Cue the Jimi Hendrix

I stop writing in March, around the time I can no longer get the idea out of my head that I want to crash my car into a tree. I wake up every morning with a horrible sense of dread that has no reason for being. I have a job I love that I’m really very good at; a beautiful home with an affordable mortgage; loving parents; caring friends; and… the pièce de résistance… the kind of boyfriend that women of a certain age (all of them) wish they had.

(If you’ve ever sat around with your best friend on a Thursday night listening to John Mayer or Jason Mraz drinking Pinot Grigio from World Market making unfortunate lists of your current lovers’ if-only’s, then you know. “If only he were more __________.” “It drives me crazy that he won’t _____________.” But Paul is more __________. He will more ___________. He fills in all of my blanks and puts exclamation points at the ends of my sentences.)

So why, why, WHY in the name of all that is holy would I want to drive my car into a tree?

This isn’t totally brand new. I’ve had an on and off, hot and cold dance with the blues my whole life, usually in winter, after days of rain or suffering through a cinematic misstep like “Million Dollar Baby.” Days on end of crying and staring out of windows wondering insipidly, “What’s it all mean, anyway?”

But those were days, and relatively few of them, followed immediately by intensely productive, joyful weeks and months in which mountains were scaled, degrees were earned, oceans were navigated.

And these days, these dull March days … they turn into weeks that turn into I Can’t Remember The Last Time I Laughed and I Seriously Want to Drive My Car Into a Tree. It’s not that I want to die. I just want to crash so hard into something that it jars me out of this pit of despair.

Instead I drive to a nurse practitioner named Tammy who says, “The best treatment is a combination of medication and psychotherapy” and I hold out my hand and say, “Lemme try the pills.” Because I’ve done the couch before, the Poor Pitiful Me and My Perfectly Average Middle Class Upbringing. I’ve tried, with at least six different shrinks over the past twenty-five years, to dig something abnormal out of my normal life, something to explain these bouts, these crying jags, these icky moods. There’s nothing to be dug. It's gotta be chemical.

Besides. I don’t want to start over with somebody new again. It’s too much like dating.

Tammy refers me to a therapist anyway, and when Dr. H’s secretary calls to schedule the appointment I am too depleted to say no. At our first session, Dr. H reveals he’s AD/HD and OCD and then he does me the solid of not asking for my life story. After he compulsively washes his hands and uses up all the paper towels in the bathroom, he asks me to describe what it feels like, when I’m in this mood.

When I finish recounting the total submersion into quicksand, the joysucking miserable gloom, the wet, gooey feel of I’m Never Going To Be Happy Again, he asks me, “What happens then? When you stop feeling that way? What do you feel like next?”

It only takes me a moment to recall. “I feel … relieved … and optimistic. Like, I'm ready to get back on the horse and ride forever. Like, I can see the sun coming up. And next time, I won’t slip into the bog. Next time, I’ll head it off at the pass...”

It occurs to me that all of my mood metaphors are from westerns. Quicksand and desert sunrises; heading depression, like a band of bloodthirsty Apaches, off at the pass.

Dr. H calls me bipolar, with a seasonal trigger, and I picture John Wayne loading a six-shooter with bullets the color of sleet.

I also remember my best friend in the 1980s Laurie’s boyfriend Dan, the amazingly talented artist/bipolar asshole who was easygoing but uninspired when he was on Lithium and wildly creative but terrifyingly destructive when he was not. We all lived in San Francisco back then, trying to be painters and poets, and Dan broke my TV set during one of his off-med rages and wound up institutionalized.

I look at my brand new shrink and tell him, “But I don’t want to be bipolar.”

He tells me it doesn’t matter what we call it, so in my head I think “Manic Depression” and see Jimi Hendrix lighting a guitar on fire. For some reason, this is preferable.

My new journey begins and I don’t write a word for at least five months, I think because now I’m on antidepressants and this is the infamous side effect, the reason all us whackjob schizos inevitably quit our meds, right? Stifles the creativity? But I don’t care about any of that because I like feeling even and peaceful and calm and at ease (besides, I have facebook now) and I dutifully go to therapy appointments and I never, ever cry anymore and I wouldn’t call it numb but damn, there’s nothing – I mean nothing – I care enough about to write down.

Meanwhile, my therapist tells me that “feelings are quicksand – never, ever, ever, ever trust your feelings” and “thoughts are chemical – you can change your chemistry by changing the way you think.” Dr. H is a total weirdo and sessions with him are like brainy intellectual discussions during which esoteric terms are bandied about and deep understandings are reached. We discuss present time sensory alignment and cued relaxation response. I think he hypnotizes me and plants brilliant, mood-disorder-conquering thoughts into my head but I have no proof, other than the so-totally-unlike-me way I’ve started handling stress and anxiety. He teaches me how to slowly examine each emotion, the way a cowboy handles his gun, turning it over in my hands, really testing its weight.

And so one day, inevitably, I too decide to wean off the meds, even though it’s such a cliché. Even though I remember what happened to Dan. Even though I kind of liked the feeling of having all the rough edges sanded off for a while. There are things I want to do, though, things I’ll write about later, things that require an unmedicated version of me. So now instead of pills I’ve got this mantra: There’s no future, there’s no past, there’s just this moment, right now. And I’ve got my beloved weirdo shrink. And he’s got Connecticut Fried Chicken, which is a mnemonic be-all end-all answer to my every emotional overreaction and which I’m well on my way to mastering and will have to explain at some later time because

Now I’ve got something to write about.