The Life and Times of the Agnostic Messiah

This is a slightly modified version of the email that I sent to Joel a few days after my most recent psychotic episode.

Hey Joel. This is Misrael. I have some stuff I need to get off my chest, and I’m not sure I’d be great at sharing verbally right now.

For one thing…when I thought I was G-d? I always knew I was Misrael too. About halfway through my stay…I realized I was not the Messiah. I realized I only had the potential to be (this person is called the Moshiach in Judaism). I was yelling about that in the clearest terms I knew how, and yet that shift in thinking is probably not even on my medical records. When I was talking to you in word salad? I knew I couldn’t speak properly. Believe me, I was humiliated. I was also humiliated that I had to beg all day for restraints, and only got them when I started banging my head against the wall out of frustration. I was so humiliated by being on the Ward that I was begging onlookers to rape me. I only felt there might be hope when they started taking me semi-seriously. All I know is that I was closer to losing my identity as Misrael than I was to losing my identity as G-d!

I had a lot more respect for the other patients on the Ward than I did for the nurses. Despite that, I always took my meds. And I’m glad! They shoved meds up this one girls butt. I discussed this with my psychologist. Even she thinks it was unnecessary, considering the circumstances. I told the patient to file a complaint at the time. Most ornery patient on the Ward, and she brought me a cup of water. She knew I was constantly thirsty. I’d get into rages…but I don’t remember being angry…just scared.

So now you have the highlights. What did I learn? That it’s the little things in life that matter. That you don’t have to be a theist to have religious mania. I can’t even listen to popular music without thinking I’m G-d these days! And in some ways, this is normal. In other ways, it’s not.

Love,
Misrael

P.S. You did the right thing where my boyfriend is concerned. I wish you’d put up a poll on Moodswingers so that we could all have a say in whether he is welcome…but what you did was good enough. So thank you.

On Emilie Autumn

 

So i’ve discovered this new artist, a singer.  Her name is Emilie Autumn, and she has bipolar disorder (according to common knowledge and Gothic Charm School).  Some of her songs are obviously about mental illness, mentally ill people, and how mentally ill people are treated by society (both contemporary and past). They are also about who is perceived to be sane, and who is perceived to be not. It is for this reason that Emilie is interesting to me. Now, of all the songs by her that I know, two deal with mental illness. These songs are “Take The Pill” and “Girls! Girls! Girls!”. These are the songs that I will be discussing further in this post.  Both songs are quoted from the lyrics videos that I found on Youtube.  Although “Gothic Lolita” (which is about childhood sexual abuse) and “Fight Like A Girl” (something of a feminist anthem) are both worth your time, I will not be discussing them here. Neither of them deal with mental illness.

“Girls! Girls! Girls!” is sung (in literary terms) by an unreliable narrator. He claims to treat the mentally ill women under his care with humanity. However, he treats them like freaks. He refers to the women under his care as “entertainment”.  This song paints a picture of a man making money off of spectators looking to gawk at mentally ill people. He refers to them in the chorus as “hot, nuts, and suicidal”. This is the beginning of the narrator sexualizing the women. He says although “they look a lot like you and me, don’t let them fool you!”  This is an example of dehumanization. Apparently, in the period this song is set in, insanity was considered purely a feminine thing. The narrator speculates that the instability of female reproductive organs, and their influence by the moon, is what causes insanity.
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All The Broken Hearts

Today, I am broken-hearted. It’s not because i’ve broken up with a romantic partner. Nobody died (thank God). Marcus is very much alive. He hasn’t left me. He hasn’t rejected me in any way. Quite the opposite.  But circumstances are keeping us from meeting.

His family is so protective of him that he would get in real trouble for revealing the slightest piece of information about himself.  If they knew I knew what city Marcus lives in, there would be hell to pay.  This, in my mind, rules out ever going to visit him in his town.  He also couldn’t meet me anywhere else in the country, because his family wouldn’t let him.  Don’t worry, i’m not sobbing. But I do have a funny feeling in my chest, so that’s why I say i’m broken-hearted right now.

I haven’t lost him. But I definitely need to revise my expectations of this relationship. I was hoping that I could meet him face to face someday, and get to know him and his family better. I was hoping that if they liked me, and I liked them (and him), I could continue to visit him, and maybe even become his platonic life partner (if he agreed, of course).

