Abigail - Bipolar II: Living in Real Time.
We’ve all seen the ad. Everything is in slow-motion. The woman in a drab smock sitting in the pottery studio, clay dry and wheel still. The woman gazing blankly outside, a window perfectly framing her seemingly perfect husband and perfect child. The woman, still in the smock, now simply staring off into space, some of her hair having escaped her ponytail giving her the carefully calibrated look of a woman on the edge but not too far gone. A woman who could be you, could be anyone, but is definitely an anyone who needs help. After all, this is an ad for psychiatric medication, and that flyaway piece of hair has to be here, if only so that it can be put carefully back in place by the end, so that the anyone who could be you can feel fulfilled and whole and not drab and ill and stuck in a smock with flyaway hair. The woman stands up, her movement synchronized with a ray of sun angling through the wind and a narrator giving a name to the drug this ad is for and the disorder it is meant to cure - I mean, to treat. The woman walks outside, receives a hug from the child and smiles at her husband, apparently oblivious to the narrator’s list of side effects; maybe if he rattles them off fast enough, no one, least of all the woman, will notice. The woman’s image dissolves with a sweep of the camera towards the sun, the bright light serving as the background for the medication’s name, printed in loopy purple font with the ubiquitous trademark TM symbol hovering below the right-hand corner. The commercial ends with the image of the family as they walk down a sub-dappled and perfectly-groomed nature path. Their backs are to us, so we cannot tell if the woman is smiling, but her hair is finally smooth and tucked into her ponytail as it swings perkily, if not jauntily, in time with her slow-motion steps.
I love to hate this commercial - I mean, these commercials, since they’re essentially all one continuous loop of slow-motion psychiatric medications curing - I mean, treating - people. There are certain inescapable tropes about this - I mean, these - ads. There is the patient. She is always a woman, always heterosexually partnered, never childless, with one strand of hair carefully removed from her ponytail. (Her hair is always in a ponytail.) There is the narrator. He is always a man with a warm voice and the ability to speed talk without sounding like he’s running from something. Like a rhino. Or complexity. Or the truth. And there are the dichotomies: light vs. dark, indoor vs. outdoor, monochrome vs. colorful, still vs. moving, dim vs. bright, alone vs. together, before vs. after. Illness vs. health.
And there it is. Illness vs. health. I love to hate these commercials. That’s my dichotomy - love vs. hate - but there’s nothing “di” about it. It, and I, and the truth, are far more complex than that. I’m alive because of my medication. I know that as much as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow and that Donald Trump doesn’t really want to be president. I’m not dying because I take medication, but that’s not why I am healthy, and that doesn’t mean that I’m not ill. I love it and I hate it. I have a mental illness and I have my health. I am a before and an after because I am a now. None of these are mutually exclusive. It’s taken me the journey of my entire adult life to realize that illness can be simultaneous with health, that I’m not required to run from it like I would a rhino. Because complexity is ok. And I can accept the truth. And the truth is that this health is work, and that this work is worth it.
I have light and dark days. 5 months spent on a locked psych ward meant a lot of indoor days, but that didn’t keep me from teaching my fellow patients how to sled on cafeteria trays when the blizzard hit the wild outdoors of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mental hospitals are known for being monochromatic, but the beige didn’t drown out the beauty of our colorful self-portraits in art therapy group. Starving myself almost to death resulted in forced stillness - being confined to a wheelchair, for example - but the fact that I’m moving on my own now doesn’t negate that I still need stillness sometimes to recalibrate and just breathe. I could see myself in the mirror through both dim and bright light then, and I can still now, too. Anorexia is incredibly lonely, but I have never felt more bonded together than when I was in the hospital with that community of strong-as-steel women. Even these are not mutually exclusive; I know now how one can feel alone in a room full of people or very together while the only one around. And I can enjoy all of it in this life, even if not all of my life is enjoyable.
There is not before or after, just the journey. I have a mental illness, and I have my health. I have now. I have this life, and none of it is in slow motion. This is real time.
Abigail
