A Memoir of Love and Madness by Rahla Xenopoulos

Author:Rahla Xenopoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: A Memoir of Love and Madness: Living with Bipolar Disorder
ISBN: 9781770221895
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2011-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

12

Backwards into the darkness

November is a tricky month. It’s the month of my birthday, and I’m an old-fashioned birthday girl. I love the passing of the years that are marked with kitsch candled cakes, taffeta-ribboned packets and long-distance phone calls. The sky is always so bright and full of summer promise in November. But the November sun often also brings with it the harsh rays of warning, the tap, tap, tapping away at my psyche, the feeling of dis-ease, discomfort nagging at my soul. All the excitement has a sort of dark lining; it’s all kind of touch and go.

On one particular November Friday, it was not so much touch as it was go, go, go … vroom, vroom, vroom. I woke, went to gym and then did a million unnecessary, frenetic things. If anything was wrong with me, it was being too ‘up’. I thought I was possibly a bit manic. At the time I was going through a liquorice phase – Panda liquorice with its picture of a cute panda – stockpiling black-and-yellow boxes of the stuff.

I was hanging beads and eating liquorice when Jason said goodbye, off to do some work. A bit nervous, I dropped the beads and followed him, Panda in hand, to say goodbye. As he got into the car, I started to cry. I tried to explain: What would I do when my Panda was finished? No, I didn’t just want to go to the shops and buy a new box, because I loved that particular box. Then I was crying inconsolably for the inevitable loss of my Panda liquorice. Within an hour I was hysterical, truly off my trolley.

Psychiatrists have lives independent of their patients, so they’re not always contactable on a Friday night. My Cape Town psychiatrist was out of town, but we got hold of the Happy Potter doctor in Johannesburg. He said, ‘Go to hospital and try to get some food into yourself while you’re there.’

Take a psychotic person to a regular hospital and nobody really wants to take responsibility. My father used to say that hospitals aren’t too keen to give beds to psychiatric patients because hospitals are run like hotels. In any hotel, the bar brings in the money. With hospitals, the bar is the operating theatre. So, unless you’re having electroconvulsive treatment or you need an anaesthetist, you’re essentially just wasting precious bed space. But Jason, long-suffering Jason, managed to get me, still clutching my liquorice, across town and admitted to hospital. So much of this is just a blur. I have a fabulous way of forgetting. Daddy used to say, ‘You don’t always need a good memory; sometimes you need a good forgettory!’

I’m a gifted amnesiac. I remember in minute detail every birthday and anniversary celebration. I remember childhood happenings and everything to do with my friends’ lives. But the recollections I have of depressive episodes are fractured. Always, I recall the feeling of people’s care and support. I remember trying to pass the pain

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