Bipolarations
by David Martinez
The second time I was taken to a counselor was during my freshman year of high school in Puerto Rico. The school insisted, saying the only way I would be able to advance to sophomore year was if I saw a professional, was diagnosed, and was put into the homeroom for special cases. When asked about it not long ago, my parents said they didn’t remember—didn’t like remembering anything unpleasant—and for a while I wondered where those memories had come from: the young but somewhat severe and intimidating therapist, the muted-red short skirt she wore, the quiet waiting room with the IBM computer at the front desk, a picture of my family I had been asked to draw and bring to her. I wondered about that homeroom at school, about the teacher who asked me why I was there since I seemed so smart and nice. I wondered if it had happened, the way I wondered if some of my childhood memories were dreams designed to make me feel less bad about causing problems for myself—until I found that crude drawing of my family tucked inside an old notebook from high school. It was real, and it was such a relief, because if that was real then the conversation with my school counselor about the conditions for my being able to stay in school were real. That homeroom for special cases—full of abused, suicidal, drug-using, and awkward teenagers—was real. I wasn’t making anything up, making the situation worse than it was. It gave me the freedom to believe my memories and impressions were as tangible as that drawing, that piece of physical proof—and in the environment in which I grew up, physical proof was crucial.
Fear of exaggeration has seeped into every aspect of my life, every action, so much so that after my official bipolar diagnosis when I was 32, I felt compelled to assemble evidence for myself that I wasn’t embellishing. I began to scour for and analyze signs. I didn’t mind having the diagnosis; it was a relief, and after a while my bipolar medication did help. It wasn’t even that I didn’t believe my therapist. It was the voice of family denying me the right to feel my own experiences, denying what I knew I remembered. Unsure of myself, I needed to build evidence.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” my dad said, exasperated, not long after my first visits with my therapist when I was eleven. It was after I’d been caught smoking stolen cigarettes that my religious parents decided I needed help. They were concerned that smoking was too much of a risk for my soul, a sign of more problems to come. For me, the smoking was a symptom of what no one—including myself—wanted to see.
My dad was terrified of therapists, and the older I became the more I realized the poor man was terrified of everything. “Shrinks make very self-centered people,” he would say. “They always talk about their clients focusing on what’s best for them. What about the other people in their clients’ lives? You have to be careful. They’ll try and trick you into thinking church is bad for you because it makes you feel bad. They’ll make you talk about things you don’t want to talk about. They’ll make you exaggerate. Therapy is dangerous and made for whiny liberals who don’t want to take responsibility for their actions.” My mom nodded in agreement. Her voice was lost for most topics my folks deemed serious. I think I met with the counselor twice, and though I did like talking to him, when my parents asked if I wanted to keep going, I said, “No, that’s okay.”
Not long after my official bipolar diagnosis, I came upon an article on synesthesia and from there wandered websites about it, obsessed over something I knew I had but had forgotten about. Synesthesia is not a symptom of bipolar disorder, but it is crucial to my acceptance and understanding of my disorder. Synesthetes experience crossed sensory perceptions, and it comes in many flavors. For example, letters are associated to different colors in my mind: A is red, B is a shade lighter than mustard yellow, C is a light cadmium yellow, D is a turquoise that leans more toward the green, E is a solid blue, and so on. My numbers have personalities: 1, who is white, is shy; 4, brown, has low self-esteem and has been having an affair with 5, red, who is using her; 6, lighter orange, is 5’s girlfriend, and she is too good for him; 6 also knows about the affair but feels too much pity for 4 to be angry with her and too attached to 5 to leave him. My numbers and letters have had the same colors and personalities my whole life, and their stories have developed according to their behaviors and placement on math worksheets. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal. What caught my attention the most when researching, though, was a drawing of a synesthete’s calendar in their head. The months had different shapes and sizes and colors than my calendar, but other than that it was exactly what I see and feel in my head:
Today is 30 September. Today we are at the edge of that brown September space. Starting tomorrow, the days will be black. October is emotionally shorter though technically longer. I know the months don’t look like this, but what I know intellectually, what shapes take place in my mind, and what I feel often don’t match up. Perhaps my bipolar symptoms work the same way. Totally normal for me. Strange for others.
