“IT AIN’T THAT KIND OF CALL, MOTHERFUCKER”
Fifteen years had passed since I had left my hometown when Rachel, my therapist, began to help me explore the details of my childhood and my relationship with my mother, despite my protests. At this point, Kinloch was a ghost town, sold off to the airport and its residents scattered around the country. Rachel had broken the shell; she cracked me open with her questions, and over the next few months I began to talk about Mama. Rachel did not see me as an alpha woman, head cheerleader, or Broadway star with ferocious talent. She saw me as a little girl—stuck in childhood pain. Her sympathetic response allowed me to begin to trust her and the process. I felt that Rachel liked me and that she could, and would, help me find those answers I’d been seeking for so long.
To say therapy was difficult is an understatement. The sadness and anger I felt while talking to Rachel permeated every moment of my life for months. During some sessions I could not speak; during others I lay sobbing on the couch, exhausted from digging down to the roots of my pain. Therapy became a burden. Just a couple of months into it and I was through! I just did not feel like having another big crying jag in that little fucking room. One Tuesday afternoon I lay with the bedcovers over my head, depressed and dreading therapy. As the hour approached, I decided I wasn’t going and allowed myself to drift back into catatonia. Six minutes after the appointment time, Rachel called:
“Jenifer, are you on your way? Did you forget we had an appointment?”
“Wha? Huh?”
“You are supposed to be here in my office!”
I couldn’t believe she spoke to me so directly. People rarely confronted me in that way.
“I, um, I don’t feel so well.”
“Jenifer, it is disrespectful for you not to show up or call.”
“I am still in bed and I am very fucking sick!” (Lying ass.) “What do you want me to do?”
Of course Rachel knew I was full of it. She said she expected me in her office pronto. During the entire drive there, I grumbled to myself about how unfairly I was being treated and how it was all bull anyway.
When I arrived, Rachel said, “You have twenty minutes left.” I felt like a damn fool, but I respected her for not taking my shit.
Slowly, Rachel helped me to comprehend that the emotional scar tissue from my childhood had grown thick and heavy, blocking my ability to move forward in my life in a healthy way. She brought me to see that my mother’s rage was not my fault and that my own rage was a replication of my experiences with Mama.
JOURNAL ENTRY: The reality of the darkness I’ve lived through is staggering. I have Mama’s anger. I go off on people just like Mama used to go off on me. I just want to be better. God, please help me to stop being so scared all the time.
I learned that treatment is not a smooth, straight path. I would see bright moments but then become filled to the brim with anxiety and sadness, resolving it all in a drunken streak. My discussions with Rachel unearthed long-suppressed feelings that showed themselves in horrible dreams, my tears falling before I could wake. One time when I fucked up an audition, I threatened to quit and leave the country for good. Rachel said something to me at the time that turned a light bulb on in my mind: “When you’re running, you take yourself with you.”
There was more. It wasn’t just about my mother’s anger, our poverty, or feeling unloved. Rachel told me what I had refused to admit to myself as I’d watched the movie Frances. She explained that I had a mental illness, more specifically, bipolar disorder. I sat there, confused and skeptical, as she talked about the disease, which formerly was called “manic depression.”
According the American Psychiatric Association (APA), “people with bipolar disorders have extreme and intense emotional states that occur at distinct times, called mood episodes . . . [that are] categorized as manic, hypomanic, or depressive. People with bipolar disorders generally have periods of normal mood as well. Bipolar disorders can be treated, and people with these illnesses can lead full and productive lives.”
Say what now? Did she say “disorder”?
I had never heard of the term bipolar. Okay, well, if white people need to give this bullshit a name, whatever. I thought about poles, about opposites, about the Arctic and Antarctic.
I was dumbfounded when Rachel characterized my behavior as extreme. Had she said “you’re crazy,” I would have agreed. I had been crazy all my life. And when she said mental illness, I thought, bitch, you crazy. I associated mental illness with people who couldn’t function, with raving lunatics in straitjackets. What was I doing in therapy, anyway? Black people don’t go to therapy!
Rachel told me that medical science believes bipolar disorder is partly caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine. Neuro what? Dopey who? She said these neurotransmitters affect our moods. Well, I certainly knew what a depressive mood was, but this other “manic” part was new. When Rachel explained the details, I gasped. She described me to a “T.” Mania? So that’s what y’all call it? You mean, there is a name for describing why I’m loud and talk fast and walk fast and feel like my brain is racing a million miles an hour? Is that why I rage, create drama, and speed when I drive?
Compulsive, you say? The incessant doodling, the endless braiding and unbraiding my hair? Impulsive? The arguing with people and storming off? Kicking shit, throwing shit? Yeah, okay, I guess all of that describes me, but . . .
Rachel broke it down for me because the concept of “mania” is sometimes more difficult to understand than the idea of depression. The American Psychiatric Association has the following definition:
Mania: A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased activity or energy, lasting at least one week and present most of the day, nearly every day . . .
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! “Abbie Normal”? Like in Young Frankenstein? I was uncomfortable and resistant, but I kept listening as Rachel talked about the symptoms that may occur during a manic episode:
1. Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
Well, if I don’t pump myself up, who will?
2. Decreased need for sleep
That’s not me. I get at least eleven hours a night!!
3. More talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
Yeah, I do sometimes feel like I just have to keep spouting off, or singing or cracking jokes.
4. Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
Damn! Well, I guess I have sometimes felt like I can’t catch up with the chaos in my brain.
5. Distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
I admit I’ve always had the attention of a fruit fly.
6. Increase in goal-directed activity
Look, I get things done! Something wrong with that?