In Very Good Company

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I think to myself how happy I am that my mother isn’t sitting next to me as a co-author.  If she were, she would insist that I mention what a spunky, independent, smart alecky, and determined child I was and how crazy I drove her and my father.  Nevertheless, she is a mother, so she would also throw in a few subtle praises—just enough to let you know that despite how much I exhausted her, she loves me and is very proud of me. 

From what my mother tells me, I’ve always had an I-can-do-it-by-myself and you’re-not-the-boss-of-me attitude.  If she told me to take a nap, I would get up and down from my bed, sing, go potty, read, get a drink of water, and do anything else except sleep.  However, if she told me, “Angela, I want you to go lie down and rest, but I do not want you to go to sleep.  Do you understand me? ” I would be unconscious before my head hit the pillow.  Common scare tactics also didn’t work on me.  I didn’t care if she told Santa I wasn’t behaving.  I knew I was a good kid, and if Santa couldn’t see that, then I didn’t need his stinkin’ presents.  And, I questioned everything.

As a kid, I also learned how to disarm my mother when she was angry with me, or at least diffuse her anger.  My weapon?  Humor.  I learned early on that humor can help you through many of life’s difficult situations.  Think about it, it’s really hard to be angry with people and yell at them if you’re laughing.  It’s even difficult to be angry when you’re smiling.  It’s also really tough to dislike people who make us laugh.  Don’t believe me?  Try it sometime.  Other people learned how to fight with their fists, I learned how to disarm with humor—it made punishments much less severe. 

My Childhood took its natural course and led me to adolescence, which was, as it is for many people, a tumultuous time.  My mother still says she is convinced I was possessed by demons during those years.  And, adolescence eventually led into young adulthood, where I became as my mother says, “human”—at least most of the time, she notes. 

The truth is she was right about something.  What I fought vehemently to keep from everyone was that not only was I possessed by demons, but they never left.  Sometimes they behaved better than other times, and sometimes they even went into hibernation, but they were always with me.

Throughout my adulthood, life delivered its ups and downs to me.  That’s the nature of life, right?  I felt that life must have liked me a lot, because it dealt me more ups than downs.  It wasn’t until I was 40 and sought help for depression that I was told that my ups weren’t part of any fortune, but instead they were part of a silent disability—my demons.  “Angela, normal people need more than one to three hours of sleep each night,” my doctor said.  “Angela, slow down,” she told me as I quickly bounced my leg and talked with the speed of a seasoned auctioneer.  “Depressed people don’t have the energy that you have.  It’s often difficult for them to even find the will to get out of bed.”

“Well if I’m not depressed, then what’s my problem?”

“We (she had another doctor working with her) think you have a mood disorder.”

“I know."  No shit, I thought to myself.  "That’s why I’m here.  I’m depressed.”

“No, we think you have bipolar disorder.”

“Oh.”  I replied nonchalantly, while I cursed her silently.  She didn’t know what she was talking about.  I was not crazy.  I earned my bachelor’s in psychology; I knew plenty of manic-depressives, and I certainly was not one of them.  I was angry with my doctors.  They didn’t know what they were talking about, and I was determined to prove them wrong.

I started to read everything I could find about bipolar disorder.  I had a basic understanding of it from when I studied it in school, but unlike when I was in school and learned about the disorder from a clinical perspective, I read stories written by people who were living with the disorder.  In many of the books I read, one book seemed to be referenced more than any other: Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s, “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness.”  I decided to read her book so I could finally prove that I was not crazy.  After reading less than five pages, I was sobbing when I realized I had violently thrown the book: I was reading the story of my life.  It was as if Kay Jamison had lived it with me—the good times and the bad.

It took about a week for my shock to dissipate, but once it did, I felt a sense of relief.  Suddenly my life of ups and downs made sense.  I also went back and read years of my personal journals.  In reading my own writing, which dated back to when I was 10 years old when I received my first diary, I could clearly see that the disorder was always there, and at times, I knew something was wrong, even if I had no idea what to call it, although I had sometimes referred to it as madness. 