Over the years, I’ve salvaged a small collection of books and notebooks I’d scrawled and drawn in from the time I was 16 to 19. Somehow they had followed me through my adult moves and were the perfect place to start my research for physical proof that would corroborate my diagnosis.
Like that old drawing of my family, I have others, along with other writings that have piled up over the years, relics I can see and which remind me of the moments I created them. I deteriorated into crisis when my family moved to Florida from Puerto Rico when I was 16, dropped out of school, and spent most my time alone in my room reading and listening to music. I fell so far into myself that I would never really recover—a good place to look for bipolar symptoms. Most the drawings from this time have recurring characters and themes. Below is the grinning man I kept finding in every notebook:
They are self-portraits. That first drawing was made on an in-class assignment I never turned in during what was to be the last few days I’d spend in high school—the balding look was an accident because I was so frenzied and full of energy that I couldn’t keep my hand steady. I remember racing, silly thoughts that were funny to me at the time. I drew with my left hand, though I’m right-handed. It felt important, something to do with the left being closer to the heart and therefore the soul, making it easier to spill the soul onto the page. What’s most important about this early iteration of this grinning man is that it’s clearly labeled “ME.” The house, rainbow, tree, and flower—none of which I was able to spell right with the velocity of thoughts pouring through my head—I found hilarious, and I laughed so hard inside I shook as I drew it, but I stayed as silent as I could on the outside for fear of classmates and teachers thinking I was insane when I clearly felt genius. I know I wasn’t high as I drew the picture, because I dropped out of school the day after the first time I bought weed in Florida, and I distinctly remember I wished I was high so I could keep that good feeling going, knowing from experience the mania would eventually dissipate.
At some point, that first-iteration smile morphed into a grin plastered on a face as in the second drawing, a grin almost always left unfinished because I didn’t have the attention span. The third is ink on paper stained at sporadic intervals, that same energy welling up with such intensity that I kept pacing around the room between every few strokes of the bamboo brush I was using. When painting at that age, after leaving school, I would cover my body in messages and symbols, paint my face, never knowing why other than it was important. It seemed like the thing to do. With each of these three drawings, I laughed loud in my head but kept silent on the outside, because by then I had grown my full-fledged fear of others’ judgement. If anyone caught me too far outside of the mildly eccentric self I showed, my euphoria would morph into dysphoria—and that was the state to be feared above all others.
When I did that last drawing, I was not laughing. The grin had taken over, beyond the control of the face it stretches. His eyes are worried. When I remember drawing that portrait, what I remember is fear.
Fear is the superlative trigger of gaslighting—it makes us gaslight ourselves. It’s the reason others gaslight us, a last-ditch attempt to invalidate an unwanted reality. When I think of those drawings, think of the manias behind them, I don’t want the bipolar diagnosis. I still want to feel the intensity I felt then. I want that intensity to be me.
The problem with a natural, manic euphoria—especially for someone familiar with manic dysphoria—is that we want, we need, to believe that our euphoric delusions and feelings are real. Who doesn’t want to believe they are singular and important in the universe? Who doesn’t want to know they’re really a genius and everything self-destructive and confusing that they’ve ever done has been because of that? Who would want to replace those beautiful moments and impressions with sickness, with a case of mistaken identity? Who would want that kind of embarrassment?
When in a euphoric state, I feel everything come on at once like electricity. It builds, swells. Light. Air. Movement. I feel all of existence on my skin, a physical sensation that penetrates me to my core, seeps into my heart and lungs and upper stomach. It runs up my spine and expands into the back of my head. I feel huge, towering over people, cities, the earth. It’s a vast feeling. It’s cosmic and envelops everything, revealing secrets normal people don’t see. Depending on the level of my euphoria, when I’m on the rise, hypomanic, I can be at my most productive. In these moments, I’m a genius after all, and all I need is to work to prove it. I’ll drive to a bookstore and pace the aisles, muttering and having conversations with myself. My hands and fingers will be in constant motion. I’ll grin. Make others laugh when I talk to them. I’ll write. It can be difficult, but until I rise too high I still have the ability to force myself to be productive, to use that confidence to actually produce work. On the outside, I look like my normal, eccentric, talkative self—the self my family and friends know. On the inside, I’m brimming.
