I am losing it. Everything that I have is about to be taken away from me. For the first time in my life I am really powerless. I am having problems at work. I cannot think anymore. I cannot do my job. I cannot compartmentalize, work, and home anymore. It’s like my life is a house of cards. It’s about to come crashing down. I am going to lose everything. I’m scared.

I look at other people in my online support group. They have spouses who help them. I have a network of friends. Heck, if truth be told, I might as well come clean about these essays. Sophy isn’t my real name. It was supposed to be my name, but at the last minute my mother changed it to the name I have. I didn’t want to embarrass my family or put my job in jeopardy by these writings.

Now the point is moot, anyway. It looks like my brain is turning against itself, the gray matter leaving. Perhaps going south for the summer to warmer climes, only never to return. I feel alone and lonely. Is this the way recovery is supposed to be?

I was once an intelligent person. I have a college degree, and a graduate degree. I was asked to join Mensa, but didn’t think I was smart enough to join. Turns out I passed the test to join, but didn’t. I don’t know why, maybe I didn’t feel I was good enough.

I know I have suffered from low self esteem all my life. I never felt I was good enough for anything. I always felt like a fraud when good things happened to me. So maybe the masochist in me should be enjoying the fact that my brain doesn’t seem to be working anymore. And if I lose my job….

I lose my apartment, and my way of life. I’ve been homeless before. I know if I lose my job I have two choices. I can do what I once did before, wait on tables, schlep drinks or work at a McDonald’s. Work retail. I don’t mind working. I honestly don’t. Or I can go on disability. And if I do that, the money barely covers things. I lose my car. OK, so I take public transportation. It’s not so bad.

I’m upset. I didn’t ask for this. Yet when I found out about my birth mother, I found out that everyone in the family either was bipolar, schizophrenic, or a combination of both. I didn’t escape the genes. I just always thought I could keep it pretty much under wraps - and try to live a "normal" life. I should have realized that "normal" is only a setting on the washing machine.

I don’t like the fact I cannot recall things. I get stressed and I cannot talk. People confuse me. I can’t handle crowds anymore. I can’t handle being around people anymore. Even my friends overwhelm me if I am with more than two or three people at a time.

I use to be the life of the party. I was the class clown. Now look at me.

My father tells me I’ve let myself go. Maybe I have. Sure, I could lose some weight, who couldn’t? Maybe that’s all I need to do in his eyes to feel better, lose 25 lbs, go to the gym again, lighten my hair and bleach my teeth. In my grandfather’s day they told women to go out and buy hats. Now what do they do? Women stopped wearing hats a generation or two ago.

Oh yeah, the Queen of England still wears hats. But who else? Didn’t hats go out with tail fins on cars?

All I know is I am losing it. I don’t feel anything. I should feel anger, but I don’t. I don’t feel resignation though. I feel nothing. Hollow. Empty, devoid of any feelings. It’s like I am watching my own funeral, but I cannot feel anything. I don’t feel it’s normal. And if I cannot work, I am going into a home.

I don’t feel suicidal though - not now. I just don’t feel. Is this what being dead is like? No feelings, just numbness?

I don’t want to leave the human race yet. I want to stay productive. My prayers aren’t being answered. I sit at work, and look at the computer, and cannot remember how to do my job. It’s not knowing how to do it - but I used to know how to do it.

The other night I was driving home and I drove past my apartment. I never did that. I forgot where I lived. I didn’t realize my error till about ten miles later. This isn’t like me. I have been driving home on the same road for the last six years. I can drive to and from work in my sleep. Yet I forgot.

I feel like my brain is turning on itself, eating itself alive, like a female praying mantis does when it mates. I’m scared.

I keep thinking of my grandfather. He was in his late 90s when he died. When he was in his late 80s my mother and father and aunt and uncle put him in a nursing home. He had Alzheimer’s. I remember the nursing home, one of the best ones in New Jersey at the time. How happy mom and dad were to get him in there. I was in high school. We visited him every weekend, rain or shine. Some days he didn’t know me. Some days he thought I was the first Sophie, his wife, the woman I was named after. She died before I was born, and I guess in my grandfather’s eyes I resembled his beloved wife, my grandmother. I can still smell the nursing home in my memory, it smelled of Lysol, sweat, and tears. At the time I thought it was like living in a hotel, grandpa had his own room and took communal meals. He had his own shower. But the furniture was nursing home issue; it reminded me of my dorm room furniture, only with a hospital bed. We brought him a meal, flowers, cookies. When I was in college I visited him once a week on my own, between classes. I remember that’s what I did each semester when I had a four or five hour gap between courses.

What stays with me are his eyes. Empty dead eyes. The nursing home did that. Every other resident had the same stare. Empty, dead. Like the only thing they did was wait for God to send them home. Grandchildren, great grandchildren were cherished. But when they left at the end of the day, leaving only a memory and a photograph that someone was fortunate enough to get, the dying began again. TS Eliot wrote about measuring your life with coffee spoons. Here your life was measured by days on a calendar, only instead of marking the days till Christmas like an Advent calendar; it was like a giant advent calendar of death. Don’t fear the Reaper.

Is this to be my life soon? When I can no longer work, to be shuffled off to some home with my books and my crocheted afghan to serve as a bedspread? To measure each day as one more closer to my death, instead of one more day that I was grateful to be alive?

Or is it that you die once you go in a place like that, your soul and your spirit, leaves and you do the opposite of a physical death, instead of waiting for your body to return to dust, you wait for your body to stop breathing.

Was it a curse on my forehead, from the time I was born that made me who I am? The sins of our parents- when I was born, was it determined by the Greek gods that this is how my life would end, and I just exist while I wait for Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos to cut my thread?

The weird thing is if I had a choice up to now, to be normal, or to have bipolar - I would pick bipolar. I’ve seen remarkable things and done remarkable things when manic. I’ve done some beautiful writing when I was depressed. By contemplating suicide I could appreciate existentialism. True, I have been alone, gone to bed alone nights wishing there was someone I could hold on to, to hold me, or to make love to me. But I have had the gift of writing. I love to read and write. Would I have been as creative if I wasn’t bipolar? I don’t know. I don’t think so. What the Greek gods give they also destroy. They gave me bipolar so I can create, I know this. I have to suffer. Don’t I?

I’ve loved writing these articles. I hope I can continue to write, to work, to be Sophy. To look at the stars through my telescope and smell the roses I planted outside my front door. To never lose that sense of wonderment that adults eventually do, but children keep.

To be alive. To have my eyes reflect back at me and be alive. To breathe the air and be grateful for the small stuff.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

I don’t know how my life will end. Someday it will end. I just hope my brain chooses to fall softly on itself, slowly, ever so slowly, and give me another good thirty years of just being me.

That would be a blessing. Maybe this prayer – will be answered

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July 10, 2003