Gathering on some
Far off horizon
In the evening
After humid days
Rain laden clouds
Plump with tears
Billow and spawn
Bringing angry downpours
Of unfettered emotion
Standing here alone
Wondering if this
Is a bellwether
Of something else
Turning myself skyward
Accepting my doom
Soaked and dismayed
Like prairie flowers
Shaking off all
Torrents and deluge
To bloom again
A bit weathered
Like barn wood
Sturdy and strong
We’re all as delicate as a porcelain tea cup.
About six weeks ago I called 9-1-1 and told the operator that I was manic and was experiencing SI/HI (suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation). They sent a handful of policemen that then escorted me from my hotel and into a police cruiser.
Before I knew it, the police cruiser was heading north to a town called Davidson. It was there in Davidson that I was interred in a psychiatric hospital for fifteen days.
The reason I was manic with SI/HI was because I have Bipolar II disorder. But more importantly, I was unmedicated: I turned my back on Depakote and Abilify and Gabapentin. Instead I flew to Paris where I met Jean-Baptiste. He also knew I was manic.
It was in Paris that I started to self-medicate with beer, whisky, and men’s affections. When I left Paris I brought my self-medication across the Atlantic and into Charlotte.
I have a high tolerance for liquor so I was able to consume a relatively large quantity of whisky. Not on a daily basis mind you, but when I was lacking the affections of men. I’m not an alcoholic, but I am abusive; I am an abuser of alcohol; I drink to excess.
But upon discharge I had my medications straight; I’d dried out (and stayed sober); I’d understood that patience is a conscious pursuit.
Fifteen days in a psychiatric hospital might seem to some as a mark of weakness. But I can assure you it is not. It is a sign of strength; of humility; of character; and fortitude.
I am now a medicated and sober man that has Bipolar II disorder. I am stronger and wiser and calmer. I have been blessed with patience. I have found great friends in both Robyn and Mike.
I think that our weakness is often the gateway to our strength.
The adage goes: Distance makes the heart grow fonder.
But distance also provides a deep sense of clarity.
The past three months have been, in a word, tortuous. Three months ago I gained a 
profound depth of clarity as well as humility. Over the course of six years, I’d been prescribed by doctors copious amounts of amphetamines, opiates, and benzos. When I mean copious, I’m not kidding. 6 kilograms of amphetamines, 3 kilograms of opiates. I should have died from these lethal doses, but I muddled through unscathed. No damage to my brain, but my metaphorical heart was crushed. I’d become a monster. I was drooling on my self, lost interest in others, and ruined my 30-year relationship.
I went cold turkey to purge myself of these toxins which wasn’t painful, but terribly discomforting. I don’t have an addictive personality, but I was dependent. When I 
meditated the voice of wisdom told me to rid myself of these toxins. Without their removal, I wouldn’t gain clarity. And without clarity, I wouldn’t ever understand humility.
There are six fundamentals of the human condition: Life, Peace, 
Humility, Clarity, Courage, and Truth. These words have been carefully selected so as to avoid any misinterpretation. The human condition cannot achieve one without the others. For instance, we cannot gain clarity without truth and courage; we can’t gain humility without life and peace. But as humans, we tend to avoid these tenets. We lie, we cheat, we distrust, we have arrogance.
I have been blessed to receive them all. I have seen and felt them missing. I have lied. I have fostered mistrust. I have pretended to be humble but acted out of arrogance.
Whenever we deny ourselves the full embrace of these tenets, we deny our own existence. We deny ourselves our own humanity. Are these tenets difficult to accept? Yes. But once we surrender ourselves to these fundamental expressions of our humanity, the world, in its divine expression, provides for us the very fabric of Life.
And Life is the greatest gift of all.
This morning I gained profound clarity. I understood that Artem and I will never be together. That I had wholly manufactured our relationship because I had experienced a hope which was so pervasive and desperate that I was willing to forgo sanity. I had been
incarcerated for two months as a severe manic. I’d been entombed in some of the most sadistic and disgusting psyche wards in Chicago. 4 psyche wards in 14 days. Some offered a bolted down cot, with no pillow, and a sheet which was tied down so I couldn’t strangle myself. I’d been locked away in some nursing homes which prevented me from wandering outside wrought iron fences. My former partner took out a restraining order against me after I’d tried to strangle him in an ER. I had no home, no address, nowhere to run from these oppressive places, so I turned to my imagination to escape.
It was in the bowels of my imagination that I found Artem. I yearned for any escape. Any 
thing which even smacked of normalcy. So I developed a relationship with Artem that I thought was real. I was so desperate that I didn’t know what else to do. I asked my Parisian over breakfast this morning, “Haven’t you been so desperate to free yourself from the bonds of personal anguish, that you’d believe in anything which provided the most ridiculous shred of hope?”
But it wasn’t until last night did Wisdom bestow upon me clarity.
My Parisian is flesh and blood. When he first embraced me, I felt the knobs of his spine, I 
languidly stroked his chest hair, I allowed my fingers to trail down his belly to his button, I let my eyes wander through his eyes and I saw my own attractiveness there; I touched his arousal as though it were molten iron; I kissed his tender lips, letting our tongues dance with each other as though they’d known each other for lifetimes.
And it was there, in flesh and bone, that I’d discovered the stark difference between fantasy and reality. The dreams of Artem were simply a way for me to maintain sanity. It’s my Parisian that allowed me to feel my future, my reality.