The silver lining is that this shows his family cares about him. It’s better to have extremely protective parents than negligent ones, especially for an autistic person like him.  He is socially unskilled enough that he could get into a lot of trouble without guidance, and he has. So it makes sense that his family guards him fiercely.

I just can’t see a way forward from here. I have come to care for him deeply in the month or two that i’ve known him. I don’t know if our relationship has room to grow from here. I guess what I have to do is keep doing what I have been, and hope some answer presents itself. But what? What will happen to our relationship?

Thank you for listening.

Angeline

profound

I found this on Queer Secrets, an LGBT Tumblr blog devoted to posting the “secrets” that people send in.  I know what it is like to feel this way about someone, at least to a degree.  My person, however, was a boy.  I will give him the pseudonym Angeline here, because like with Genevieve, I want him to have a pretty name.  Angeline also means “angel”, and he was that to me also.

He was my angel because he was my friend.  I often teased him, and he’d retaliate by chasing me around the yard we all called a playground.  When he was given detention, I skipped my recess to be with him.  When I found out he self-injured, I told Davina (another pseudonym) what was going on.  Davina was the head teacher there, and she told Angeline’s mother, Kaleela (pseudonym), what was happening.  I was known as so close to Angeline that one day, I asked Davina what was wrong with him.  She looked a little hesitant, but led me outside.

“You know that Angeline had a brain tumor when he was very young, right?  Well, that tumor affected his brain in certain ways.  Much like your mother’s stroke affected her.  As a result, Angeline cannot always tell appropriate behavior from inappropriate behavior.  He needs special help for that.  He also has a hard time with reading and writing, just like your mother.”
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A Bipolar Love Story (One-Sided)

Once upon a time, I knew a man named Genevieve Zuni (pseudonym). Now, a word on the name I picked for him before we begin.

I am deliberately giving Genevieve a woman’s name. This is not to humiliate him. I want to give him the something beautiful, and I don’t care if it’s a girl’s name.  But there’s also another reason for this, one that i’m not sure I can explain.  I have only experienced sexual attraction to girls.  I have only experienced romantic attraction, that I was sure was romantic, to girls.  Genevieve is like a girl to me because my feelings for him were just as strong as my past romantic and sexual feelings.  More on this later.

As for the last name, it involves a complex set of word associations that I do not wish to reveal.  I don’t want you to guess who he is.
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Autism and Bipolar: A Surprisingly Common Combination

According to HealthyPlace.com, here are the symptoms of Autism.

Impairment in social and emotional reciprocity that ranges from abnormal social approaches and failure to participate in typical give-and-take conversations to diminished sharing of interests and emotions as well as failure to respond to social cues and interactions.
What does that even mean???? I guess it means that we have general problems and difficulties with social interaction. But a little more deeply, I guess it means that in conversations we tend to either do all the talking or let the other person do all the talking. We may approach people in a way that is a bit abnormal, which may entail diving straight into our chosen topic without pausing for small talk. Don’t look at me funny; These are just guesses. We may share too much or too little of our interest and/or emotions. We may also fail to see when the other person is getting bored, or when the other person may be trying to make friends with us or take advantage of us.
Impairment in use and understanding of nonverbal communications used in social interactions, such as inability to make eye contact and abnormalities in body language. These children also have difficulty understanding the use of physical gestures and often have a complete lack of facial expression.
This basically means we have difficulties understanding and using body language.

Impairment in developing and maintaining social relationships
Well, this one is obvious.
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Face

Alright, guys. I’m going to show you my face right now, since today is Bipolar Awareness Day or whatever.

I have brown hair, with a pink and blonde streak in it.  It is straight, and grows almost to my shoulder but not quite. The bangs mostly cover my forehead, which is free of acne. I have unplucked eyebrows, but they still look decent. My eyes are brown, and my eyelashes are average. I have a piercing on my right cheek, and a “cute button nose” as my old gender therapist once described it. My face is a little red, with some spots. However, it’s not half as bad as it used to be. I don’t know how to describe my lips, except that they are relatively full and they turn a little downward. I definitely have a chin. I consider my face to be round/oval-ish. It’s not a fat face at all, but it’s definitely fatter than it would be if I was not somewhat overweight. However, from a distance, it’s relatively pretty.

