BUZZ THE CLOWN JUST LEFT HOME

Last February, after the mood swings began to swing me so hard I could barely breathe without feeling anxious about it, I began to isolate.  Nothing quite like withdrawing from everyone, or feeling as if everyone wants to hurt you, or that no one really cares.  Locked-into myself, left alone with no one but me, the illness only got fiercer than it otherwise would have. 

That wasn't healthy.  I began deleting what I then believed were "so-called friends" and blocking many people I had decided to give-up on because I had asked them for help and they merely shrugged their shoulders.  By that time, I'd been given the boot from Mad Swirl by a blazing narcissist after really doing nothing more than tease him.  I'd also been given the brush-off by Tamitha after two full years of her flirting, offering herself and trying to get involved with me.  All in all, I was a mess.  And I isolated.  I didn't feel like I had a friend in the world.

In the few days leading up to my eight-day internment in an emergency mental health clinic, I really lashed-out at some people.  I called my friend BA and simply started screaming as loud as I could into the telephone.  I called Michael Clay and repeated the process.  When I look back at those moments, it's easy to see now that what I was doing was asking for help.  I was irritable.  Angry.  And even entering a quasi-psychotic state.  The so-called "reactions" to my backhanded plea for help were mixed.

BA, who also has a touch of Bipolar, and who works with children with behavioral problems, called me back and talked me down.  Clay, however, took it personally and used it as "proof" that I didn't like him and that I was a disgusting human being for being so out-of-line.  Of course, me being angry at literally everyone, including members of my family, was really me having a serious Bipolar episode, the worst, in fact, in over 20 years.

Doubtless, people were stunned.  I'm always so laid-back.  I typically keep things pleasant when I am around people I respect.   Not a person affected by the social neighborhood effects of a serious mental breakdown had the inkling of a suspicion of an idea what on earth had gotten into me.

Thea Temple of The Writer's Garret told me via Facebook PM that she knew I was "troubled".  Trying to convince her that, no, I'm not so much troubled as I'm a human being with a chemical imbalance in the brain that can go awry at any time was like talking to a rock.  "Sounds to me you need positive things happening in your life."

Really?  Ah, come on....  You can't be serious.  Oh wait.  You are serious.

Thea Temple, a woman who has done immeasurably positive things for the local writers community, apparently didn't seem to know there is no such thing as "normal".  What's it take to get that through your inch-thick skull, Thea?  John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Lord Byron, John Keats, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Winston Churchill and hundreds of other poets, writers, artists and generally great human beings, all of them manic-depression sufferers like me? 

At least Thea stuck in there until I calmed down.  Then, quietly, she defriended me and let me be.  In fact, I don't know how many friends I lost because I got sick, but the loss of support and understanding from people I would have expected to have had the depth of character not to kick a person when that person is down sent me into a tailspin of isolation.

As a consequence, a year later, I find I have much less tolerance than before for people who don't happen to be good people.

BA, who got caught-up in the mess I was in, had a right to be pissed-off, but then I was angry at absolutely everyone.  He wasn't really singled-out.  Hell, I even threatened my stepfather with a chainsaw simply because he didn't understand I was in serious need of help.

At least the Dallas Police cared.  They came running after I had an altercation with one of my caseworkers.  They could have pressed charges against me, but they knew I was sick.  I needed help.  Everything had gone wrong in my life.  They were really pretty nice to me.

Since I got sick, and even after I finally achieved mental and emotional balance (getting back onto mood stabilizers did this), I have been socially alone.  Literally isolated.  Not one friend has come to visit me or has offered to spend time with me.  While I am used to being relatively isolated and alone a great deal of time, I finally had to face the music.  Pretty crummy music too.

BA, who has a problem with the telephone because not answering it is part of his coping mechanism, a compulsion to ignore those out-of-sight anxieties and upsets that seemingly come out of nowhere, has been markedly absent for a year.  He was in a relationship with a fine lady, and I was really happy that he'd found someone as quirky and fun-filled as he is.  I'd call him when I was lonely and anxious.

Why did it always have to hit the message machine, BA?

Ignore it and it will go away.

On his Facebook page, he portrayed many pictures in the last year, photographs of himself and his girlfriend, himself and his friends, himself at art galleries and at various poetry events.  Looking on, I couldn't help but feel left out.  What could I do for him?  When his relationship crashed, and I suspect it was his friend who broke-up with him (his intimacy issues), I called him to offer him any support I could give him.  What did he need?  Money?

Oh well.  I've been here before.  I've had my life crash before, and it always hurts.  I can't help it that I have a serious emotional illness the sometimes gets the best of me, I really can't.  I do what I can to help myself.

Sometimes you simply have to release someone from your life because their next-to-non-existent position in your life is to say the least pointless.

Carry on, BA.  When you're going through Hell, keep going.  