I’ve always had a fighter’s spirit, refusing to let myself be defeated.  Bipolar disorder was going to have its hands full with me, just as my parents did.  I refused to let it be the boss of me.  I had no fear of my demons, but I did have some fear.  I was terrified that with this label, people would think I was different, and not in a quirky way.  It wasn’t the fear of being ostracized for being “crazy” that scared me.  I mean if I didn’t care what Santa thought of me when I was a child, do you really think I would care what anyone else thought of me?  No, my fear was that the people who knew me and loved me would suddenly think that I was incapable of taking care of myself, that I would lose my independence.  That’s what scared me.  I didn’t want to be treated any differently than I had been or than they would treat anyone else.  Different can be good.  We are a world of very different people, and that’s what makes life so exciting and beautiful, but treating people differently because they are different is not good.

When I began treatment for my disorder, the first thing I did was tell everyone close to me.  Why?  It’s harder to hide in plain sight.  Not only that, if I suddenly started needing less and less sleep, or I began spontaneously calling people at 2 a.m., my brain was probably driving the wrong way on a one-way street.  If I came up with some of the cockamamie ideas I was famous for—like my plans to rid the world of all its ills, live out of the trunk of my car, and “home school” my kid from the road, then those close to me would know it was time for a road block—whether I liked it or not. 

In the beginning, some of my friends and family members tried to be sensitive to my illness, and I appreciated their respect.  They were very careful how they treated me or how they referred to my illness.  But, I’ve always felt that life really isn’t that serious; it goes on with or without us, so why make it more difficult than it has to be?  I told them, not to walk on eggshells around me.  I explained, “you’ve been calling me crazy my whole life, and I have even called myself crazy (although we usually meant it more as quirky than mentally disabled), there’s no reason to stop now that I have the pedigree papers to prove it.”  Some people may not take it so lightly, and I respect that.  Everyone has his or her own attitudes and experiences, and I want to honor that, especially since I know firsthand the torture that bipolar can inflict.  I also know that it is very much a silent disability, because many people who knew me said that they never would have suspected that I had such a disorder.  I was good at hiding my misery when I was depressed, and my brain tended to spend most of its time traveling in the hypomanic lane.  I know that many of those “disbelievers” meant well.  They wanted to be supportive, but sometimes in denying my disability, I felt they were trivializing my challenges. 

My personal choice is that I don’t like the word disabled.  Although bipolar is a disability because has the potential of disabling me, I refuse to be disabled by it.  I spent about a year working with a team of doctors to learn how to live my life with bipolar, and I spent a lot of independent time learning as much about the disorder as I could.  My biggest challenge was learning how to travel “in the middle lane,” instead of riding the bipolar rollercoaster.

Don’t get me wrong, bipolar disorder is a very serious illness.  Some people spend their entire lives battling it.  Some people’s disorders are such that their bodies don’t respond well to many of the medications, or it’s difficult finding the correct dosage for their treatment.  I’m lucky.  Very lucky.  I responded well to the first medication my doctors prescribed, and I’ve had no problems.  It’s been several years now, and I’ve become used to a “normal” life.  A very peaceful life.  Enough time has passed that while I remember that I enjoyed the amazing highs that came with the manic moments, and I remember that I felt so incredibly hopeless during the down times, I can’t remember exactly how they felt.  I only remember whether I liked them or not.

My point of sharing this with you is not to solicit your pity, sympathy, or praise.  My disorder is what it is, and I’m only doing what most people would do when faced with a challenge in their lives: deal with it.  What I would like you to take from this is the following:

As annoying or strange as some people may be, we never know what may be going on beneath their surface.  We all have our own challenges, be they cultural, physical, mental, or emotional. 

Not everyone who has a mental illness is scary or dangerous.  One of my friends once told me, “You shouldn’t tell people you have bipolar disorder.  It might scare them.”  I confidently told my friend, “I’m not going to hide or deny who I am.  Society wouldn’t think anything was odd if I were diabetic or had high blood pressure.  Besides, I’m not the person they need to be afraid of.  I take my medicine, and I am under the regular care of a team of doctors.  They should be more scared of the people who deny that they have any problems.”

Some of the world’s most brilliant writers, poets, composers, and artists suffered from manic-depression: Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Michelangelo.  The way I see it, I’m in very good company.

Signed,

A pedigree crazy person who is surprisingly sane.

