Lipgloss and Lamictal: A Bipolar Blog

The telephone cord barely stretches all the way from the phone on top of the faux wood desk to where I am crouching underneath. I peer up and out as discretely as possible and wriggle the cord gently, trying to avoid toppling the small sculpture of empty Diet Coke cans onto my open appointment book. That’d be a cacophony I just didn’t need.

“Dad, hold on,” I whisper into the phone, feeling my anxiety climb each passing second. Right before I had climbed under the desk I’d glanced quickly at the clock, which read half past two. The first influx of students was about to arrive at the after school program I co-directed. I dreaded their arrival so much that I could already smell their advance in the air, an unsettling combination of chalk dust, aerosol hair-spray and chewing gum. The thought of them — teenagers, in singles, pairs and groups — was turning my stomach into a wash machine. There was nothing to do but hide. Changing the hands on the clock would halt nothing. I called my father; I was out of ideas.

“Dad?” I ask, repositioning myself for maximum invisibility. “You still there?” He had put me on hold. I could hear the elevator music from his company’s phone system.
I scan the framed Harvard University and Mount Holyoke College degrees where I had hung them on the wall 2 months ago, when I took the job. I was hoping to draw some confidence from somewhere. You can do this job, I remind myself. You’re more than qualified. But, I had excused my acceptance letter to Harvard away just like I’ve done everything else positive in my life: it happened in spite of me, it was an accident, a charitable offering, or — the admissions staff was drunk that day. I picture the usually-solemn committee around a conference table, all of them are three sheets to the wind, spinning their crimson-crested blazers like lassos, taking vodka shots from plastic tumblers emblazoned with the school motto “Veritas.” Or, perhaps it was simply a slow year for them; they needed to fill some seats. (This never fails to make my friends laugh. “Hinsley?” they say, “there’s never a slow year at Harvard…”)  But the negative stuff, the foibles, mistakes, humiliations and failures? I OWN those. I have practically built an interactive, multi-exhibit experiential museum now open to bus groups and field trips.
Yes - you too can cough so hard when you’re eight years old that you repeatedly pee your Brownie uniform, leaving wet ass-cheek imprints on your chair - causing all fellow students to laugh for weeks! Ever wanted a group of chortling, rich teenage boys to dramatically back up to ensure they have “enough space” to catch your big ass on a ropes course — because you’re bloated from 3 months of steroids to keep your lungs open? Awesome! Step right up! And coupons on Tuesday!

“Yeah, yeah, yeah - what’s going on Hacco?” my Dad says, as he clicks back from a business call. I smile at the name he’s called me for years, a reference to the fact that I came out of my mother’s womb coughing and hacking like I’d spent nine months smoking two packs a day or a hanging at the local hookah bar. My mother had nothing to do with my incessant coughing; she kept her womb as sparkling clean and disinfected as she kept house. I was premature, unexpectedly breech, and born with a “mucus plug,” an abundance of phlegm and an overall purple-blue pallor – in short, I didn’t go home with my parents for weeks.

“Dad, I can’t stay here,” I whisper into the phone, sticking my head around the corner of my desk, scanning the hall for my boss. “I need to find an excuse to leave.”
He says nothing. I’m sure he’s running through an already-exhausted set of options, yanking his tie away from his collar, his blood pressure rising and nose subsequently turning red. He’s used to this drill. Every new job’s just another cog in a large, faulty wheel. Three good weeks or so and then blam! I’m hyperventilating on the morning commute into an old McDonald’s bag I’d yanked from under the seat.

The Center’s students are beginning to collect out in the hallway. I can hear book bags hitting the wall in solid fwumps, “fuck you’s” being tossed around like hackysacks, and mildly-pornographic sounds signifying a last minute make-out session behind the coat tree. I am supposed to be out there supervising, attempting to stave off conception or murder. But I can’t. I’m terrified, weak and seeking an escape hatch.
“Dad, I can’t do this anymore. Everyone here hates me. No one even tells me about meetings anymore.”
“That’s a good thing!” he says. “Who needs more meetings anyway?”
“…and I think the owner and the other Director are talking behind my back. I swear they make faces at me. I think they want me to quit so they don’t have to fire me first.”

My skirt is twisted around my waist, and I’m watching a brand new run start in my nylons. I reach up and blindly pat around my desk drawer for my new MAC lip-gloss, some clear nail polish to stop the run, or my Xanax bottle. I can’t believe I’m squatting under my desk wearing a charcoal-grey business suit. Thirty years-old and I’m a professional stow-away.

“Dad, I am about to walk out of here and drive my car into oncoming traffic. That’s my fucking plan.” I’m start laughing for the same reason I am crying. As much as I am hurting, breaking open inside, I am still trying to lighten the mood with hyperbole.
“No, you’re not going to do that,” he says. “What time do you get out of there?”
Now the tears are really flowing, and all at once I’m snorting, shaking, and laughing, applying a sunset-hued lip-gloss, popping a tiny green pill, wrestling the last Diet Coke out of the 12 pack by my knee, and watching the clock. Dad, save me, I plead silently. Please. Bring me a doctor’s note and pick me up. Call and say I have to leave; I have a sore throat. Can’t parents still call in for their 30 year old?

