Twenty years. When you're thirty-one, that seems like an eternity.
I just walked up the street from my bungalow with my dog to get a bottle of wine at 2pm, not because I wanted to have a glass or two with dinner, but because sobriety was not for me today, and now I'm drinking the whole thing, sans-glass with one of those little bags of lays potato chips mom used to put in my lunch bag. You know, the kind from the supersnack pack? I used to eat those things, and mom would say, "Jeez, Eerin...those greasy chips are the reason you've got acne." No, my greasy skin was reason my face used to be such a mess, and it's currently the reason why I get carded every time I try to buy a bottle of wine. I pass for twenty if the light is right and my cheeks are all puffy due to some shutdown in my thyroid gland. "Can I see your ID, please," the clerk asked suspiciously just an hour or so ago. I've got one!, she thought. 1977? As my dog would say, "Blurrfft?"
[Aside: It must be said, I bought a cheddar cheese stick and a bottle of wine and a snackpack bag of potato chips. Maxie is quite fond of cheese. Also, I'm going to pre-apologize for any sort of descent into madness this entry might take. I'm drinking a whole bottle of wine, which is like two bottles of liquor for you folk with good livers. It might get crazy. I don't really know.]
And then I think back to twenty, when I did indeed try to buy liquor just like twenty-somethings do, and had enough red lipstick on, and seductive enough a facial expression, and low cut enough a top to convince the mullet-headed, toothless boy at Lakewood liquors to sell me booze. God, I felt so cool. I felt self-possessed and adult, a full-grown human being, no...a woman. I took my booze to a party, where I sipped it like a woman (never been a fan of the keg). I chatted up college boys. We discussed adult things while some cornfed boy played Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" on a "boombox" (a primitive device primitive people one played music upon). "I'm joining the Peace Corps, soon," I said, self-importantly. "I hope to be stationed in Africa," I said, like the Peace Corps was going to take me with all my mental problems. But so grown up, I was. Really, really formulated into a self-possessed being.
And at twenty years of age, I was as grown up as the disease I've had all my life, for it was not precisely but approximately twenty years ago I came down with a case of depression that greets me each morning, "Hi there, fuckface! Wanna do things all day while I tell you how much you suck?" Every morning, for twenty years. It's our anniversary, and you could say my depression, my wife, is a full-grown woman, a clingy one I'm plain fucking tired of living with, a fucking bitch, frankly, and you can take her and kill her and eat her if you want. Where's a creepy Czech when I need one? Perhaps this is a brutal linkage. That poor boy. Honestly, I think it's mere physical manifestation of the sort of immaterial consumption of the soul that happens between mother and son...or daughter. We fucking eat each other. Why not cannibalism? It's the physical manifestation of the emotional act.
In honor of our twenty-year anniversary (it is getting rather difficult to type, no shit), I decided I was going to visit a psychiatrist.
Last time I went to a psychiatrist, a specialist in bipolar, he told me emphatically "You have bipolar axis I," and tried to put me on mood stabilizers I didn't need, because I had a thyroid problem, and my day was like: 2, 10!, 1, 10!, 2, 10! Much due to the thumping and bumping of the thyroid, you know? The rest, he didn't care about, and in "the rest" was the whole reason I was upset and had a painful and pretty debilitating personality disorder it took me another year of private research to self diagnose. It's always been a self-diagnosis, so I've never taken it too seriously (you're so not supposed to do that). To add, it's a recently discovered PD, and there are, like, twelve psychiatrists that agree it exists. And they're fucking right. Because here I am, I have this, and I exist.
So I'm not bipolar, fuck him! And I went five years without a clinician tending to my brain because he fucking sucked so much. A fancy psychiatrist from New York City recently moved to Hippieville and set up office in her unbelievably luxe desert home, a psychiatrist whose papers I read and greatly respect. I rode my bike out to see her (102 degrees, yuck) to celebrate my twenty years of depression, and also because she's one of the smart brain doctors, one of the ones I've been watching, researching, who seems to understand. I sat before her and spilled everything, my whole life story. The goods. I wanted so badly for her to be the one who said, "You're right about how you feel, and everyone who tells you to 'shut the hell up' is wrong." I had no idea what kind of affect my story would have on her. I've always been told I bitched about nothing. I've been told I am whiny. I've been told I'm self indulgent. I've always thought differently, but nobody has ever confirmed.
"So that's about it," I said, and she looked as if she was going to puke. She got up, went over to her desk, and pulled out a rate card. She crossed off something on the card, and then handed it to me, saying, "I cannot believe you're still alive." She cut her rate by 75% so I could keep seeing her as much as possible.
"Do you think my self diagnosis is correct?" I asked her.
"I think you know more about family dynamics than ninety nine percent of family therapists."
So there it is. Fuck all you haters. I'm genius...
...and yet, still walking up to the liquor store at 2pm to get a bottle of wine and say no to today, I just can't do today.
It's twenty years now. Last time I rose carefree into the world, Billy Ocean's "Get out of my dreams, get into my car" was playing on my boombox. I guess I'm prayin' for the end of time. What a sick partnership I've entered into, and yet what an amazing time we live in, that doctors as distinguished as this are dedicated enough to cut their rate by hundreds of dollars just to listen to what a little girl from Buffalo thinks about mental illness. It's really something. I like this lady.
I'm pretty much trashed. I'm gonna wander uptown and hit on some hippies. Nice chatting with you.
Posted by The Bunny at 6:45 PM