Funkywinkerbean and Me

Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you gonna say, “Hi?” Don’t you love it? Who doesn’t love a good laugh? Okay, so it’s a really corny joke. It’s probably one of the first jokes we learn in school. Then we run home so eagerly to tell our parents, only to have them say with the most deadpan face, “I was telling that joke when I was your age.” They probably were. And, their parents probably said the same thing to them, with the same deadpan look when they ran home eagerly from school to share their new comedic line. But, for whatever reason, most humans love the opportunity to laugh, including me. Humor and laughter are and have been one of the few constants in my life. I never find laughter and humor boring.

My first true awareness of humor was as a child. I was five years old, and school always came very easy for me. My parents wanted me to go to summer school. Of course, I thought it was because I was so smart that I got to go to summer school, and unlike the “slow” kids, I had a choice. Summer school was for either really dumb kids who needed the extra help, or the really smart kids who were so smart they blessed the school by being there for the summer. I most certainly was not one of the dumb kids.

Being a parent myself, I now realize that neither of these is necessarily true. I think my parents wanted me to go to summer school, because they couldn’t fathom the idea of a whole three months with me home all day—just me and my parents. goodness, the thought of it makes even me shudder.

So, there I was, the summer between kindergarten and first grade, so excited to be one of the privileged kids who blessed the school with my presence during the summer months. Everything was going great. I loved it. On the third day of summer school, one of my little classmates had the teacher looking at her. I heard the teacher say something about chicken pox. Of course, I had no idea what chicken pox was. Well, my naiveté soon changed. My little classmate was so kind and generous; she decided to share her pox with me. Needless to say, I didn’t last too lnog in summer school.

My parents had my great-grandmother, Gram, babysit me while my pox ran their course. That same summer, Gram also babysat my cousin, Robbie. Robbie and I couldn’t read, but we loved to have someone read to us. We had Gram read the Sunday comics. We found them mildly entertaining, that is until Gram read us the title of one of the comics—Funkywinkerbean.

Funkywinkerbean—go ahead and say it. I dare you to try to say it three times without so much as cracking a grin. If you can do it, you are a tougher person than I am or ever was.

When Robbie and I heard the name Funkywinkerbean, we laughed hard. We could not stop. We laughed that kind of laugh that makes your stomach and cheeks ache, makes your eyes water, makes you look like you’re crying and makes you drool. We had Gram read Funkywinkerbean over and over for the rest of the day. It was like an addition. We looked forward to Funkywinkerbean every day. We were like little addicts, and Funkywinkerbean was our fix.

Funkywinkerbean always stayed with me and made me consciously aware of how pleasurable laughter can be. I wanted to be able to make people laugh the way Funkywinkerbean had made Robbie and me laugh. I began to really observe what make people laugh. I would listen attentively to my parents’ and other adults’ conversations. I wanted to master the art of humor.

As the years passed, I became more proficient in my art. During my adolescent and preadolescent years, not only did I become more humorous, but I also became more sarcastic.

Oh, sarcasm—we are all familiar with it. We all know a few sarcastic people. Those people who can make everyone laugh. Unfortunately, it is usually at the expense of someone else. The one victim I terrorized more than anyone else was Sony.

Sony was a really sweet girl a few years younger than I was. She was non-confrontational, and albeit, she was very intelligent, her wit was not very quick. Sony and I had a few mutual friends, so unfortunately for Sony, we were often in each other’s company. Of course, I would tear Sony apart. “Sony, when you laugh, your eyes disappear. Can you even see when you laugh?” I didn’t care that Sony wore glasses and that without them, she was legally blind. I honestly can’t remember any of the other things I used to say to Sony. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that everyone around us was laughing hysterically, and I was the cause of their laughter.

During this period, I never once thought my cynicism was my way of hiding—hiding my vulnerabilities and insecurities. As time passed, I only got better. I became more quick-witted and more sharp-tongued.

In high school, I met Tom. Tom was a male version of me, except he had a few more years of experience under his belt. We were both scared of being hurt and terrified of our own insecurities and fear of rejection. We had what is commonly called a love-hate relationship. Tom was my first love, but there was no way I was going to let myself be hurt, so I used every weapon I had to defend myself. The most powerful of these weapons was my sarcasm and my humor. That is until one night with a large group of friends, I verbally tore Tom up one side and down the other. Sure, everyone was laughing, including Tom. Later that night, after everyone left, Tom repeated everything I said to him—verbatim. To this day, I still remember all those words he spoke. They have stuck with me better than the many times my parents told me “never talk to strangers.” After Tom repeated all the cruel things I said to him, he told me, “Ange, you can rip someone up, tear them apart, and leave them for dead all within a matter of moments. Why don’t you just try listening some time and not being so quick to put someone to their death?”