A drug-induced euphoria can be laughed away: “I was so wasted, bro.” “Did I really do that?” “I can’t believe I was that high. That’s so funny.” It doesn’t matter how crazy the idea or good the feeling, whether a high person rants about being connected to the universe, how bizarre or garbled the words are, because if it’s drug-induced, it’s to be expected. The user, as long as they have no serious addiction, can shrug off their strange impressions. A natural manic euphoria can be just as strong in my case as some acid trips I’ve had—sans the dreamlike quality—and have the same spiritual feeling of growing importance. Problem is, I can’t laugh those thoughts away because they don’t come from a drug. They come from me. It’s embarrassing, and that also breeds gaslighting. I keep it to myself, knowing full well that if I start ranting about the colors I feel on my skin and the electricity in my mind that I’ll either worry or annoy people. I’ve kept so much to myself that when I’m not in one of these states—or even if I am—I’ll wonder if they’re real. If no one notices, and if no one says anything, is it just an exaggeration on my part? But almost no one ever noticed when I was on drugs, either: speedballing at a job fair where I was hired by a hotel because my brother and I seemed like fun guys, speed-talking on shrooms to family who nodded in agreement to whatever I was saying so they could get on with their TV shows, tripping on acid at work in the ice-cream shop kiosk at the mall and collecting phone numbers from girls I would never call. No one noticing doesn’t mean it’s not real.
The space between euphoria and dysphoria is thin. They sometimes overlap, and while dysphoria does not need to pass through euphoria, it often can. Not long ago, I came across a fellowship I wanted to apply for writing about the criminal justice system . My wife was concentrating on work in the living room. I stood up, excited, and began to ramble about my ideas, what I would write, why it would help people caught up in prison and the families who were suffering, how I was perfect for it. I read all the requirements to her, read the bios of the people who had won the previous year. This isn’t unusual for me, and it wasn’t startling. I went back to my seat, read more, then stood up, walked over to my wife, and started repeating everything I’d said before. My wife, calm, looked up at me and said, “You’re repeating yourself. You already told me all that.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry. I think I’m getting too excited.”
She went back to typing her notes, and I went back to the kitchen. At the computer, my excitement wasn’t diminishing. It was growing, becoming electric, and I realized I had forgotten to take my pill—and, as I later learned when I counted them, I might have forgotten to take it a few times. “Oh shit,” I thought. I could feel myself growing and speeding up. That grinning self was taking over. “Well, it’s too late now. It’s too late. I’ll just have to take it tomorrow I can’t take it now but I need to act cool she’ll think I’m high that’s what they don’t get people would just think I was high they don’t understand that’s the problem that’s why I can’t trust them they’ll think something is wrong nothing is wrong. This is great. I just need to harness this.”
I now cannot fathom why I thought I wasn’t able to take my pill at that moment. I do remember feeling that grinning face expanding in the back of my mind. It’s a sensation that is often present, though not often in control. The range of my manic and depressive sides are always present, like a current that’s constantly running either over, behind, or under me, a sensation I can always feel. I can feel it now, rushing over my head as I type. As I change moods, the position of the current changes. If I’m dysphoric, I’m drowning in it, and it rages. When I’m stable, I can feel it outside myself, either below my feet, parallel to my back, or over my head. When I’m depressed the current is more like a sick sway, almost still, heavy, but silent, and I am under it. When the depression is bad, I suffocate. When I’m euphoric, I ride on it, like surfing at high speeds.
