Real

Bipolar and the World are holding hands and holding me down. I’m drowning in their fierce psychosis and equally convincing reality. They strangle my senses by making me watch the news. I turn off my screens and their voices scream and screech at me to watch and listen as the World turns faster and faster and anger falls out.

I try to take my medication, but my refills are reluctant, and the white ridged caps are crazy-proofed. I drop my pills on the ground and they’re swallowed by a hungry earth. My sanity stripped away as the dirt grows bushes of anti-psychotics just out of reach. The few pills that linger in my mouth melt into nothing but residue on my broken brain. I walk outside and the World tells me she’s busy finding the perfect incisions for suicide. My Bipolar rattles in the sunshine.

Every morning we wake up to a new atrocity. Afternoons bring new violations. A predator every single night. I am haunted with days of doing nothing, immobilized by fear and disease, and my nights are wide-eyed nightmares that take over my mind. I am Bipolar and the World is insane but it’s hard to distinguish and treat the two. They fight and fuck and fracture and I don’t understand how to exist because I can’t determine who is right. Who do I idolize? Pay tribute to my Bipolar sickness or is the World my new warden? Trapped in a crazy brain. Shackled to a splintering planet. Which will kill me first?

I can’t wait to find out.

Dr. Rachel Kallem Whitman is an educator, advocate, and writer who has been shacking up with bipolar disorder since 2000. Rachel is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on unpacking ableism (disability oppression) and her speeches, interviews, and writings on the topic have garnered acclaim locally in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, across the United States, and internationally. Her debut book, “Instability in Six Colors,” paints a vivid picture of what it is like living with chronic mental illness, trauma, and a complicated relationship with sanity, safety, and suicide. Rachel’s mission and passion is to create a safe community to empower individuals to look beyond their illness to find themselves. You can buy this bipolar narrative through One Idea Press, a woman-owned independent press based out of Pittsburgh, PA, as a paper copy or ebook. For more of her work please be sure to check out Rachel’s website seebrightness.com and visit her Medium page.