It was just like chasing the white rabbit, twisting and turning and tumbling down and down and down until I was sipping tea with the Mad-Hatter and entertaining nonsensical conversations with the Cheshire cat…
And here I am, not quite a real girl yet- 67 scars etched into my skin, a permanent souvenir of my latest adventure in Wonderland- new meds, old meds, new characters in the story, familiar players, and a girl who at the end the day is still very much like a bewildered, wilted, poor-man’s Alice- still chasing a phantom white rabbit and running from the Queen of Hearts lest it be “off, off with her head.”
I wanted to believe that losing my job at OFL was not as bad as it was- I wanted to look in the mirror and see hope in my eyes- I wanted to get up in the morning and chase after all those beautiful things that I love but I could not- And I did not. Instead, I fell down- deep into myself- deep into despair- deep into the nether worlds of bipolar depression. At first, I could fake it- a smile here, a laugh there, make sure to act ‘normal.’- I didn’t want to be the fucked up mess that I’ve been so many times before- when does it end- that’s all I wanted to know- when does Alice make her way back to the real world- when does Alice become a real girl again? When do I become a real girl again?
It was always a battle lost- In retrospect I do understand that. But the understanding of it does not take away the sting or dry the tears that I keep crying. And in the aftermath of these last 2 hospitalizations, I am no closer to the end of Wonderland than where I started from. I wish that I could honestly say that it doesn’t matter that I have bipolar disorder- but it does matter. And the older I get, the more years that pass, and the repetitive detours I take through Wonderland only reinforce the fact that it does matter and it always will because my life will never register on the normalcy scale- and it hurts more than I ever speak, more than I ever wanted to admit.
So the question of the hour- perhaps the white rabbit that this Alice is still chasing after is- how do I make peace with this world- with this Wonderland existence and all the trappings’ that come with it? How do I tell myself that it will be okay- how do I begin to really believe that?- Because the curious world of Wonderland is full of paradoxes, stigmas, bitter endings, and broken dreams; This Alice knows that all too well and it is the worst pill of all to swallow-
………
