Into the sea, you and me

Love song in the key of twins

This is a tender thought mixed with a crazy story.

I sing to Lilah and Silas all the time. I’ve been playing music for them since the day we came back from the hospital. Singing for them has attuned me in a new way to the power of love songs. I just feel such a deep love for our kids and it’s like no love I’ve ever felt. It feels really good to sing about it in whatever form.

In this brief conversation, I want to own the part of me that is mad, the part of me that has repeatedly earned myself the label of “Bipolar I with Psychotic Features.” I want to hold it next to the part of me that is so in love with my children, because in my line of work I am constantly reminded of how much shame people with my kind of diagnosis carry. And I suppose I just want less shame in the world, starting with myself.

So that said I’m going to tell you a quick story:

A couple weeks after I turned 26 I spent a month in Los Angeles County Jail Psych Unit. I was arrested running through the streets smashing windows because I thought the world was ended and I was living in a dream. I ended up mostly in a cell by myself and during those long days I would have conversations with the flickering fluorescent light blubs. I would have conversations with the metal sink and toilet and the swirls in the water. I would stare out the window and watch the traffic go by from high up in the jail tower.

I would also sing all the time. I would sing any song I knew. Even though I was in a jail cell I had this very complex parallel reality that involved communicating with my friends back in Oakland who were going to come break me out. In my mind it was going to happen any minute. There was a whole cast of imaginary characters I would talk to, I remember specifically an older Black man with lots of tattoos who was a mentor figure to me. In my fantasy he was teaching me how to keep my body strong and my mind sharp on some tropical island.

The thing I really want you to grasp by me telling you this somewhat intimate story of my madness was that I was living inside an epic love story. It’s hard to explain with logic but I somehow believed that there were actually only two people in the universe and I was one of them, and that, everything around me was some kind of manifestation of our epic cosmic love affair. By some twist of fate of the stars, I was stuck in a riddle and I needed to unravel it to find my place in the world. And there was deep meaning in everything.

I have a vivid memory of one night in the cell singing this Cure song, “The Lovecats,” and conjuring up visions of all my friends, and feeling such a deep love for everyone. Do you know the song? Here are some of the words:

We move like caged tigers
Oh, we couldn't get closer than this
The way we walk
The way we talk
The way we stalk
The way we kiss
We slip through the streets
While everyone sleeps
Getting bigger and sleeker
And wider and brighter
We bite and scratch and scream all night
Let's go and throw
All the songs we know...

Into the sea
You and me
All these years and no one heard
I'll show you in spring
It's a treacherous thing
"We missed you", hissed the lovecats.

It made so much sense to me, the words came alive in the midst of my mad love story. Tonight, spontaneously, 22 years later, while I was putting the kids to bed I started singing The Lovecats to them. The melody just poured out of my mouth and I just felt this incredible joy. Our kids are so beautiful. Their big eyes and wild hair and strong little bodies. I get to slip into their little fantasy worlds all the time, I get to be a character in their story. I put them in their cribs and and gave them bottles and they stared at me, this big giant dad creature singing a goofy love song to them before I turned out the lights.

Just for a minute while you’re reading these words I want you to reflect with me on these two parallel realities: in one I’m considered a dangerous psychiatric patient who is being forced to take injections of medicine and held in a cage. In the other I get to be a therapist during the day, I’m in a loving relationship with a woman, and we have two beautiful children together. I hold these realities together and there is great power in the unity. I’m not making it up, this is a true story.

There are a lot of people who have the kind of psychotic experiences I’ve had that never come out of them. The real world is just too painful and it’s easier to live in a cracked fantasy. Then there are a lot of people who have the kind of experiences I’ve had that manage to make their way back to consensus reality but they exile whole parts of their inner worlds to the shadows because they threaten the integrity of their constructed realities.

Somehow, because of some combination of luck and hard work, I seem to be able to cross back and forth between the worlds. It’s a bit like having control of one’s dreams. I’m not always lucid, but I know how to get there. Knowing the paths across the shame rivers is key. I’ve come to understand shame as a protective force. Often underneath the shame is some really intense old pain. Shame is a way to keep the system from breaking down that inevitably outlives its usefulness.

Also, and I think this is important, I still hold a lot of space for complex stories. I still believe in the epic love story. I think all the imaginary characters are actual aspects of myself. The main thing I’ve learned to not get confused into thinking that all the stories are actually about me. That’s the big mistake people diagnosed bipolar often make. We confuse our egos with the Universe.

Anyway, I have to clean the apartment and get all the clothes and food ready for tomorrow and we were up at 4am but I just wanted to get this thought down before it slipped away. With mad love,

Sascha

(Photo taken this morning. “Black sheep, black sheep, what do you see?”)