Tripping

It began as a trip or maybe a fall. Maybe it was more like a bird who couldn’t see the clear glass and went- smack! But, I think it was a trip that lead to a fall and I hit my head, ripped my pants, tore the corner of my shirt where I tried to protect my face. I would have felt embarrassed if someone had seen me but no one did. I had to tell my husband and my therapist that it happened.

It had been over twenty years so I was naive to think it wouldn’t happen again-feeling bad and sad and depressed, the kind where you don’t want to wake up or rather stay asleep until it was all over. “It’s been happening for years, Liz. Since you went off the lithium,” my husband said. I had to change meds because lithium could cause kidney damage. The med that saved me could hurt me. But the depression felt so fast, as fast as the fall, that I couldn’t see it happening until there I was on the ground, and I felt so heavy, like I had jumped into a pool with all my clothes on.

It wasn’t like I had to start from scratch. It’s an important detail I want you to know, but I had to start and from someplace new- a place called Lost, which is why we are here with me telling you all this and hoping you will follow along.

This wasn’t when I was twenty four and first diagnosed with bipolar. This was different and I have to remember that. I’m fifty now, a new fifty, not quite “in” my fifties. I’m not sure why it’s important to know but it is. It’s all important.

I’ve begun a new journey. I now have a husband and he is coming along too. I had lost myself, the one I had worked so hard to create and it’s the not knowing that feels worse than the depression, the lack of definition. It’s a reinvention my therapist says. I’m tired of reinventing to be honest. I didn’t want to do this again. So, I’m on this new fucking journey. I breathe and tell myself it’s okay to fall which sometimes sounds like bullshit, like out of some self help book found on the shelf of a Barnes and Noble.

I wade in the words self and journey and they make me a little sick to my stomach as I try to keep them down. Reinventing at age fifty(See? I told you that detail was important).

I write all this here and share it with you.