When I was younger, I often got the sensation of having large and pointy ears on the top of my head.  I could never decide whether they were cat or wolf ears.  This wasn’t just an imaginary thing; I really felt them.  When people spoke to me, I would always angle my imaginary ears towards them.  When I looked away, I would still do this.  I assumed people would see them, and know I was listening.  However, nobody could see them so it was useless.  Since I also had the ability to retract them at will, I made the choice to retract them permanently one day.  I haven’t been able to feel my “cat ears” since, even when i’ve tried to.

Now that we’ve got that part out of the way, we can get on to real business.

My face is a topic that i’m sort of sick of talking about, because i’ve discussed it a lot in gender therapy. I’ve also written about my face, how it bothers me, and how it doesn’t bother me. I have face issues sometimes, and they are connected to whatever gender issues I have. I have times where it bothers me more, and times when it almost doesn’t bother me at all. I’m sort of genderfluid that way.

It’s not that I want a beard. It’s that once, I accidentally got a haircut that made my face look sort of masculine. When I looked into the mirror that day, I felt like I was looking at my real self for the first time. I have never been able to get the same effect since, no matter what i’ve tried or what i’ve done. So no one will ever see my real face, and no one will ever understand who I truly am.

A Quick Update On Abaven Before The Big Intersectionality Post

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Alright. So, readers seem to want to know how my autism and bipolar interact with each other. I will address this on the first.

I understand that this is first and foremost a blog about mental illness. However, something important happened to my relationship with Abaven. I decided I couldn’t wait until the first to tell you. And since I did mention Abaven in my maiden post, I would like to give you a short update.

I saw Abaven last Saturday. We visited a friend in the hospital, and then took a very long walk around a certain outdoor mall. After that, we went out for burgers at In ‘n’ Out. And over the course of all this, I realized something.

I do not think i’m in love with Abaven, and it would be a mistake to act as if I was. I am extremely comfortable around him, yes, but that doesn’t translate to being in love. I can talk to him about almost anything, and he won’t judge or be stern. If he rebukes, he does it so gently that I don’t feel too bad. And it’s a blessing to have someone like that in my life. In the unlikely situation that he asked me to marry him, I might say yes, because even though i’m not in love with him, he’s very near and dear to my heart. I would be honored to spend the rest of his life with him. But that’s probably not going to happen. Better to be on the lookout for someone with Abaven’s qualities.

Enough about him for now, see you all on the first!

Introduction

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Hello, everyone. I’m Misrael. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get in on this blog. I was extremely reluctant at first, but then Joel reminded me that I had previously agreed to write for him. I tried to back out, but then Joel told me that I have a bad habit of backing out of commitments to him and that i’d better follow through this time. So i’m here.

One of the reasons I was reluctant to write for this blog is that I actually have very little to say on mental illness. Other than the lithium and risperdal pills that I pop in the morning and at night, and the weekly therapy (which everyone would benefit from, in my opinion), and the weekly socializing and chitchat at support group, mental illness really doesn’t affect my life much. Maybe it’s so normal to me now that I don’t notice it anymore.

On the other hand, mental illness has affected my past. Bipolar runs on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. Schizoaffective and schizophrenia run in my ex-stepdad’s side of the family. Asperger’s and autism also run in my mother’s side, and I have a schizophrenic uncle on my Dad’s side. That’s a lot of mental illness for one family, and it has affected me quite a lot.

I have bipolar 1 and high functioning autism. I don’t show a lot of the symptoms of autism anymore, and I really don’t have typical autistic issues. As a result, although I am technically autistic, I don’t identify with the label much.

In other news, I am genderqueer and gray-ace/asexual. I am also gray/aromantic. I have a best friend that I try to see every week, who has issues with anxiety. I will call him Abaven on this blog. He’s 73. I’m 20. I don’t know whether I can say i’m in love with him yet, because I haven’t known him long enough for that. He’s also definitely not interested in me that way, which is a relief in some ways and a pain in others.

But this blog is going to be about mental illness, not about my love life (unless the two intersect). So you probably won’t be hearing much about Abaven on this blog, unless you tell me in the comments that you want to know more.

Any question and suggestions as to what to write about would be appreciated. Like I said, the reason I was so reluctant to write for this blog is that for me…blogging about mental illness is like blogging about having brown eyes. Yes, my brown eyes are beautiful. Yes, I can see because of them. Yes, I need glasses. Yes, I have been gifted with a beautiful pair of tortoiseshell glasses that bring the brown out. It gets boring after a while, because there’s only so much you can say on brown eyes.

But if you still want to hear about me, let me know. Post suggestions and questions in the comments. And until then, see you on the first.