I will never forget that sordid Sunday in March of last year.  I'd somehow gotten it into my head that Tamitha was going to meet me at the grocery store.  I showered, shaved, got dressed, put on a nice shirt and headed for the Kroger up the street.  It was all fantasy, really.  There was no reason she would have shown-up or even known about this so-called meeting between two "friends", but nevertheless I sat in a patio chair inside the store for about 45 minutes, feeling really sick and sad but still smiling at people who stopped to ask me what I was doing.  "I'm here to meet a friend".  Yeah, right.  Likely story.

Once it was pointedly obvious the woman was not going to show-up in this crazed, deluded sideshow of my insane thinking, I angrily went home and began calling people.  I called my stepfather, a 90-year-old man and pleaded with him to help me.  I begged.  His response?  "Get a job!"  It's one thing when someone you love completely misunderstands what you're trying to communicate, but it's quite another thing when someone you love shushes you off the way my stepfather had.  For three years after my mother's death, I'd called him every day simply to let him know that I was there for him, that I cared and that I would always lend him a listening ear.

Reverse karma.  I must have reverse karma.  If I do something good, either nobody bothers to notice or I get pushed-down into the dirt and have my nose rubbed into dog shit.

Needless to say, that set me off.  I was crying.  I was desperately in pain.  I didn't know where to go or what to do.  I tried calling the national suicide prevention hotline in Washington DC.  What happened?  The line was no longer in service.

So I called BA.  And yelled.  And yelled.  I slammed down the phone.  I was kinda-sorta trying to say, "Look.  I am sick and tired of you ignoring me when I am out-of-sorts!", but mostly I was asking for someone to talk to, to help me through the pain.  To give me a little dose of reality.  What a way to ask.

Then came MH.  I'd been feeling neglected by him for a couple of years.  At first, when we were first friends, he was really kind to me.  When I had that episode of reactive arthritis, he went to the grocery store for me when I couldn't walk.  He was always giving me gifts.  And help.  And then something changed.  I could tell it in the tone of his voice when he told me, "You know, that Chris.  He and I get along famously."  There was a tinge of guilt in his voice.  I was half-assedly being told I didn't rate.  What was wrong?  For one thing, I was withdrawn after that leukemia battle.  I wasn't my usual, silly self.  I had been having trouble opening-up to people for a while when I got my termination papers from MH.  Shit happens. 

I realize I cannot expect people who have never suffered from a mental or emotional illness to understand what was happening to me.   Sometimes they simply move away like amoebas do when something threatening is put in their path.  Sometimes those people are frightened.  And with the yelling I did, I was frightening.  I have to assume complete responsibility for my actions even if I was out-of-control that day.  By Tuesday, I was sitting in the emergency mental health clinic on lock-down. 

The perfect storm: Me sitting there watching "What Dreams May Come", a sort of after-death love story starring Robin Williams, feeling as if I had been stabbed in the chest the pain was so bad.  All I really needed was to get back onto the mood stabilizers and wait.  The medical fix didn't fix the social mishaps and misconnections. 

Now a year of being almost completely alone has passed.  I lost all of my friends.  Through thick and thin my ass.  Even when I apologized, MH's little termination letter was pretty lame.  It was all about him, and me?  I was defective.  And you know how consumers have the right to return defective material to the store.  That's how that went down.  Kicked when you're at the bottom of the world. 

All of this has to do with people who are good people and people who are not good people.  Shoot, all of those people use plenty of drugs to "amplify" their pseudo-spirituality and their dependence on an outside source of faux well-being goes into the project, withdraw and deny cycle of dysfunction.   While I was indeed wrong on one level to have inappropriate expectations of the people in my life, and wrong for abusing those people, it was also wrong for them to project their inability to be ready for human-to-human contact on planet Earth, or to withdraw from me, the great big threat, or to deny that they had any part at all in the Dancin' With The Stars final episode.  It takes two to tango.  At least BA sort of understood. 

But leaving someone in total isolation for a year and then calling on occasion to "check-in"?  That's not real friendship.  That's simply stringing someone along.  BA, after all, has a hard time being a rainy day kind of friend.  He was overwhelmed when I came down with leukemia, and his big concern was his sense of inadequacy.  I told him then, "Just be yourself.  Make me laugh.  Help me keep my mind off these messed-up cells in my bloodstream."  That gave him a sense of relief.  He'll never really know just how much I appreciated him simply showing up, going to my house and finding paperwork that would help me finance my own treatment.  Heart of gold.  At least then.  This time, not so much. 

Now that I am strong enough to release this thin thread I hung-onto in the belief that BA was still a friend somehow, I have to be just and take care of myself.  There is no sense in hanging-on to next-to-nothing.  Does he treat all his friends this way?  If you don't laugh, are you simply supposed to go away?  Or is it "Drinking Buddy City" or get lost? 

I really can't tell what is on his mind.  He hasn't told me.  He continues to send my telephone calls to his answering machine.