Talking To An Old Friend For the First Time

If you saw me waiting at a crosswalk, you'd have no idea what the last stretch of my life has held, or what I'm still carrying. The truth is that it has been the kind of experience that pushed me, and a lot of people I've met during treatment, to relearn how to live from scratch. The social part has been the hardest. I'm scared of what people who once knew me now think, partly because of the things I posted on Facebook when I was at my sickest, and partly because of the diagnosis itself. I never know who has said what to whom about me and about bipolar.

Today I was out buying groceries with my sister when my friend Liz called. We hadn't spoken in nearly two years. She's lovely, warm, always in my corner, and still I froze. I couldn't manage a simple 'How's medical school?' or 'How's your mom doing?' The only thing I could get out was something about what kind of bread I was hunting for in the aisle. The whole time I was talking to her, I was quietly tearing into myself, aware that I sounded absurd.

We can feel absurd and still be doing the only thing available to us. What settled on me tonight is that you don't get to walk before you've crawled and fallen over a thousand times. None of us skips ahead. You can't become an adult on your own schedule when the rule is that you have to be fifteen and a half before anyone hands you a driver's license. As kids we all wanted to be older, and the blunt reality is that it takes patience. You wait. That's the same thing that's required when you're figuring out how to rejoin the world.

There will be clumsy conversations. They have to happen before family and friends start to feel ordinary again, and when they go badly, the job is to let them go badly and keep going. I know acceptance reads easy on a pamphlet or in some tidy phrase you hear during the day. Actually accepting it, and talking yourself into the fact that your own thoughts are the thing doing damage, and that for the most part you are the only person who can redirect them, is a different and much harder thing.

Advice doesn't land for everyone, and sometimes it's just noise. But paying attention to what runs through our own heads is about the best any of us can manage. - Susan Page