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Monday, Oct. 20, 2003 - 11:01 p.m. TURNING LEAF The weather has become less warm, sometimes cooler than usual, and the autumn sun is giving a piercing light not as intense as its summer blaze. The large oak tree in my backyard is slowly dropping its shriveling leaves, piece by piece, as they spin toward the slightly yellowing grass below. My air-conditioner is beginning to rarely kick-on; the noise of the compressor humming outside my window has given way to a silence at night where scarcely a cricket is heard. However, I do not sense this to be a peaceful silence. In the distance I hear the faint Baton Rouge traffic, something I have never noticed until recently. It gives me a feeling of restlessness, as though the world is purposely blind to any peace of the season, as though the passengers are wanting of the noise, desirous to reach their destinations in order to see people and do all the noisy things ordinary people do. It reminds me that I am alone in a silent house surrounded by nature dying. It screams to me that I am helplessly lonely. Yesterday, I began to feel an alteration in my mood of which I cannot make heads or tails. I sat in church contemplating my plight, one where I am trapped in a job of no reprieve, with no one even noticing that I exist. I began to feel a slight depression setting in, where I could no longer feel any motivation for changing my condition. I started to question the rewards of any further labor in correcting the areas I have sought to correct. The well juice of my emotionally motivated brain has gone dry. I simply lack the energy to go any further. I now feel like a man who has attempted to climb a tall mountain, climbed halfway, but has neither the will to climb up further, nor the energy to climb back down again. In my attempt to find myself on top of the mountain, I am beginning to embrace a truth that the mountain cannot be climbed. At the same time, when I look to the depths below, I see a void of nothingness. Instead, I am left stranded, with nowhere to go. The inexplicable nature of my condition was brought to fore when I spoke my brother on the phone last night. My older brother just began law school and is taking a course in tort law. I spoke to him about a trip we may do together when my busy spell ends and his semester is over. During our discussion, he mentioned the issue of proximate cause. Basically, this concept holds that a party is responsible not only for what immediate damages they cause to the injured party, but any damages resulting thereafter. Such would be the case of a man who broke his back in a car accident who recovered and then began to suffer from seizures ten years later. Under proximate cause, the person causing the accident would be held to pay compensatory damages not only for the broken back, but also for the seizures later on, assuming that the seizures can be tied to the car accident. Then he brought up an interesting issue. He maintains, like many other people that know I am bipolar, including my roommate, that before I went to my therapist in Houston, I was a perfectly normal functioning individual. I held down a great job, I had a record of impeccable accomplishment, my character was well-respected, and I was, on the whole, quite normal. I certainly did not exhibit the behaviors of a clinically manic-depressed individual. Indeed, the genetic components were present; after all, I have four bipolar first cousins. However, studies have shown that there have been documented cases of identical twins, both assumed to have the same genetic makeup, one of which turned out to suffer from a severe mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, while the other did not. This supports the argument that there is an environmental component that may or may not trigger such abnormalities. His point was, and I believe it may be valid, that the Houston psychologist may have been the component that triggered my illness. How, you ask? I could probably write a book on the sessions I had with that therapist. It was like something from the twilight zone. Unfortunately, my ignorance in the field of psychology limits my ability to explain it. At the end of it all, right after I was put on medication, my father went in with me for my final session. The psychologist acted as though the whole "vaudeville act," as my father had put it, was nothing but a figment of my overactive imagination. I insist to this day that everything he did was purposeful, deliberate, and grounded in known clinical techniques, and that his misuse of these techniques resulted in irreparable damage to my mental well-being, ultimately "triggering" my dormant genetic condition. In fact, upon reading the transcripts of my sessions, one of my later psychiatrists said that the psychologist made a grave mistake in "stirring me up." Of course, my brother said that this would be an interesting case study but, because I have handled the illness so well, it would be difficult to be prove in a court of law the extent of the damages that I have suffered. If my condition were completely debilitating, however, I might have an interesting malpractice lawsuit. But as far as I am concerned, it is all foolish, idle talk. No matter whose fault it is, my mood appears to be changing with the color of the leaves. I am becoming despondent and uncaring. At work, they think I have become happy-go-lucky, which, to them, is a good thing. They have told me over and over again how my personality has changed over the past couple of weeks. In truth, I am simply reflecting the personality of a person who has given up on his dreams, has accepted the absurdity of his life, and sardonically laughs at it. I do not know whether such a realization is healthy or not. All I know is that I am still alive, and that even though for now I am climbing the mountain no further, I do not have to. I suppose I will set up camp until this dark season passes, and I hope it passes soon. |