My life can be divided into two parts: pre-2005, and post-2005. Or rather: three parts. Before the earthquake of 2005  swallowed my life like a sinkhole, the watershed was 1990, the year I hit bottom with alcohol and got sober.

When that happened, I knew I had reached rock bottom and would never rise again. I was humiliated to discover and uncover my alcohol habit, my method of coping with chronic depression, personal weakness (I believed) and broken dreams. It was my way of getting through the day.  And that's all I'm going to say about it.

The very short version is this: I went to AA, found a church and became (or  re-became) a Believer, learned to teach and preach and sing solos, took university courses and got straight A's (and even one A+), took up the violin again, lost weight, went to therapy. . .In retrospect, this sounds like a lot, and at one point my jealous bitch of a sister sent me a book called Meditations for Women who Do Too Much (and this after nagging me for years that I wasn't involved or fulfilled enough).  Eventually my life found a sort of keel, not an even one, but a keel, and I began to focus on writing a novel that someone else might be interested in reading.

I hate to say there is no short version of this.  All I can say is 1990 - 2005 was a pretty good, pretty long stretch of relative stability. I didn't drink and I stayed out of the hospital and I found good medical support. When everything erupted in 2005, everyone needed to know "what happened". What sort of stress was I under, what couldn't I deal with, what sort of fatal flaw or personal weakness lay in my core that led to this bizarre, unthinkable relapse?

If I'd had a liver or kidney disorder, I don't think anyone would have asked "What happened?" in that nearly-accusing way. No, this was my brain, and should be under my control, always. Well, didn't I do pretty well for 15 years? Didn't my dream of having a first novel published finally come true? What more did I want?

Or - maybe that's what she couldn't handle. Couldn't deal with the stress of finally attaining success. Oh, dear. Or maybe it's the menopause? Everyone had a pet theory, and all of them devastated me with their lack of insight or respect.

What really "happened" was that two stabilizing drugs I'd been on for more than ten years were both discontinued at the same time. I had no heads-up on this at all - my doctor simply didn't know. I found out by accident, on the internet. I am the kind of person who has to make drug changes very, very slowly: 1/8 of a tablet at a time, over many weeks. Suddenly, it was all gone: but hey, I felt so well that I decided to try flying on my own. I'd show the world that after decades of dependency, I could be "drug free".

And at first it felt so good, and I looked so good, that it was a pretty sure thing I had finally shed the shadow of depression that always seemed to hide around the corners of my life. I was 50, but suddenly I looked 35. It was eerie. People shook their heads, didn't even recognize me at first. I needed less and less sleep. A creative maelstrom was unleashed, and I wrote two full manuscripts in 11 weeks. My doctor cheered me on, saying she'd never seen me look better.

I don't know exactly when the free-fall came, but maybe it was when an untrained friend of mine hypnotized me to plant the suggestion that I could sleep more than three hours a night. I had a religious epiphany so shattering, so overwhelming that it felt like my brain was literally searing, cooking in its own juices inside my skull.

Well, that's enough of that, eh? Here I am in 2009, and you know what? I'm supposed to be all better by now. I'm on new drugs, all of them lethal and wrong (just so all you non-doctors out there won't have to bother posting stupid, ignorant comments about  them), and have an official bipolar diagnosis that I suppose shouldn't bother me as much as it does.

Didn't I already know I was bipolar on some level, hadn't I already been diagnosed and undiagnosed, diagnosed and undiagnosed for too many years? But the dizzying decades of runaround by the medical profession wasn't the worst of it. So many things that used to mean something to me fell away, important things that now seemed shabby and false, a sham.   I believed in just about everything, in fact, astrology, numerology, palmistry, the Resurrection of Christ. . . until it all mysteriously turned to sand in my fingers.

I used to believe in Big Daddy God, a God you could pray to and get what you want (for why else would anyone bother?), a God who looked after you personally with tender care. The real  God had casually dropped me on my head ("Oops! Did I lose something?"),  so that particular belief system completely crumbled. 

I'm officially all better, I'm writing a novel, I am capable of having good times, but there is a pain that won't shut up, a sort of muffled shriek of horror that may never go away.  I just read that article in today's Salon about Xanax dependency, and it mentioned the woman's friend having to go to "the mental hospital". Small word, that "the", but what does it represent? "The" is a generic term summoning macabre images out of movies like The Snake Pit. It's that visceral, knee-jerk, oh-my-God-this-is-the-worst reaction that most people have when they hear the term "mental illness", evoking the spectre of human beings spinning wildly out of control.

 And that's another thing. We don't say "diabetic illness" or "Parkinsonian illness", do we? This is the only illness in which you can't be well. It's not possible, so long as you keep calling it an illness. Hopelessness is built right in. You're stuck being "one of those people (poor souls)". Most people push the whole thing away, until they read some horrific story about a guy shooting up a shopping mall and read that he was "bipolar and off his medication". Oh. One of those.

My psychiatrist, a cheerful young gay man who dresses impeccably and reminds me of Pee Wee Herman, tells me that 25% of the population is on antidepressants, which means that attitudes must have shifted by now. Maybe. But the dreaded b-word triggered a deep sinking sensation in my gut that has not bottomed out yet. Maybe it won't. I'm writing again, which is supposed to be a good sign. In fact, I think it's my best work (but what do I know? I'm bipolar and on medication.)

But I am convinced no one in the publishing community will give me the time of day. I had to ditch the tour for my second novel in 2005 because I was just too sick to go. You can't go on a book tour when your equilibrium is shot, when you're not sleeping or eating, when you feel like you're hanging by your little finger from a violently swinging rope bridge that keeps flipping upside-down like a skipping rope.

People still sort of tiptoe around me, expecting me to break like a piece of cheap china dropped on the floor. I don't know what they really think of me. I don't know what I really think of me, but it's awfully hard for me to sustain much happiness or joy. I had everything, and I just sort of blew it, didn't I? Oh I know, I'm supposed to see this purely as a brain disorder triggered by the sudden, precipitous removal of sustaining medication. I'm supposed to see it as hereditary (and God knows there are lots of "those people" in my family tree). Oh, crap, it's my fault and I KNOW it, and that's why I feel like shit a lot of the time. That's why I feel like I do right now.

The Little Mary Sunshine that brutalizes me from time to time says,  "Oh, but look at all the people rendered homeless by the economy!" It could be so much worse. Yes, it could. A lot worse. I realize this, and it doesn't make the pain stop. Maybe I could blame my malaise on The Economy, as everything else is now. "Well, with the economy the way it is" (we can't really hope, we can't really dream, we can't really live). It affects the price of dog food and the state of my soul. Should I just give up and wear the label? Mentally ill, mentally ill, mentally ill.  But if I'm really this ill, how in fucking Christ's name can I ever be well?