“The unwanted other in the relationship”

Manic depression has made me alternately attractive and hideous. The strain of my erratic behaviour, manic demands and paralysing, life-draining depressions have effectively wrecked most of my relationships and put a strain on my friendships and my family. It does feel like an unwanted other. That phrase really struck me. Especially since I am sitting alone in my bedsit as the sun bleaches the clouds. I know that without manic depression I am a happy and optimistic person who finds beauty and loveliness in the world and it is why I struggle daily to somehow articulate it, that beneath everything else, it’s still there and that I still, even if just in writing, find pleasure and playfulness and poetry. This is the last part of me that exists consistently. I cling to it. Even when I so long ago stopped finding beauty in myself. And can’t remember ever have doing.

But how many times has depression and despair smashed all my feelings out of my body like entrails. How many times have the people’s faces, who I so often wondered about, held only malice and murder to me, how many times have the unique lives of millions been so greyscale and pointless like my own. With no fascination. Just quietness, and every breathe so difficult. Felt ruined and as though I had destroyed the world because it felt destroyed and hopeless to me. And my hands and body would shake in grief. In a place where I can not be held or kissed and where loves dissolves into meaninglessness. And cannot be reached.

And how many times has the world seemed so unreal and hypercoloured to me that nobody else can see what I see. And I try to show them the ballet of the street and am confused and angry when they are not with me. And to show the cracked open chest of golden ideas and ambitions. And the incredible quickness of life and thought. The no inhibition of asking a stranger home with you in true belief that they are your new best friend. That they love you as everybody loves you. Where you are completely unable to truly love one person because you love everybody too much. Talking to god and angels in mortal ways as your own reflection. And they talk back. The skin and seduction. And silence and fear. And absolute terror at both ends of the muddied rainbow when you don’t know what is real anymore. And what is real can be as terrible as what is not. Where do you hide then. And it is months and years of your life. That you should have done so much in. And are wasted. And have no stories but horrible stories to tell. And people do not know what to say. So they smile clamp lipped and turn away.

They are both such lonely places to me. Take me away from these graves and clouds. I feel like crying.