, though, not compared to the real me. I was used to writing at least ten pages a week of unassigned original work for the sheer joy of it, constantly eager to get to the next book over the horizon, playing out scenes in my head every waking moment not occupied by immediate concerns. I don't know what happened. And when I try to talk about this, people usually say I've written plenty already, that it's okay to be low on inspiration for a while when I have done so much. Guess what? I've eaten three meals a day almost every day of my life, but eating nothing one sandwich every two days would leave me hungry and weak no matter how well-fed I was to start with.

Taking this course has been part of my attempt to fix this issue. If I was required to write, I thought, maybe I could tap into the source again by sheer brute force. Perhaps the prompts would awaken something. At least in the meantime I could refine my phrasing and improve my cliche elimination rate, get better at receiving criticism, possibly be helpful to others, and work on all the other little things while the big things elude me for a while.

I succeeded at the last, anyway. The short story is pretty good, especially after the editing help, and I think is worthy of sending out to be published. The journals were at least therapeutic. The exercises have their moments of charm, the occasional clever sentence. I am still feeling pretty empty and alone in my head. It reminds me of the end of The Amber Spyglass when the heroine can no longer magically use a certain oracular device, but instead has to learn how to read it slowly and painfully. I realize that this may sound ludicrous to many. I have a candle flame to light my darkness, still. I feel petty for it, but I long to have a forest fire again.

Something I wrote for Creative Writing

Prompt was "death scene". I thought it came out well.

There’s a song I’ve got stuck in my head as I watch my premature infant struggle to breathe in the incubator. By Death Cab for Cutie, a song called “What Sarah Said”. It’s got a nice piano backdrop to it, better than the hiss and whir of various machines trying to hold back the inevitable.

My baby is only about the size of my partner’s two fists pressed together. My partner is still recovering from her ordeal. I’m not sure if they’ve told her the percentages, the steady unravel of all these months of expectation and hope. She’ll pull through, the doctors say, but they don’t want to stress her until she has a better handle on remaining with us.

Technically it’s not “my” baby in the sense that I am not a man, I did not insert Tab A into Slot B. But my cousin donated the sperm. More importantly, I’m the one who held my love’s hair back as she threw up from all those days of morning sickness, the one who fetched her toasted seaweed chips and pho from the Asian market downtown when she yearned for them, who rubbed her feet, who picked up the slack of taking care of the two cats and chinchilla. I feel this is pretty much the same amount of involvement as a father has. I was convinced I was okay with being Mommy Number Two.

She’s such a misshapen doll, our baby. We came up with girl names once we knew, but if I start thinking of this little scrap of fading as the name we liked best, I know – just know – that I’m going to break.

This was supposed to be a celebration of life.

“It better not be contractions,” was how she broke the news to me, “but we should get this checked out.”

How I prayed. You’d think a minister’s prayers would hold weight, but then again there is no guarantee that heard prayers will not be denied anyway, for part of some greater scheme. I have to hold onto that.

She waves her little hands feebly. I wonder where she thinks she is. I wonder how much she’ll notice the slip from here to eternity.

I’m not even sure why they bothered putting her in an incubator if they’re so sure she’s not going to make it. I suppose because you have to let them go on their own schedule. You have to try, so you don’t spend the rest of your life wondering if you accidentally blocked a miracle.

My stomach growls, and I am dismayed at such a mundane thing breaking into what is supposed to be tragic. Yet I am not crying. I’m not doing much of anything. I am sitting very still, watching the millimeters’ rise and fall of her little chest, and I have an alternative rock song running through my mind’s ears.

I’m not sure how you love a lump of flesh that will soon become a shoebox’s worth of burial. What earthly good does that love do anyone? All I know is that I do. Maybe it’s best that my partner is not present.

I must tell her myself, when she wakes. I owe it to her.

The fingers stop moving. The breathing dwindles. A lump is a lump is a lump.

And I’m thinking of what Sarah said:

That love is watching someone die.

Another blog

This is my blog for Creative Writing. Feel free to read and comment.