The morning after not taking my pill, I was consumed to the point that it was difficult to hear anything that wasn’t my own thoughts. I took my wife to work, came back home, laid on the couch, and rocked back and forth, free from having to pretend to be normal, feeling everything, trying to get myself under control by humming with what I felt were the inner vibrations of the universe before I would have to go to work. At some point, knowing what was happening and wanting more documentation, I grabbed my computer and wrote this:
It went on for a long time, and it’s exactly what the precipice between manic euphoria and manic dysphoria looks like. I went to work with thoughts like these running in the background of my mind and performed, asking students to repeat what they were saying in class because my thoughts kept getting in the way, but otherwise without issue, never letting what goes on inside come out, because I knew the moment anyone saw they would worry, and I had been trained my entire life by family, religious culture, country, and community to hide it. I was an expert at hiding.
There is another iteration of that grinning man that appeared on a face in an oil painting I’ve lost. The grin is almost exactly the same as in the last three drawings above, but it’s not attached to the face it controls. It hovers over the face like a mask, casting a shadow on the skin behind it, the eyes in a clear state of panic, no longer in control.
Manic dysphoria is terrifying. It has the same electricity as euphoria, the same swelling, but instead of unbridled joy and confidence, the swelling carries a nervousness, a jitteriness, an overwhelming sense of guilt, and an irritability fused to obsession. It’s mixed with depression, and like the other phases comes in varying degrees. Another old drawing that I pulled from one of those sketchbooks:
The marionette hanging from a noose is another me, a severely depressed and malnourished me. A me with no control. The screaming, berating figure is also me, yelling about how ridiculous and horrible and self-pitying and melodramatic I am. The two forces cause an inescapable vortex, a current that cannot be stopped by trying to “think good thoughts.” This is the state I need drugs for, and it is by far the most dangerous. I haven’t had any serious dysphoric states since I started on my bipolar meds, but when I did, this is when I would do anything to get high, even if I’d been clean for a while. In this state, every part of me is thrust into panic. I’ll still pace the room, but in dread, knowing that I need something, anything, but not knowing what that something is. Nervous stomachaches from childhood come back. I’ll become obsessed with wanting to sleep and never waking up, and the obsession will grow into the need to either sedate or kill myself. Yet I’ll stay quiet so no one ever notices, and why would I want them to?
I’ve never had to prove my depressive sides. I’ve recognized them my entire life, like how sometimes being conscious is so uncomfortable every second comes with a dull ache. I’ve seen it in others, in my parents’ sighs and headaches, always unspoken but apparent. That’s the problem with the depressive sides. It’s not that I have to prove they exist, it’s that it’s either bad form, offensive, or damaging to talk about, no matter how obvious. I grew up with a dad who locked himself in his room all day and any time he wasn’t at work, stomping off in a huff because someone laughed the wrong way, leaving behind an air so tense only still, awkward sorrow hung in the vacuum—and a mother who accepted that as the norm by attempting to laugh at it.
A dim depression can look like serenity. It can look like hours in a meditative trance in which I’ll lay on the floor and think slow thoughts. Colors can be potent in this space, and they will percolate through my skin and into my chest and back or the middle part of my brain—especially deep, solid, pure colors, like pigments. The difference between this state and the euphoric is a weighty but profound and influential energy and a pervasive melancholy that surrounds that weighty energy. The melancholy is strong enough to be the dominant impression, strong enough that these moments don’t last too long before they’re swept up. But while they do last, they’re sensual. The best way I can describe it is like a small cut on the lip that that has to be bit and sucked because it hurts so good. It’s that spot between the painful and sweet, and it’s lovely. It looks like Van Gogh’s The Café Terrace at Night, that warm, yellow light surrounded by the lovely blue dark of the street and buildings in the background. After I left high school, I would stare at this painting in library books until I could feel it behind my eyes and under the skin on my temples. I can work in this type of depression—in fact, I can edit and think more lucidly in this state then in either mania or hypomania, even if I feel slightly translucent.
When I was 14, the morning after the first time I took acid in Puerto Rico—when the world was still shimmering but not full-blown bizarre—I went to the pool, put on goggles, jumped in the water, and blew all the air out of my lungs until I couldn’t float, then lay at the bottom of the pool watching the sun spill through the silver skin where the water met the air. The water around me was heavy, and my long hair danced slow around my face and head. I stayed like that—wanting it to last, the pressure and light and sensuality—and only came up the moment I couldn’t take it any longer, the moment I needed to breathe. That’s what a sensual depression feels like, that weight and weightlessness at the same time, knowing I’ll eventually need to move again, need to breathe, knowing I could conceivably drown, but not caring, enjoying the small moment until it inevitably passes.
