coming out of it

I always come out of it hypomanic, crazy like this, too hyper, too happy, and sad underneath. I go to the store today and buy a mango. It feels like buying black leather or piercing my lip. It is something dangerous, something I have always wanted but never done. I've only had mango smoothies, dried mango in tough little strips. I stand there with my sad little basket full of dog food picking up mangos and smoothing my hands over them and I don't even know which ones are ripe, and that sort of naiveness tastes like metal. I pick a red one, squashy, that smiles a little like Mexico even though it left there a long time ago.
It tastes good. I don't really know how to eat it either so I slice it half way open and peel it with the carrot peeler. The pit is enormous. How stupid of me, to think a mango wouldn't have a pit. To think it was like a coconut, a seed of its own. The pit is shaped like a slice of metal, a bullet, something sharp. I stand there in the kitchen eating it, goofy, my dog sitting on my foot. I play Scrabble with my mom and lose by two points because ogle is spelled with only one g, and I was so sure of the two.
Bipolar is a hard thing to wrap your mind around. I write about it a lot. I am a writer at heart. I've written about five books. I want my writing to make you feel something, to force you to split yourself open and face something you've been ignoring. I do it to myself all the time, writing about bipolar. The fact remains, I am so scared of it. I was diagnosed in February of seventh grade, over three years ago. It still feels new to me, taking the pills, getting used to the rocking. I mean, I've had it since I was very little... well I've had it forever but it came out in me when I was little. My life like an anvil, smashing between two poles, never staying long enough in that crazy arc in the middle for me to understand, middle ground. Only those extremes. And it's hard to sit here and think about it still. Over two-thirds of people with Bipolar 1 commit suicide. That's a comforting statistic. I want so badly to not fit neatly into it. I want so badly to be in the 33 percent that fight it. It's so hard though, to remind myself (cruelly, sharply like that mango pit) that it is always there, it will always be there, forever, I will have to take the pills forever (nevermind all the other disorders that I have and the pills that moderate them), when I have kids it will still be there, and if I am irresponsible and don't take the medicine, it will dominate me, no matter what I have to live for and be healthy for, it will drag me down into its throes.
On Tuesday I slept over with people from my church at a church leader's house, and I hadn't taken my medicine for a few days becuase of everything, the laxatives, the overdose, the return of bulimia in harsh colors, and I begain panicking silently. I felt myself dissolving, I felt psychosis seeping in. I was paranoid and delusional and afraid and angry. Like I used to be in seventh grade before the lithium saved my life (and later while it ruined it). And I was reminded. That is what I have to return to. And today while I ate my mango: this is what I have to lose. All this.
Coming out of it, I'm always way too hopeful, and I always pray to God, let it stay this way. And it never does.