Well Bottom Blues

Yes. I misspelled it, but I wasn’t at my best eight years ago. Bi-polar disorder met the job that almost broke me, and the Risperdal began to kick in.

The pill saved me, and it erased me. I not only stopped writing, I stopped reading anything difficult. John Berryman and and Dylan Thomas might as well have been published in Sanskrit. It was the year I broke my June habit of Ulysses.

Is inspiration a category of madness that the medicine took that away, along with my capability for higher-order, associative language processing? Should poetry be in the DSM 5?

I also began to withdraw from society. When I couldn’t find a job after five months, I started driving Uber and Lyft full-time to get some cash flow. My weekends and evenings were fully booked with driving. Not time for friends, festivals, music, dinner out. Even my partner complained she was an Uber widow.

I’ve been on some sort of meds for 16 years, reading the inserts and attempting to adjust to many before I moved on. This probably helped when I started to consider who I had become on Risperdal. An old friend once said she felt like she was on an old school cell phone plan with me, from the days before unlimited call and text. I accidentally fell into the literature of Bi-Polar Disorder and creativity, beginning with Kay Redfield Jamison‘s excellent Touched With Fire.

I began to seriously consider titrating off Risperdal, as the outrageous behavior of a decade earlier had subsided. I had already titrated down to the lowest effective dose. I wanted to know if the parts of me eclipsed not by the illness but by the treatment could be recovered.

As evidenced here, and in my growing manuscript of new and some published poems, I was clearly right. I still haven’t recovered socially after COVID compounded my social disassociation, but I’m trying to get there. Life is a procession, not a place, and I’m back on the path again.