After dropping out of high school, I used to drive out to bookstores and wander alone to look at and smell new books. Being depressed at home was excruciating, listening to family argue or when not arguing, leaving an anxious buzz in the air, while I laid on the floor in my room as the clothes and paints and guitar chords and dust piled up, soaking up the dense despondency that strangled the house. Most of all, I didn’t want to be noticed. I would grab a pile of books at the store and hang out on one of the lounge chairs until my anxious stomachaches would send me home. The presence of books would offer a small charge to the fading electric feel as the depression deepened, the last vestiges of fading color, the last safe space.
My obsession with color is the best way for me to describe my levels of depression. I scribbled in one of those old notebooks: “It ok when it’s blue, but when it’s gray it’s unbearable.” That blue is the next level down from the sensual depression, which goes from red to purple. It stretches wide and dives deep until it reaches black, and eventually gray, or the end of color.
One of the famous paintings I would stare at in libraries and bookstores was Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. I copied it later with blue oil paint, trying to fit that old man into the rectangle canvas. I never succeeded and ended up painting something else over the top, but that painting is what the beginnings of that blue depression feel like. I’ll function, but slowly, the way that painting is slow, the slow old man with the slow long limbs, the guitar I can imagine making noise but not being played. In this state, I’ve never been able to do anything with any proficiency since my self-confidence will have melted, but I can still feel. When like this as a child, I would walk barefoot around the small town where I lived, dreaming of running away, of starting some adventure I wasn’t yet able to comprehend but would save me from the heaviness that was piling on. As a teenager in Puerto Rico, I would ride my skateboard, not practicing the tricks I was perpetually trying to master, just rolling down the hills in Old San Juan, barreling toward the ocean at that time when the sun is down but the sky’s not yet all the way dark, hoping somehow the momentum could light me, spiral me away. As a teenager in Florida, I would steal sleeping pills or Benadryl or anything with nitrous oxide or anything with pseudoephedrine or NyQuil from the Walmart next to my house, or I’d make homemade LSA—similar to LSD— or drink or eat whatever substance my brother would bring me, then drive through the orange groves at night in pitch black with the windows down while listening to Radiohead until I got to a bar on the edge of Lake Jessup. I knew they wouldn’t serve me, so I never went inside, but I would sit and watch the alligators that roamed the water’s edge in the dark. Every now and then someone would catch one of the big ones and put it in a cage next to the bar so that people could appreciate it before setting it loose again. I liked the darkness of it, the weight and comfort of whatever substance was weighing on my head, the long alligators, and the smell of the orange blossoms. As an adult, it’s not a bad state to be in. I don’t feel nearly as dangerous to myself as I used to. I don’t drive under the influence. But I’m still nihilistic. The suicidal ideations at this level are light but present, as they often are, coming on before the torturous self-loathing. I’ll have crying fits when I’m alone and no one can see. This is where I’ll watch movie after movie, show after show, and if I find a book that’s good enough, I won’t stop reading. I’ll try to outrun what I know might come, what would be worse and much more dangerous, what I referred to in that notebook so many years ago as The Gray:
The first portrait is from Florida a couple months before I left school. A page or so before I’d written this: “The substances don’t work, but lack of them causes enormous lack of colors, blues and reds, purples and greens, black, gray. Gray is so much sadder than blue. It’s nothing.” The second is from maybe a year or two later, and though I remember drawing, I can’t recall what I was thinking, only that everything was bad.