My father clears his throat and says he’s going to call my psychiatrist and see if he’ll take me after work. I remind him I don’t get off until 8:00 pm.
“Shit,” he says. “Well, you’re just going to have to leave. I’ll call Dr. Muffson. Just hang in there, honey, OK?” I am crying, the anxiety is getting worse. The hoots and hollers from the hallway keep startling me, causing me to hit my head on the underside of the desk. The Xanax is probably a sugar pill, switched at the pharmacy by some drug-seeking tech. Even worse, I suddenly hear my boss, Joyce, ask the teaching assistants and some students if anyone has seen me. Of course, no one has.

“Dad, listen. I am here on the floor in a $400.00 suit, popping Xanax and the kids are just starting to come into the school and I have three parent meetings this afternoon. How can I do this?” The tears run into my mouth, a salty endless pool; my anxiety rises like a thermometer thrown in scalding water.
I know he doesn’t know what to say, and inside I start to scold myself for worrying him. How can I be so freaking selfish? I know there is nothing he can do for me. Even worse, I know if he could do something – anything — he would. I don’t deserve this kind of concern, I think. I deserve everything rotten I feel inside –the incessant fear, the intense self-loathing and shame, the anxiety bubbling like blisters.
I begin to calm myself by think about dying in an accident on the way home, or just lying down across the front seat once I hit the highway, closing my eyes, humming with the radio and hoping for the best. Or the worst. I am so tired.

“Dad,” I say, “tell Dr. Muffson this. If he cuts me open, inside he’ll see one of those mile long vacationland water slides with multiple tributaries, spiraling down like ribbons into a huge, silent pool. The slides only go down, like a death drop. There are no ladders. Everybody would understand then, Dad. You see? Everyone would finally get what I’ve been talking about, why I feel like this. Why I need to end it, finally.”

****

He hangs up to call my doctor. Just before though, he asks me to hang in there, just for a while - for him. The dark hands of depression feel like they’re yanking me towards the door, the car, and a bad decision, but I promise him anyway. There’s nothing I won’t do for a parent who is trying with every cell in their body to somehow right the past. To help heal some of the damage they imposed on the bald-headed, soft-skinned creature they had a major hand in creating, and to assuage the guilt they feel, the shame that serves no one.

I crook my arm up and tap around with the phone until I find the hook. Then, I carefully find a place for my open soda. I steel myself, and get ready to climb from my enclave. I throw my Xanax bottle into my briefcase, tuck my hair behind my ears, and take a breath, trying to exhale evenly. On hands and knees I emerge, amazed I pulled it off. No one will have any clue I was just holed up like a dusty, terrified fetus wearing DKNY heels. I can brush the lint off and slip into my professional role for an hour or so without anyone knowing the difference. I have spent my life covered with cat hair, so no one would even look at me twice. I place a hand on my chair to steady myself, in order to make the slow ascent to a standing position. Instead, I am looking directly at a knee. A knee clothed in brown polyester pants. I slowly tilt my head up and see the blue Snoopy tie that Rick, the Center’s owner, always wears on Wednesday, and then, up another notch to the behemoth shocks of nostril hair I always try to avoid staring at.
“Hinsley, um - everything OK in here?”
“I just — dropped something…..(just insert one, I cant’ remember what I said: contact lens/pen/lipstick) but I’m fine, going back to work now.”

At that moment, my co-Director, a vessel of a woman named Joyce, fills up the doorway to my office. She is looking monochromatic, as always - the most boring, dry woman on the planet. The best way to describe Joyce is - beige. “Everything OK in here?” she asks, looking at the owner, not at me.
“Not surrrree,” Rick drones, pushing his glasses back up the slippery slope. I feel vulnerable, too far from my desk-womb. “You know guys,” I say, “on second thought I am really not feeling well. Mind if I get out of here early?”

Again, they meet eyes. (Perhaps they’re having an affair? I shake the image from my head quickly) and don’t even wait for a yes. I grab my Coach briefcase, the jacket off the back of my chair, and the Diet Coke from my desk. “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll make it up with extra hours next week. Have a good weekend!” It’s only Wednesday, but I don’t care. I walk out into a blast of cool, almost dusk air, throw my stuff in the trunk, and drive towards the Boston skyline. I pull through McDonald’s, turn on the radio, and munch on fries all the way home. My dad calls on the cell and tells me I have an emergency appointment on Friday to discuss a plan of action. I already figured, which is why I “assumed” the next two days off.

****

The most horrendous day at that job hadn’t yet occurred, much to my ultimate humiliation. I am still considering whether to brandish that tale here in its full glory. But, I can offer you this: it got much, much worse. And days after that ultimately horrific day, I ended up institutionalized for a week. I guess that’s what happens when you attempt to defy reality and pretend that you can’t read the writing on the wall — even if you’re the one who’d been scrawling it there yourself.

In the end, what my hairy-nostriled or beige bosses thought didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I hung in there through school and work, day after day, for several years until I made an ultimate decision with my parents and doctors that I simply couldn’t do it anymore.

It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t need to be anyone else’s hero. I always forgot to wash my cape, and it was so matted with cat hair, washing wouldn’t help anyway. I learned that no matter how much I tried to not be me, no matter how many times I tried to stuff my velvet body into a Velcro box, that I would just get worse. As my world fell increasingly apart, it only demonstrated how finely crafted my soul’s progress was meant to be. I had been taking so many wrong roads for so long and my soul, or my higher self, knew there were better choices to be made. The question was, how long was I willing to live like this?