I tear my eyes from the mirror and pull open the drawer, pushing around my lingerie until I find the masks I keep buried at the bottom.
For the longest time those masks depicted the person I was, the person I was before I admitted my truth. I am bipolar and those masks are the two sides of Lacey Parrish. The smile is for the girl I am when I’m not fighting for control over my mind and the frown is when my maker reigns over me. Some people call God their maker, believing he controls everything—Heaven and Earth, but for me the only thing that controls me is my mind. My mind is my maker and for most of my life I have been a victim of the vicious villain that lives inside my head.
I freed myself from the silence and used the only weapon I had against my mental illness—my voice. I sought help and was diagnosed and now I start my day with a daily dose of Lithium. It took some time adjusting to my medication but mostly my maker has been shut down. One would think I’d find relief in that, or it would make my life easier but instead I feel lost—like I don’t know who I am without that voice doubting everything I know and feel.
I guess I’ve become so used to the struggle I don’t know how to live life normally. My therapist tells me it’s natural but what does she know. To her I’m a textbook, just a case study, she has never lived with my mind, she doesn’t know how I became one with my maker.
It sounds sadistic, even to my own ears, but I sort of miss that voice. At least I had an excuse for the devilish thoughts that filled my head with doubt. Now, those thoughts are mine, they are pure and they are real.
I close the drawer, taking the masks and bring them to my chest. I step out of my bedroom and stare at the empty room across from the bedroom I share with Blackie.
I should be on top of the world.
I should be smiling.
I’ve got everything I ever wanted, everything I never thought I’d have, everything my maker tried to keep from me.
And yet today I’m miserable.
There is no voice telling me my happy life will be ripped from me. No voice feeding me lies, telling me I’ve conjured the whole thing up.
The facts that are driving me into a depression.
Cold hard facts that are dragging me down.
I’ve avoided reality for so long I have no fucking clue how to deal with it. I don’t know how to make sense of everything I’m feeling because I’m still learning how to differentiate real life from my illness.
I think people automatically think once someone undergoes treatment they’re healed with a snap of their fingers, but it’s a process, erasing everything and starting fresh. Learning how to exist normally is just as much a struggle as living in torment.
Add adjusting to living on your own with a man to the mix, and the fact that your father has been avoiding you because you fell in love with his best friend, well, I’m fucked and that’s putting it mildly.
My stepmother is pregnant and while I’m genuinely happy for Reina and my father, for this new life we’re all going to love to pieces, I can’t help feeling some kind of way.
What if this new child is born like me? And if I’m asking myself that question, I wonder if my father is too. Is he worried that another innocent child will fall victim to the illness that is generated in his DNA. I become angry because I know how it is to live impaired by my mind and wouldn’t want that for anyone let alone an innocent child. I can’t help thinking that it would be negligent to bring a child into this world, knowing there is an illness he or she may inherit.
Since I’ve been diagnosed I try to put myself in my father’s shoes. He’s survived mental illness and somehow he doesn’t let it dictate his life. I try to understand his logic and ask myself if I could live like him. I’ve always wanted children, and now that I am with Blackie, I want nothing more than to give him everything he’s ever hoped for but never thought he’d have. I know he wants kids, maybe not now but eventually he wants to fill this house and the blank pages of our story with children.
I close my eyes and I can see it all so vividly, the life we dreamed of having—the little girl with her daddy’s eyes and her mommy’s sweetness. She’d have a smile so big and so bright that it will melt her daddy’s heart. In my dreams we always have a girl, and she’s the apple of Blackie’s eyes. She’d be his true angel, and I’d be the one who gave her to him.
I want it so bad.