Manic-Depression is not a lifestyle; it is a very real disease. Most people believe that you can just “snap out of it” or that it’s a way of thinking, but if that were true, why would 5.7 million Americans choose to think in such a negative/drastic way?
Another misconception is that people with bipolar disorder ‘lash out’ or have violent tendencies. That is so not true. Childhood onset bipolar disorder brings on more rapid, severe mood swings that are more likely to result in irritability than enlightenment during manic phases. While manic-depression can be triggered anywhere from early childhood to a person’s late fifty’s, most cases begin around age 25, so the majority of people affected by this chemical imbalance no more violent than any other person.
In the movie Girl, Interrupted, which gives a look into the life of women in a mental hospital, one patient states that her mental illness is a “gift”. This is a common belief among people with manic-depression; often causing patients to refuse taking their medicine or being treated, and denying that anything is wrong.
Everybody has experienced depression, not everybody has experienced manic-depression. It feels like nothing that can be understood unless you’ve felt it yourself.
Behaviors from both phases include symptoms like bad decision making, (such as buying a car you can’t afford) insomnia, hyper somnolence, fast speech, trouble staying focused, high self esteem, low self esteem, flamboyant dress, crying spells, unhygienic behavior, over eating, and under eating.

I knew something was……. Different about Mr. Jones the first time I met him. I was at Cooper during the summer for orientation and he was there setting up his room with dried-up sea critters and raccoon skins. That was different in its self. But when he opened his mouth and made no sense it was even stranger.
Me, a very curious little specimen, made a note to investigate this…err… him, and I did. After I accepted his strange behavior, which wasn’t limited to the way he talked (He would bounce his feet for weeks… maybe months, and smile and laugh at the strangest times, then totally stop. He cried at my parent-teacher conference, which I later found out was because the parents before us accused him of flirting with the students, and that was so true. I don’t blame him for being upset about being confronted, but the only times I’ve seen grown men cry were when someone died, and then.) we got along like peas and carrots.
I decided it was time to apply my research when Mr. Jones answered a phone call during class about medicine. I asked him why he needed a change in his medicine, and what the medicine was for. He said, almost exactly, “Normally I would tell you, but with this….” I had to know what was such a big secret that the man who cared enough to write me passes so I can extinguish the suspense of who’s going out with who, the man who told me about the birth of his child, the man who listened to me tell him that I loved social studies, but hated how he taught it, then change his whole plans, couldn’t tell me.
So Kalynn, Hannah, and I (the three musketeers of our time) set off on a mission that started off as a way to see a movie free, but Pirates of the Caribbean turned out to be boring and wayyy too long, and since we were already at the library, we decided to look into what was really up with Mr. Jones, and started in mental illnesses because that was the only thing we could think of that he couldn’t tell us unless it was something like erectile dysfunction, and we had no interest what-so-ever in knowing about that.
The conclusion was that he had bipolar disorder, and we were so funny after that too, trying to trick him into telling us himself. The way we acted reminds me of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Hehehe.
We weren’t like, persistent or anything. After all, sixth graders have better things to do than think about their teachers all the time, right?

Everything changed when I fell down-down-down into the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. I suppose it was because I lost my best friends, who I guess I wasn’t talking to that much then anyway, but it still hurt like the end of the world. When you’re way little, your friends are the people who live in your neighborhood, but I wasn’t way little, and Clarissa and Nicole didn’t live next-door. I cared a whole bunch about them…. I thought they cared a whole bunch about me. Nobody can be right all the time.
I didn’t want to talk about it with Mr. Jones. Hello? Why would I? But I was a problematic child who was now crying in class and so I did everything I could to keep me out of the counseling office. A call home about this was the last thing I needed. I was crying at school because I didn’t feel like I could cry at home. It looks like I have my own….. Different behavior.
Me and Mr. Jones got really close after that. Father-Daughter close. I liked that. At home there isn’t really a….. I don’t know. Something is missing.
When the end of the year tapped us on the shoulder, I didn’t want to say goodbye. He didn’t either, sooooo, we didn’t. He gave me his email and address on a little yellow sticky note. So it was the last day of school, and the marketer inside of me thought it would be a good idea to sell my teacher mosquito plants. Ahaha! How smart am I? He came to my house with his son Zach who is like, twenty, losing his hair, AND has pimples. What a double whammy.
