By Nate Livsey
Author’s Note: I wrote this as an exercise for a writing workshop I recently completed. This was written as an exercise in 2nd person point-of-view and I enjoyed it enough to share it.
You stand at the side of your bed and you present yourself with two options: go to bed, or swallow the pills in your hand and then go to bed.
For the past 13 years, you have chosen option 2. You haven’t always been consistent, but past experience has told you that yes, this is the correct option. Begrudgingly, you unscrew the top of your water bottle and place the cylindrical capsule and diamond-shaped tablet on your tongue.
You grimace at the bitter taste of chalk and plasticity. Despite the consistent presence of atypical antipsychotics in your life for the better part of two decades, you still haven’t gotten used to the taste. You probably never will.
10 seconds and a healthy swig of water later, you have completed your task and can get into bed and attempt to fall asleep and get a decent night’s rest—something that hasn’t happened for you in the last 20 years—except as you get under the covers, you realize that the diamond-shaped chalk-tasting pill is stuck to the roof of your mouth.
You’ve done this before. If you don’t get up and wash it down, the pill will lodge in your throat and you will wake up in the middle of the night with a burning sensation and you will attempt to cough it out, but nothing will happen. Then you will stand up, stumble blindly to the kitchen and attempt to flush it down with some food (a string cheese, perhaps, or maybe some crackers) and a few healthy chugs of milk straight from the jug. Despite your age, you have never been able to overcome this childish impulse.
And so, regrettably, you throw off your carefully situated and layered blankets, shivering at the sudden blast of cold air—you keep your house at a frigid 71 degrees at night, as you’ve found that sleeping in a simulated icebox is actually quite conducive to rest—and grab your bottle of water, unscrew the cap again, and take a few more healthy swigs. You drain the bottle and feel the pill slowly dislodge and travel down your gullet. Now you can go to bed and let the selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitor that functions as an antidepressant and atypical antipsychotic used as a mood stabilizer dissolve into your bloodstream at night and keep your brain functioning at a somewhat “normal” level, even though whatever that might look like is still an enigma to you.
Now begins the usually hour-long attempt to calm your ever-racing mind enough to trick yourself into sleep. You’ve tried all sorts of things: relaxing music, earplugs, eye covers, talking, not talking, sitting still, moving, more blankets, less blankets, different pillows and so on, and despite all these experiments, your time to fall asleep still averages around a forty-five minutes to an hour. You let your mind wander, thinking about the tasks of the upcoming day, what appointments and events you have scheduled. You open your eyes, and close your eyes, breathe deeply. As your mind calms and you start to drowse, you start making noises: a simple “hmmm” or “uhh” but you don’t necessarily have control over them. When one is too loud, your wife hits you and says, “too loud” to let you know that there is another person trying to sleep here, too. You shift from one side to the other, adjust your pillows, and, slowly, gradually, nod off into sleep. It’s taken you an hour to get here, and you probably won’t wake up until your alarm goes off.
You awaken with a burning bladder and stay still for a few moments to orient yourself. You lean over and press snooze on the blaring alarm on your phone and try to open your eyes. Previously, when you were on a different cocktail of medicines, it would take you 30 to 45 minutes just to wake up. Now that you’re on 40 mg of Fluoxetine and 200 mg of Lamotrigine, things are a little easier in the morning.
You know from previous experience that taking your medications is important and necessary, but there still exists a part of you that wishes you didn’t have to take a pill to stay sane. However, you acknowledge sadly in your mind that as of 60 years ago people were still being lobotomized for mental health issues and you are thankful that you don’t live in that time period.
You remember the night where, after a long game night and poor medication management on your own part, you nearly drove your car off of a highway overpass in order to end your own life. You recall that when you were living in Middleburg that your medications were not functioning as they should and, thankfully, an attempt only ended up in two separate hospitalizations instead of in a casket under the ground.
You brush your teeth. It’s a pretty normal routine, one you’ve done only slightly longer than taking medication. You’re tired. Despite getting a solid eight hours, you’re still mentally exhausted. Your body has recovered but your mind either hasn’t woken up or didn’t get enough rest. Maybe your racing thoughts kept going long after you fell asleep. Maybe your mind doesn’t stop. Maybe, just maybe, you are incomplete, broken, less-than, fragmented. Maybe you will never be normal. Maybe, despite all your attempts at leading a normal, adjusted life, you will never be completely normal by society’s standards. You realize and continue to tell yourself that you have to be okay with it. There will not be a cure for bipolar disorder in your lifetime. But a part of you still wishes you were whole, complete, neat, tidy. A part of you wishes you didn’t have to deal with all this. So you brush your teeth and soldier on. You don’t have much else of a choice, but you’ve learned to be okay with that.
Nate Livsey 