There's a block party on our street today. Little kids are screaming and throwing water balloons. Parents chit chat by a picnic table, beers in hand. My brother and I are inside the house catching up. A long time ago, we were those kids. A lot has changed since then.
I've been out of the house since 18, and just moved back to the US after living abroad on my own the last three years. My parents just split up. My dad's moved out, and Mom's painted the house a new color that my brother likes to call "aggressive plum." I'm in between jobs. So I'm moving back to my old room in the attic. It's the first time in a decade that I've been home without having a precise plan for how to leave again.
Rummaging through my old closet, we find a hidden crawl space I haven't been in since I was as small as the kids playing outside. I opened it up to take a look around. There's a tiny doll bed in the corner with paper towel sheets and a sock for a pillow. Shiny bracelets decorate the walls. It's a strange time capsule. The kid stuff isn't the only thing tucked away where the sun doesn't shine, though. Packed into the old cardboard grapefruit crates my grandparents used to send us at Christmas time, are stacks of old photographs and letters. My dad's graduation from college. My mom with a big pregnant belly in our old apartment in Boston. And letters, lots of them.
And you don't want to talk about family history.
Well, I mean, I could just talk a little bit about the family history, which is that on one side of our family in particular, there's some history of mental illness. There's some pretty benign mental problems. And then in one particular case, there's like a very... scary, unfortunate, dramatic, larger than life, explosive? There's a case in our family of someone with you know, some serious troubles not just eventually committing suicide themselves, but of committing murder.. on the path toward their ultimate death.
My brother is talking about our uncle Bobby. In the back of the crawl space, I find letters that our dad wrote to his incarcerated brother in the late 70s before he died. We always knew about Bobby, but he was gone before our parents even met. The letters make Dad's connection to him so much more real. Bobby was bipolar. And my brother is too. He points out that it's a disorder that carries tremendous stigma.
If you don't talk about it and acknowledge it, and treat it, it can really ruin lives.
Even though my uncle and brother share a diagnosis. Their stories are pretty different. Treatment options for bipolar patients have improved since the 70s. My brother has learned self discipline and responsibility early. He works as a mental health professional now, taking care of patients on a psych ward, and uses terms like "sleep hygiene" and "suicidality" in regular conversation. He feels compelled to support other people struggling with mental health problems, and sees his bipolarism as a big part of his identity. He's done hiding it in the dark.
Talk about it. Don't hide it under a bushel, right? Don't, don't pretend it isn't there as a as an attempt to get rid of it because it's not going to go away. Even to this day, if people are like, you know if you could press a button and magically get rid of your bipolar disorder, would you do it? And I probably would say no. I would stay the way I am.
(Brother playing "Cleopatra" by the Lumineers)
This piece was produced by Pendle Marshall-Hallmark as part of the 24-hour Radio Race from KCRW's Independent Producer Project.
...and now a nurse in white shoes, leads me back to my guest room. It's a bed and a bathroom and a place for the end...
