Was I Ever Really Crazy?
Reader Question: "I just found out I'm bipolar. What is that like for you like what kind of meds are you on and how do you deal? - T from Estonia :)"
I was recently diagnosed as being bipolar, and my doctor also believes that I might have a personality disorder. A fancy doctor who sat still and listened to me babble on about my life for an hour made the determination that since I'm so impulsive and have a hard time controlling my emotions, especially anger, the only thing that would make me better is a few pills that could also cause serious life threatening issues.
"It will help control your mood swings, but it will not get rid of your maniac episodes," she told me.
Then what good were they going to do for me?
It was seriously disturbing to hear a complete stranger tell me that I had a personality disorder, but once I had a few moments to ponder it it all made sense. Most of my life I've felt like two completely different people. One person is charming. She's so charming that she uses her gift to manipulate others around her, and it makes it easier for her to be in control of everything and everyone. She's seductive and knows how to get what she wants without giving it up, she's also petty, yet intelligent. She can own the world and everything in because she believes it with her entire heart. The other woman yearns to be closer to God, she wants to find her purpose and help others find it too. She's more interested in helping someone than taking from someone like the other person inside of her.
Keaidy Bennett is the woman who was created by God. Tamia Santiago, one of my main characters in my urban fiction novel trilogy, is the greedy, selfish, vindictive, manipulator. Both woman wanted to be absolutely free, but it took me 10 years to let Tammy out.
Whenever I told someone before that I was going to be a writer I was immediately shot down because some people seriously believed that that wasn't a career. Instead, I was told I had to go to school to be someone. I tried. I tried, and I tried all in vain. I spent 10 years of my life without my notebook in classrooms I hated in an effort to 'become someone', and it's amazing how only after that did I find out that I was supposedly living with a life long mental illness.
I told my doctor as I laid awkwardly on the uncomfortable chair in her cold office how I saw words just running through my mind all day long. I explained how sometimes what made me angry is how hard it was to concentrate on everything going on around me with these movies, and words just flying around through my mind constantly. She brought up the fact that maybe it was my writing that helped me process my emotions before which made it easy for me to live life without recognizing the mental illness I was supposedly living with. I took her advice and I began writing again. In the last two years, I've published one poetry book, and have written two novels, and 104 blog posts. Not including the words in each of my blog posts, I've written a total of 140,695 freaking words. I moved Tammy out of my mind and placed her in beautiful worlds on paper where she thrives even more than she ever did sitting stagnant driving me crazy in my head, and it makes it easier to be Keaidy Mariana Bennett - the woman God intended me to be.
Now please don't only take my advice because I am definitely not a doctor, but I believe we all have something inside of us that will drive us to madness if we spend more time fighting it then embracing how different we are. I've got hundreds of characters inside of me that want freedom so much that they will appear in my day-to-day life if I try to avoid their existence. I've recognized that when the anger inside of me builds up so much to the point it causes me migraines it is just my body telling me that I need to sit my ass down and write. If you've ever seen the movie Girl, Interrupted, then I'm sure you'll remember the scene when Whoopi told the girl who also suffered Borderline Personality Disorder, " You're not crazy, you're just a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy." Let that sink in for a moment.
A stranger who I'm sure makes big bucks for these prescriptions she writes me tells me that I'm crazy and need medicine to make me better. Now knowing what all I know, I wonder if I was really ever crazy at all? Maybe the only thing that made me crazy was the fact that I let other people who were too scared to follow their dreams lead me to the same path of mediocre living that the're now stuck living in. I've learned to control those emotions by putting them down on paper. I've learned to control all of these personalities by giving them names, and stories, and exciting places to live in that other people also love to read. I turned these wild words and images in my mind into tangible books that someone else can use to take their imagination to places they haven't seen since they were a child, so it makes me seriously wonder : Was I ever really crazy?
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