Mr. Jones charmed my Paula into liking him, a very clever tactic if he ever wanted to talk to me again, and that was that.
Very soon I was emailing him everyday and even sooner I was replacing the “Mr.” with Jason. He was very supportive and made me feel better about my failing relationship with my Paula, struggles with stupid summer school, and my pre-mature sexual experimentation.
I was supportive about his “lifestyle changes” that I called a diet, but couldn’t understand why I was losing more weight than him without even trying.
I was very happy.
Ohhh, nothing can be perfect forever. My stomach had never flipfloped faster or harder than when he told me he was jealous of my bad boyfriend. Pictures of Jason in Tyler’s place with his big old man hands down my dress…up my legs… made my face get hot. What the hell was he thinking? Fume must’ve run through the letters in my email because he got the message and stopped. At least for a little while.
I read somewhere that bipolar disorder gives people sexual indescribpencys. I don’t know if that applies here. A big part of me wishes it does.
I found myself stuck on thoughts of him. Jason coming over and bringing my favorite ice-cream (which I believe to be an irrational manic decision) didn’t help. They weren’t romantic. They were their own little something. Something I wasn’t familiar with.
It didn’t make my dad happy to have my old teacher come over again. Dooofff. Things were calm around the house when they he didn’t think I was talking to Jason anymore, but like an erupting volcano when I was caught sending him an email or talking to him on the phone because they believed he had “sinister intentions”; I wasn’t going to give up what we’d built, so I fought back just as hard that he was a saint.
I was getting headaches everyday around then, and losing even more weight. Size zero didn’t even fit as comfortably when I was ten.
I slept all the time to escape the drama. Sleeping was the middle ground I could almost touch until my Paula started bugging me about it.
I started therapy last summer because I was cutting. My Paula didn’t even notice. I never woulda went if Jason hadn’t called and told her that I needed help, but thank goodness had enough sense not to be the barer of the bad news.
In therapy I lied and said that I wasn’t talking to him anymore, and everyone believed me.
School started. We talked about school work for a while, but school work is dull. He wanted to talk about dreams. I told him mine. It was full of symbolism about security, with ‘dirty’ symbols.
He told me that I needed to call. Two days went by with me, myself, and I fighting over whether or not I should. In the end the curious little specimen part of me took over and I called. On his school phone. At 4 o’clock. In my backyard.
He said a lot of words that confused me. I kept my mouth shut. He said he’d had the same dream. My face was hot again, but I stopped myself from feeling anything but gratitude for him, he’d stopped me from cutting, and helped me look at the world like a good place, for the most part, and I’d had the dream too. I said nice things that girlfriends say to their boyfriends. He wanted me to, and it made him feel good inside, I know it.
When we hung up the phone, I think I was happy that it was over, but I told myself that I was happy that it happened. I wanted to be. It would make sense. But I wasn’t. I was not okay.
A week later I got off the bus and walked into my house. Cold sweat was coming from me all over and my heart was pumping like, a million miles an hour. I went on the computer and sent Jason and email, saying goodbye, and still telling him things girlfriends say to their boyfriends. Then I went into my room and lit all my candles, turned on my favorite CD and got a big knife from the kitchen drawer. I was gonna kill myself. I was gonna kill myself because I was a bad girl who did a bad thing, and who’s parents were right but she never listens to them. Why?
But then I didn’t. Two hours went by and nothing happened, the blood was coming from my little girl arms but very slowly. I didn’t know what to do after that. My options were to stop here or try something else. The weight from failing was too much though. I couldn’t try again and I didn’t know what to do.
Jason was the only person I felt like I could trust, even though I couldn’t trust him. I called him and asked what to do, he said wake up my Paula and that he was on his way.
When he came I was hiding in the bathroom because it’s the only room in the house with a lock. Paula answered the door. I could hear her yelling and there are two rooms between the porch and the bathroom.
She came back in steaming and forced me to the hospital. Jason went to Cooper and ‘turned himself in’.
Now he’s being investigated by a real life investigator, and I’m left to pick up the pieces.