The Gray is BoJack Horseman depression. It’s the space where nothing makes sense, and it doesn’t matter that nothing makes sense. I didn’t experience it until just before I left Puerto Rico, and it dominated for maybe three years with other states intermittently making short appearances. Before I left the island, I was walking around the basketball court where I used to skate, buy drugs, and get high. It was overcast and humid. Gray. I looked up a hill that led to a school and saw a tree I had known for years. It was dark with no leaves. It also looked two-dimensional and wrong, like a cardboard prop. It hurt my senses, and I had to blink a few times before realizing the sensation wasn’t going away. Everything looked and felt emotionally drained of color, like it had been that way forever, but it was only then that I had ever noticed. I knew it wasn’t real, but I carried that two-dimensional sensation for months. People felt empty. School didn’t seem real. Students, teachers, crowded halls, dirt on the floor, none of it real. It was as if everything existed on some existential plane I was able to see but not touch. I was alone.
One afternoon, junk sick, I was walking to the light rail with a classmate from ASU, a skinny guy who always wore flannel, was obsessed with David Foster Wallace, and seemed constantly worried about not appearing bland. Sweaty, oily, with gooseflesh and chills raising on my skin, I stopped and leaned against a pole outside a corner bar before crossing the street. I don’t remember what we were talking about, or why I said it, but I leaned my head against the pole and said, “I wake up in pain every day, man. Miserable every day.”
He looked at me, half rolled his eyes, smiled, and said, “Is that really true? That’s so cliché.”
He wasn’t someone I hung out with often. He didn’t know anything about me. All he knew was that I was in his writing classes, and he saw me floating around writing conferences and readings. He’d read some of my stories about drugs and mental-health issues, and for some reason I’d thought that would have made a difference. Or at least I wanted it to have made a difference though I knew—the way I’d always known—that no, like most “normal” people, he would never know, and I was stupid to have said anything in the first place.
I ignored the comment, and he pretended I’d never said anything until we parted, and I made my way over to the light rail alone. I walked carefully across the street, trying not to shit myself, and sat on the baking metal bench with the desert sun on my shoulders to wait for the train, leaning over my knees and rocking back and forth. I wasn’t lying. I woke up most days then junk sick, feeling greasy. If I was feeling well, I knew it wasn’t going to last and that I’d need to find something quick to keep me high. Or, it’d be during one of my clean periods, and I would wake up nervous or unable to see reality, unable to go to work, and never sure why other than I was probably lazy or melodramatic. What I’d said was the truth, and all it took was one comment, that I was being cliché, to make me feel I was an exaggeration.
“Asshole,” I thought, trying to fight the idea that maybe he was right. “There’s a reason clichés exist.”
For a while, I kept those old notebooks and sketchbooks in my office at the college where I teach English and creative writing, and as I wrote about them, they stared back at me, sprawled out on my desk, remnants of a history that was always mine no matter how invisible to others, proof of some of the building blocks that make me.
I wouldn’t be teaching without having first looked into those old notebooks, without first acknowledging the pieces of myself that weren’t supposed to exist. Hidden and unrecognized, my disorder would consume me. Analyzed, addressed, and accepted, I can thrive. I’ve since found, and am collecting, more proof, which has always been there for all to see, less physical but just as real. After discarding gaslighting, the evidence of my bipolar disorder settles like sediment, becoming stronger and more discernible the more I search and pay attention. I laid on my back in that bedroom in Florida as a teenager, after having left school of my own accord, scrawling those spirals, and the eyeball and Talking Heads’ “stop making sense” on the cover of that maroon notebook, floating on the stolen Vicodin I’d lifted from my dad’s room, listening to the strained silence of the house, thinking that strain and silence was normal and real. It wasn’t either, though I wouldn’t know it until I grew up some. My racing thoughts, manias, hypomanias, levels of depression, are all still part of the fabric that makes me, just as discernible as those images I’ll still look at, reminding myself that the boy alone in the room was real, that the man who now teaches college is real, too, and that’s okay. There is no reason they couldn’t coexist, despite how crazy or unlikely. No reason to deny them, but every reason to accept them and recognize them as both dangerous and beautiful.
David Martinez is a half-American half-Brazilian writer who has lived all over the US, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. He earned his MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert. His most recent writings can be found in Writers Resist and Charge Magazine. He also has forthcoming work in The Coachella Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books. David teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona. You can find him at davidmmartinez.com.
Header image by David Martinez