I'm in trouble again. Big trouble.

It's the rapid cycling again. I feel so good, I mean, I felt so good last week, maybe even earlier this week. Who remembers anymore. Now, it is gone again. No rhyme, no reason, no provocation.

I broke down crying at my job today. Inconsolable crying. Full out sobbing at my desk while on the phone withy my husband. The walls were caving in around me and I couldn't breathe. There was too much screaming. Too many elderly people wailing and the sound of death all over the place. Someone coded. They were a DNR (do not resuscitate). She died. I wasn't permitted to start compressions and life saving interventions. It's prohibited with DNR's. I had to stand by and watch this woman die. Someone called the funeral director.

"I have a pick up," she said as though she was talking about some Chinese take out.

She had a name. I can't reveal it...but she had a name. Do you know that everything you will ever need to learn about life is in the movie "Fight Club". Everything. Every single solitary thing.


Narrator: Bob is dead, they shot him in the head!
Tyler Durden: You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs.

It makes me think of Fight Club. Only in death does a person have a name. I am a nurse. I should be better equipped to deal with these sorts of things, but I am not. I was on the phone in hysterics with my husband. Not because this woman died (that was two days ago) but because I simply couldn't hold it together. I couldn't breathe. I was having the worst panic/anxiety attack you could imagine. So, when another nurse came up to me and said "CP, are you alright?"

I said no.

"Do you need to go home?"

I nodded yes.

Now, if I had cancer and simply explained that my chemotherapy wasn't agreeing with me today, there would be no issue. If I told the truth...that my mania has turned to depression and panic once again, there would be no sympathy, no empathy and surely no one offering me the ability to go home until I calm down. So, I said what any other irrational, manipulative bipolar human being would say.

"My grandmother died."

Now I have the attention, the sympathy, the empathy. Now I have a good reason to go home and make it all better. I even got tomorrow off for bereavment. I am filled with guilt over this statement which only makes the problem worse. I am now anxious because I feel like I wished death on my grandmother. What will I do when she really dies? Create another grandmother? How many dead grandmothers can a person have in a years time? This isn't the first time I have done this. It's more like the fifth time...only at different jobs. I never stay at one place very long because eventually, they all figure out that something is very wrong with me.

Narrator: I wasn't really dying. I wasn't host to cancer or parasites. I was the warm little center that the life of this world crowded around.

Again, "Fight Club". I am the warm little center that everyone else needs to crowd around. Oh poor baby me to death. I live for that shit. Then, I go home, collapse in my bed with a mouthful of Klonopin and pray that death doesn't befall me before I can straighten up my act. I don't know how to save myself anymore. The days I swear the medications are working are the happiest days of my life. This is why times like this are such a let down to me. I can't stop crying. I can't even breathe right without feeling my pulse in my own head. I beg for my husband to come home from his job in another state because I can't pull myself together long enough to be functional. I am getting progressively worse. Although, I can't tell if it is because the meds make me feel so much better that depressions are painful...or if it has been this way all along. My husband remembers it always being this way. I always had the mania to look forward to. Now, it is just numbly going along with the world...and then, falling into the gaping maw that is my depression.

Marla Singer: Listen. I tried Tyler. I really tried. There are things about you that I like, you're smart, you're funny, you're spectacular in bed. But you are intolerable. You have serious emotional problems, deep seated problems for which you should seek professional help.

This is me. This is me on my game. No one better thanme. Smart, funny and spectacular in bed. But intolerable. I don't know how those who love me stay loving me. I am insufferable. I make myself sick, so I don't know how I don't make others feel the same way. I am dangerously close to having myself committed because I don't think I have any other way to go. I don't fantasize about suicide...but I do fantasize about what everyone elses life would be like without me in it. I can see them crying. I can see them missing me.

I can hear a nurse saying "I have a pick up".

Yet, I can't help but feel that my children would be better off without this crazy person molding their life. My husband can find a normal woman who cooks, cleans and isn't prone to these insane outbursts of crying or screaming all the time. Someone who doesn't need medication to function. If I go off my medication I am a thousand times worse. I wouldn't have had a crying jag today. I would have simply walked out and abandoned my patients without any regard. I could lose my license doing that and I would care less.

Narrator: It's called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.

I have gotten so good at making everyone see this vibrant, alive young woman that no one really knows what to make of me when I break down. The movie goes on. The star of the show is always me. Sometimes I am a femme fatale. Other times, I am the pitiful protagonist ready to jump the precipice of her lifes edge. I am so strong and so frail at the same time that it hurts me to have all of this inside one woman. I want to be one or the other. It is too tiring to be both.

I am writing this from the darkness of my room. The dog shit on the rug. The laundry hasn't been done. My house looks like a train wreck. I haven't bothered opening the mail in days. My door to my bedroom is locked. I haven't seen my son in two days. I leave him at his fathers house because I don't think I am fit to raise him when I am like this. The other night, he woke up from a dead sleep.

He was crying.

"Mommy," he said softly. "I am upset."

He fell back to sleep and right then and there, I knew. I have passed my disease onto my son. My daughter is unscathed, but my son has inherited my disease. In a few years time, he will be just as distraught, just as prone to crying jags, just as diseased as his mother is...and I will be to blame. Genetics will be to blame. I pray it doesn't devour him the way it devours me. Everyday he wakes up to be a different kid, just like I wake up to be a different woman. He has my disease. I can smell it on him, festering like an open wound that has been left unattended.

"I have a pick up." she said. And I can't get those words out of my head.

Narrator: Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again, resurrected.

This is me, never knowing what my brain is going to give me as the daily deal. I can understand when life hands you certain things each day, you have to wrap your brain around it and go with the flow of whatever life has to offer. What precisely do you do when you don't know what your brain is up to? Who do you turn to for that? What does a psychiatrist actually know about what I am going through. He's not me. He has read several dozen text books that lets him think he knows me...but he doesn't feel my anguish. He doesn't understand that everything out of my mouth has to be a lie just so I can get through the day. No. I'm not fine, thank you very much...but for you, I will put on the air of being fine so that I won't ruin your happy little day.

You know when people say, "hey, how are you" and then, keep walking...never waiting for your answer? One day I would like to say..."I'm fucked. I am totally screwed. I am dealing with a brain that doesn't know how to deal with life. You asked, now you know. And what precisely are you going to do with this information now? Nothing? Move on with your day and wonder what the fuck is wrong with me? Good. Now you understand how I feel on a daily basis. Don't ask me how I am if you aren't willing to deal with my answer. Don't fucking ask. Please."

Sorry to ruin your day. Truly.

Everything I have ever learned in life, I have learned from the movie "Fight Club". Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But that's my life. That's the way it is for me...two personalities in there, wrestling for pole position, each one thinking it is smarter than the other. Each one embroiled in its own personal war for control. Eventually, the fight exhausts me and I lose in one form or the other.

Tyler Durden: Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

I wish I could.