So I’ve learned over the course of the past few days that I’m not interested in hope, but am fully vested in reality. Whatever doesn’t happen with Artem doesn’t happen. Artem is paying dearly for crimes he committed in South Africa years ago: Tax evasion, fraud, and criminal intent. I simply can’t help him.
Ah, but the Parisian? In him, I have found myself, and in his eyes I see myself. In all my true colors and wrinkles; in my Parisian, I have learned to fall in love with myself.
Why are we ashamed by what we do? We do what we choose to do because we stand to gain something. Yes, some people are forced, say at gun point, to compromise; some are coerced through drugs and alcohol; and yes, some actions are purely altruistic (ashamed of philanthropy?). It’s my opinion that consciously withholding or denying or lying about our actions is caused by fear. Not a generic fear, but a two-tier fear. The first tier-fear: judgement by others is beyond your control; but the second tier-fear: consequence sits squarely in your lap, and which, by the way, you’d already equated as a potential cost of your unprecedented action. We all know this simple truth: We have absolutely no control over the actions of others. That said, we can remove the first tier-fear: judgement by others; we now find ourselves staring down the steely barrel of culpability: we encountered a situation, measured consequence against benefit, and toed the line or stepped across it. So shame and regret were considered well before we pandered to our hunger, thirst, or warm body (emphasis on warm).
The best possible precursor to a mental illness diagnosis was, until 1973 its own mental illness: homosexuality. Coming out as a gay man taught me the valuable lesson that there will be people who can’t distinguish between my sexual orientation (which places me in a specific group) and who I am (in general terms) as a fellow human being. Having learned that lesson years ago I was well prepared to face similar discrimination 
based upon my mental orientation, i.e. mental illness, e.g. bipolar disorder. And yet, what is there to be ashamed and regretful about? Don’t carry the burden of Shame or wear the shackles of Regret; never apologize to anyone irritated by what you have, especially if what you have is a medically recognized disease.
Recently I conducted a thoroughly non-scientific giddy-up poll which asked: What diseases do you think you’d be ashamed to admit having?
Answers? Anal warts, vaginal herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea. . .what? Anal warts? Venereal diseases? According to our non-scientific poll of middle-aged men and women, they said that carrying a sexually transmitted disease is the only other human affliction besides mental illness that they would be ashamed of having and which also carries with it a damning social stigma. STD’s are the result of risky and unsafe sexual activities engaged in by choice. Does mental illness really belong in their company? Really?
Shame and Regret are burdens that those who choose to remain ignorant and judgmental should shoulder.
Not me. Not you. And certainly not the neighbor, best friend, Richard Dreyfuss 
parishioner, bowling buddy, Ryan Phillippe, 
prom date, recipient of the first kiss, Girl Scout, Teddy Roosevelt (yes, really), Girl Scout Leader, Sinéad O’Conner, full back, Metta World Peace ,
offensive line coach, movie star, Burgess Meredith, Opera Star, Ronald Braunstein, famous orchestra conductor, infamous commuter train conductor or any one of the other 25% of our world’s population. How about the other 75% of the world’s population loosen the reins of their prejudice.
My brother got my dad’s physique; I got his mental illness.
Once I assumed the role of cook a couple of years ago, I planned my menu so that every other day I’d prepare a new meal. The only cookbook I owned was a 1960’s copy of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. This cookbook was my mother’s, and if you saw it, you’d think Betty Crocker herself passed it along to my mother. It was a solid first-step for me, my hesitation quieted by my mother’s obvious use of the cookbook, evidenced by the incredible number of batter-splattered pages; missing pages; half-pages; and an index at the rear which resembled the color palette of Crayola’s 64-Color box of crayons. There were highlighted recipes; notations at the margins; and just a few, but oddly significant in an extreme way, an ad infinitum decree by way of thick, heavy lines, one or two eliminated altogether by a formidable, dense marker, applied as determined and repeated coats, forbidding any chance that these recipes might appear on our kitchen table.
My father was already a train wreck when my brain began recording his presence. Failing at life (mainly due to his undiagnosed mental illness, bipolar), his appearance was infrequent: his social mask was one of humor: albeit acidic sarcasm and shearing, pointed wit composed in the key of tease and enacted before an unending column of untried yet promising second-shift ladies. His role as a bullying, boorish big shot, whose sole domestic purpose was to reprise the 1963 verbal variety of water boarding. His peacocking drove us closer and closer to suffocation, as though with each matinée he pressed another thick pillow of despair onto our faces and then, just when our desperation went quiet and we felt that first, foamy wave of disappearance, back we’d go into his second act and the shrill, ingenuous cackle of his subordinate’s callow laughter warned us that he was gaining adoration. And the louder the laughter, the more lewd, raunchy, and viscous his anecdotes became, and our mention increased proportionally until, by the end, the three of us, his family, descended well past indecency, a good way beyond degenerate, and somewhere between contemptible and worthless.
And as the ladies stood and he, broadcasting his manners, helped them with their coats, those ladies whose saturating attention fueled my father’s mania sending him further and further afield, looked at the three of us, fodder of my father’s insanity, and delicately lifted the corners of their mouths in an effort to produce a symbol of empathy that my father couldn’t decode.
But what those lips produced was that sneer tossed at has been’s, could’ve beens, once was’s, and children who repeatedly witness their father falling apart.
HARLAN DIDRICKSON 