She throws her head back and laughs heartily, and then
jabbers excitedly for a few minutes. I’m
watching her across the room and I’m glad she seems happy. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh in
days and it’s a welcome change from slamming doors and constantly fearing the
next thing you say will be the thing to set her off.
But there’s something else lying underneath it, something
that’s just as worrying as her depressive swings, but for a totally different
reason. This is only the first day of
mania, but by day three she—and we—will be exhausted.
You can see it in the way her eyes are wide open and shiny,
like she’s afraid to miss something. You
can hear it in her voice, which is a little too loud for comfort. You can sense that there’s crazy laughter
bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to break out at the wrong
moment. You can tell it, in the way she
barely takes a breath between sentences, and in the way people sometimes sidle
away from her.
I see it and I’m uncomfortable. If her depression is a dark pit I can’t see
the bottom of, her mania is a spooked stallion, and I can’t even approach it. I can only watch helplessly as it careens
around and injures itself. I’m
uncomfortable because I just don’t know what she’ll do. She feels invincible, like she can do
anything, and when she’s manic, she DOES.
She cleans the whole house. She
runs. She can’t sit still. She can’t sleep. She doesn’t eat. She colors and talks and cooks and talks and
drives the car fast and spends money and talks and does reckless things and
talks and…I can’t keep up. I’m exhausted
and so is she, you can see that she is, but she CAN’T STOP. Literally.
Both ends of the mood swings are hell in their own ways. I know that in a few days she will come
crashing down, and the jagged pieces left will crawl back to bed and sleep all
day. She will emerge from her cocoon sad
and angry and the cycle will start all over again and some days I don’t know
how Mom and Dad can stand it and I run away like a coward instead of facing it
like a loving sister and daughter.
There are times when the mania is almost fun. We ride in my car with the music blaring and
sing at the top of our lungs. We laugh a
lot. But there are times when it’s too
much, and I can’t help that I sometimes just want a break from her.
I love her so much it hurts, but God help me, I can’t do it
sometimes.
That was then. We
joke about her mania sometimes now. I can
tell on the phone sometimes, when she’s jumping from subject to subject and
telling me how she did a bajillion things that day. I just laugh and say, “A little manic today,
are we?” And she laughs and says
yes. I can’t begin to tell you how thankful
I am for modern pharmacopeia.
If you have a loved one who is dealing with a mental illness
and you feel some of these things, it’s ok.
It doesn’t make you weak. It
doesn’t mean you don’t love them. If you
need to take a break now and then so you can come back stronger and deal with
the illness, it’s ok. You’re not a
superhero, and no one can do it all the time, all on their own.
