The people you’ve been before that you don’t want around anymore, they push and shove and won’t bend to your will.

I’ll keep them still.

[elliott smith]

***

I am scared on a daily basis.  Daily, hourly.  By the minute, sometimes.

On a bad day, the second.

Scared, worried, terrified that I will not be the person I want to be.  Not scared for the future (though, yes, I must admit, scared for the future).  But scared for the present.  Scared of my body’s own inertia, of my own history.  I’m scared of my story—not for what is has already been, but of what it will be.

***

On a Friday afternoon, when most people are relaxing and letting the pressures of the week slide off their backs, we stand behind a hood in a laboratory, tagging mice for future experiments.

We talk about how we are the same.  “You’re just like me,” he says.  “But someday we’re going to have to grow up.  We’re going to have to become the people we want to be.  We just have to do it.  That’s it.  You just do it.”

He keeps going.  I look at him and think about these things he is saying.  He’s older.  But, these days, most people are.  I’ve landed as the almost-baby of the group of people I’m always with.  Young, but not too young to be acerbically cynical.  Not too young to be sad or worried.  In fact, I usually don’t feel very young at all.

“I’m not a bad person.”  He says.  “Neither are you.  We’ve both done bad things.  But we’re not bad people.”

We just have to be the people we want to be.

***

Once upon a time, I thought (or perhaps simply wished or dreamed) that the pills would be magic, that they would take everything away.  Even as I was telling myself—and everyone else—that the pills would be no sudden cure-all, I hoped they would.  Still, I sometimes feel gypped and let down–by chemistry, by life, by psychiatrists who never told me that the Lamictal is brilliant for depression and sometimes-kind-of-really-lousy for the hypomania.

Nobody wants to do the work that it takes to manage a mental illness.  Nobody welcomes that burden.  Nobody wants to go see a psychiatrist and tell them the absolute truth.  Nobody wants to give up all those wonderful bad habits.  My disease feels comfortable, like a sweater you’ve had since junior high school or a hug from someone you’ve always gone to church with.  I am comfortable in it, riding the highs and lows in a Cadillac, sleeping stretched out in the backseat and never worried about crashing.

I am often flooded with conflicted feelings, plagued with the shadow, with the devil, with a sense of longing that winds itself into my pores and kicks out the bottom of my stomach.  I am overwhelmed, like the detectors on our microscopes when too much light hits them.

I see the diagrams in class, and I understand.  The light source is my brain.  I need filters to keep everything in.  To protect everyone else.  The pinhole is my heart.  I need filters to protect everything else from getting in.  To protect myself.

So, I close my eyes and turn the filter wheel.  Or let someone else take the reigns—for a day, for an hour, for a second—and let them turn it for me as I sink into their arms or just fall asleep, exhausted.  Turn, turn, turn—and believe that somewhere out there (in here) there is that girl that I want to be.  I just have to keep going until I find her.  I just have to be her.