Blogging at 37,838 Feet, 453 MPH

Reruns, re-thoughts, rethinking, reminders.

I am going home. I think my liver is going to explode. I am sure that my gall bladder is encouraging this in an attempt to free up some room for itself. My rib cage seems to have squeezed itself into an invisible corset and my entire torso is being crushed.

Maybe not. This is the next phase of shingles, part of the postherpetic neuralgia, which, in my case is causing referred pain. That means that the source of my pain and the place where the pain is ultimately felt are not the same. In this case, they are not even on the same side of the body. My affected nerves are in the back, but all of the pain has amalgamated in the front. I feel like I am dying, but Valtrex, Vicodin, Advil, and topical treatments have done their best to make sure I make it through this horror.

I can’t sit still and it must be annoying as hell for the people sitting close to me on the plane. There is no way to apologize, and how could I possibly explain what’s happening anyway?

I visited with my friend Laurel while I was in New York. She might be reading this, although I don’t share my blog information with people I actually know. Considering the clues I gave her about tracking things down in Blogger, Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs would have worked like GPS had they contained similar directional insight.

It was good to see Laurel. I always enjoy watching her tell a story. She talks with her hands, but it's like ballet. She has the most delicate and graceful hands I've ever seen. Unlike me, she actually maintains relationships instead of decisively abandoning whatever no longer fits. As a result, I still get updates on college friends and sorority sisters who would otherwise be vague images in my memory’s crackling 8mm loop by now.

Laurel and her husband wrote a book and you should buy it. Sleuth around a bit in my profile and you’ll figure it out. I actually am not lying when I tell you I know interesting people.

Part II

Being in New York was like being blasted in the face by every major life decision I made between the ages of 18 and, well, now. I realized how different my life would have been had I stayed back East. I wondered what my career would have come to when my illness smacked me so hard I fell and never thought I would be able to get up again. I work in a fairly tolerant environment, and that is largely the reason I am still working today. I cannot say that the outcome of my brain explosion would have been so positive in other career circumstances.

All week, people asked me, “Do you miss it?” Miss what? The East Coast? The New York area? A job that paid well and demanded that I be a damned bright overachiever every single day? Do I miss the pace? It’s not a straightforward answer. While paying for a shirt in the NBC store, the cashier asked me if I like living out West. I thought for a second and said, “Well, when I’m there. But then I come here…” My voice trailed off and the young woman nodded and said she un-dah-stood what I was sayin’.

I had to think about this whole issue of my choices, career changing, and—always—Bipolar Disorder. I have a job that is comfortably dead-end in its direction. There is safety in this, just as there is safety in knowing that my particular position is so ungodly demanding that nobody else has any desire to try on my shoes, let alone maneuver to fill them.

That being said, I turned down a promotion recently. My boss was recently promoted. She is quick to tell people that she got to where she is because I mentored her and taught her everything she needed to know about professional competence and advancement. It’s a big, big jump and she was hesitant to take the job unless she knew she could hand off much of her current work to someone who not only wouldn’t fuck it up, but would nurture our mission with true love.

She said I was not only qualified, but the most obvious choice for many reasons. I told her I would think about it. When I eventually told her that I had decided against the promotion, she said, “You don’t have to tell me why, but I’d certainly like to know what you’re thinking.”

I told her it was strictly due to health reasons (ah, what a euphemism). She said, “But I thought this would give you more flexibility so you could adjust your time and workload if you needed to.”

But having that option was not my point. The point was to not get into that situation in the first place. I cannot risk the stress, I cannot risk the responsibility, and I cannot risk the pressure of knowing I have no room to Be Bipolar. What would I do? What if my medication stopped working—an inevitability for all people who take mood stabilizers. What would happen if I took a rapid slide into irrational, paranoid, hostile, weeping, fast-talking, sleep-deprived hypomanic rapid cycles and people were actually depending on me to steer our department through always-choppy waters? What would I do? How would I explain? How do you make people focus on the painfully stigmatized illness and not the behavior? You can’t. I can’t.

I like my job. I find value in the work. It is not glamorous. It is challenging every day, without exception. I do it well, even now after a major brain breakdown that almost killed me.
Everything takes me longer. Every frustration has to be tempered with compassion for myself and the reminder that I will never think as quickly, work as efficiently, or shrug things off at the end of the day the way I did prior to, say, 2001. The last two episodes of jarring BP cycling very likely caused permanent changes to the way neurotransmitter traffic flows through my brain, as well as to the processes inherent to the hippocampus and frontal lobe. This is not May as she once was, although she fakes it pretty damned well.

My trip gave me occasion to look at my life and my choices. It gave me the time to talk to myself about acceptance. I need to remember why I chose the way I did, and why my choices were right for me. I need to reassure myself that my responsibility is to live by thoughts rooted in self-awareness (even when I don’t like what I know to be true), and not by thoughts fueled by hubris.

Humility, not humiliation.