Although I didn’t change my ways, those words have stayed with me forever. It devastated me to hear the things I said to him. Knowing I was capable of saying those things to someone I cared for, then what was I capable of if I had no feelings for someone?

As the years passed, without realizing it, I had begun to take Tom’s advice. Maybe it was maturity. Maybe I was losing the fear of feeling vulnerable. As I got older, I became less sarcastic. I still had it in me; I just didn’t feel the need to use it as often as I once did. It was similar to having a gun in your house. If you are really scared, the gun is loaded. If you aren’t scared, then you still have the gun, only it’s locked up and unloaded. You feel much better just knowing the gun is there if you ever need it. I stayed that way until I moved out of my family’s home. I guess moving out on my own gave the courage to feel fear and vulnerability.

When I moved out on my own, I moved in with my girlfriends, Nicki and Jackie. We had a great time. I still look back on those days as some of the happiest times of my life. Jackie and I quickly became best friends. We hung out all the time. It was while I was hanging out with Jackie that I found a new way to play with my humor. Jackie and I would do things that were simply silly. There was no victim. If ever there were one, we were our own victims.

One evening, Jackie and I were waiting for some friends to get off work. They were running late, and we had time to kill. We decided to put on a dance show for all the people in the Downtown Plaza. It didn’t matter that I had never been a dancer. There we were in all our glory, two girls in our early twenties, singing and dancing to the Village People’s YMCA. Let me add that the song and dance were performed a capella. I have no idea if the passers-by thought we were entertaining, but Jackie and I were laughing in the same hysterical way that Robbie and I has laughed the first time we heard Funkywinkerbean. I had rediscovered my childhood humor.

I no longer needed a victim to be funny, and I found that I could still make people laugh or at least smile. It was a wonderful feeling. If I ever did need a victim, I was the victim. I learned to poke fun at myself. I quickly realized that people responded better when they were laughing and there was no victim in the humor.

I still seize the opportunity to make people laugh, only now it is with some clown-show antics or silly, corny, kid-type humor.

Once at work, one of my mangers got a promotion. During the meeting announcing her promotion, I ran through the conference room door with pom-poms. The pom-poms were made from the perforated sides of computer paper, and they were bound by rubber bands. As I ran through the conference room, shook the pom-poms in the air and sang a little cheer, congratulating my manager. The entire staff at the meeting began laughing. It took the edge off all of us being called into a meeting, because meetings had been traditionally become something to fear and be nervous about.

As a result of my victimless humor, I have been given the moniker “Sunshine” because I “always bring sunshine to a situation.” I know. It’s corny, and I sometimes find myself thinking, “what, are you crazy? If this is sunshine, then I’d hate to see your gloom and doom.” Instead, I bite my tongue, say a gracious thank you, and feel a little warm, knowing that I brought some happiness to someone’s day. It’s a good feeling knowing you have a positive impact on a person’s day.

It has been through the use of humor, both positive and negative, that I have become who I am today. I still sometimes hide behind my humor, and I often laugh when I am nervous or feel shy. However, for the most part, humor has given me the strength and confidence to be my true self. Humor and laughter have been constants in my life. I often get bored and restless with so many things, but laughter is one of the few things I have never gotten tired of. Humor has helped me make new friends and provided things to share with old friends. Humor has given me strength when I felt the most weak and vulnerable, and it has helped me feed my imagination. Humor is a nice ice breaker, and I can use it to disarm people. It is really difficult for people to be angry and offensive when you make them laugh.

Humor and laughter have been my life boats to jump into when I was drowning, as well as my gun when I was feeling scared and vulnerable. However, humor and laughter have ultimately allowed me to be relatively stress free, friendly, and approachable. It is humor that has been the “twist of lime” in my personality. It is what gives me zing and makes me unique. It is what I have become known for. After all, when people call me silly, crazy, or a nut, I always tell them it must be my dad. You know, he had a big orange Afro, a red bulbous nose, and he wore big floppy shoes.