Okay, I don't think of myself as actually mentally ill. It's a handy term to explain to total strangers why I don't necessarily always operate exactly the way everybody else does, but mostly, it's just an inconvenient quirk in how my brain works.
But before I found out what the heck was going on, it made me feel like screaming when I couldn't do at all something I did brilliantly last week, or when I went practically overnight from doing heavy landscaping 12 to 16 hours/day for months to being so tired I got weak and shaky from a trip to the mailbox.
Then one day, my sister told me that her psychologist told her that I was bipolar.
Turns out she was giving a family history and described my erratic energy swings. That's a roundabout way to find out why--for example--I could write seven novels (that's about 800,000 words) in six months and then be unable to finish more than two during the next ten years. And don't think that didn't make me frantic. And I look back now and realize the stuff I did manage to do during that period is as flat and dull as I felt at the time.
So anyway, I went to MY psychologist and told her what my sister's psychologist told HER, and my psychologist asked me a few questions and shrugged and said, "What the hell; let's try some drugs."
I know the popular feeling regarding prescription pharmaceuticals. I used to have the same opinion: "I don't need no stinkin' drugs; I'll do it by brute force with diet and exercise and meditation and obsessive-compulsive behavior!"
But eventually, you reach your thirties, and you just wear down, and you give in, and you realize, "I don't have to keep pushing this darn boulder up this hill only to get squashed when it rolls back down."
Science to the rescue!
So now I am a drug fiend! Well, not the kind of drugs you get from the really mellow guy with the Birkenstocks who lives in a yurt (although that's now legal in my state--the "herbs" not the yurt; the yurt was always legal), or the jittery guy in the next office but one in your building.
I like the ones you get from the doctor that lift up the downs, and smooth out the "explosion-in-a-fun-factory," and now I can WRITE again. Which means a lot when you live for writing (also for building fences out of twigs and spit, but I get to do that too).
I don't mean to encourage everyone to run out and load up on prescription psychotropics. Most people get along just fine on their caffeine and their alcohol and their nicotine. And some pot. Lots of people treat their bipolar disorder with pot. Call me crazy (ha ha), I like knowing my drugs are doctor supervised and FDA regulated. Plus I hate the smell of pot.
My point is that I feel a need to explain why there is such a long (heh heh) gap between my early novels and my latest (blush), which is actually a rewrite of one of those earlier novels that I mostly wrote while in a down-swing (Warning: do not read anything that is not shown here on this blog site!)
While none of these stories is about mental illness per se, many of them contain characters whose brains don't operate the way everybody else's do. The Lady Fred series (fluffy Regency romance) is the best example. Freddy can do all sorts of remarkable things like sightreading piano music better upside-down than right-side-up and thinking around corners, but she doesn't get the social niceties and is a butt of jokes among her social set.
In Strangers (science-fiction, ebook available, but temporarily unavailable in print, and why are you still reading in print anyway), three of the characters have neurological glitches that give them some intellectual advantages but handicap them in social situations. Their stories are about finding the place where their particular strengths fit and finding the people who aren't frightened or offended by their oddities.
I guess that's what I would wish for everybody with "interesting" brains--that we all find where we fit and the people who think we're fine pretty much the way we are--although possibly with meds.
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