Lisa Mizan's "I Hate You Don't Leave Me"

I cannot outrun my insanity.

When I walk down the hallways of our century home, down to the basement where we store all our forgotten possessions, I can feel it creeping up behind me. I am a slow individual, always have been, and the grasp of my illness walks faster than I can run. It finds me wherever I go. It finds me and then it gets a hold of me. I know it has when I can feel the world numb all around me. The colours, all those magnificent shades, begin to falter.

——

It was the summer of 1997 when my family and I moved to the Dalloway estate five kilometers outside of Winnipeg. My mother, my insane mother, needed solitude and to be away from the noise and uneasiness of city life. She sold our humble cottage in the St. Boniface neighbourhood, put my sister and I in a school north of the city that would be closer to our new home, and in the midst of it also separated from our father when he didn’t support her very sudden and unusual change of mind.

“The hustle and bustle makes me crazy,” she would say to us over family dinner.

“Like you’re already not crazy,” I would think to myself.

My mother was Type I Bipolar and we, her family, were more aware of that than she was. Her psychotic episodes were wiped off her memory once she came back to stable reality and thus, we were left to deal with the emotional residue of them. Her most recent one, that took place the first night in our new home. Shaken from our beds and still in our nightclothes, our mother, our insane mother, made us sit in our blue Honda Civic for three straight hours claiming our father was going to set our new house on fire. Afraid that we would trigger an exacerbated reaction, my sister and I put up with my mother’s whimpers by silently sitting at the back of the car and going to bed only when she allowed. It was 4 a.m. and I dug my face into the coolness of my pillows and let my mind jump onto a train of thought regarding my very own struggle with mental health in the past year.

Hereditary. That was the word my psychiatrist Dr. Picoult had used when describing my behaviour in the last year. He explained to me how mental illness can have genetic roots, and that one related to an afflicted individual should take caution. The psychologist at the unit, a treatment center for children and adolescents, had made me fill out a pile of tests. Dr. Picoult had already seen me twice but he wanted me to visit the psychologist, Dr. Narduzzi, for a more extensive examination of my case. I had found the whole process rather tiresome. I was admitted to the Child and Adolescent Treatment Center after I threatened to kill myself in front of my Biology teacher and was immediately regretting it by the time I was put into my hospital pyjamas. Honestly, I didn't mean it. Not really. When I said, “I will kill myself,” I was just wanting Ms. Patel to comply with my wishes of not wearing my lab coat in the laboratory. Afterall, my mother, my insane mother, always did it to my father.

“You won’t bump up my life insurance?”

“I will kill myself.”

“You won’t leave behind your whole life and move with me to the middle of nowhere so I can spend the rest of my life haunting the house with my hallucinations and catatonia?”

“I will kill myself.”

But she did not kill herself. And that is not exactly what she said. But I am imagining it that way in my head. In fact, the divorce seemed to have had a great impact on her. She won custody and most of the shared assets. She was soon dating a dashing man named Steve whom she referred to as “Pumpkin Spice” much too often. The doctors had asked me if the divorce had any effects on me. And I flatly said “No.” It did not. Didn’t bother me at all actually. The only hint of emotion I had felt throughout the whole ordeal was annoyance.

Annoyance at the amount of times both our parents’ lawyers asked me questions regarding the nature of my relationship with them. Annoyance at having to spend time in two different houses. Annoyance when my father would break down in tears in front of family gatherings. Annoyance when I saw my friend Samantha and her perfectly whole and unbroken family cheer her up at volleyball tournaments.

Then they asked me if I had a hard time feeling emotions at all. See, that was a hard one to answer. I racked my brain and told them no, that I felt emotions all right. Annoyance is, after all, an emotion. But I wasn’t sure if that was completely honest. When I was five, my best friend Cassandra and I went shell collecting by the Gimli Harbour. We came across a small baby blue bird that seemed to have fallen out of its nest and left crippled. I felt a strong urge to help that bird. Cassie suggested we call her mom to see what she can do, but the bird needed help then, not later. I took out one of my sharper shells and put it through the baby bird’s chest. Liquid rubies flooded out like a waterfall. I looked at Cassie’s face; white and full of disbelief at what I’d done.

“Why would you do that?? Are you crazy?” she screamed at me, tears rolling down her chubby pink cheeks.

“Now it doesn’t have to feel the pain anymore,” I replied.

I took Cassie's hand and told her that I love her and that I love nature and that I also love birds. I told her that the baby bird is now in heaven with all the other creatures of this world who didn’t make it. And asked her not to tell her mom. She seemed reassured and walked back with me to our beach mat. As we lay down basking in a rare sunny day like that in Manitoba, I thought about how it felt to do what I had done. The rush of an indescribable feeling that overwhelmed my otherwise numb being. So, when I looked into Dr. Lint’s eyes when he asked me if I had a hard time feeling emotions, I knew that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t hard to kill the bird nor was it hard to feel its aftermath.

I spent a total of 225 hours in that unit. I, at 17, was the oldest you could be regarding admission, so I found myself surrounded by kids who were either too young for me or ones who were too sick for me to want to fraternize with. I left on a Tuesday morning and threw the “Gratitude Exercise” sheet one of the social workers had stuffed into my hands out the window of my mother’s car. My mother, my insane mother, wasn’t happy that she got called into the school counsellor’s office regarding my suicidal threats. She spent the car ride back home in complete silence, as if the confrontation of me having a possible mental illness was reminding her of her own inner demons.

After that admission I found myself increasingly detached from the material world. I didn’t want to be friends with people who thought I was strange. I didn’t want to be around girls who weren’t as pretty and slim and as smart as me. That meant a goodbye to Cassandra. I met a boy too. Tyler was stocky and blonde and knew how to write poems. He also did a lot of drugs. Cocaine was his main thing. He worshipped it, breathed it, loved it more than he loved me. I wanted him to love me as much as he loved that white powder. One day I asked him to let me try some with him. He hesitated but complied after I offered him a blowjob. It also struck me then that Tyler was a slacker and not as attractive as me and that perhaps I should think of dating someone of my calibre. But, regardless, I wanted his validation.

I don’t remember much after the first high except for a whirlwind of colours and noises. Substance-induced psychosis, that is what the doctor on call had said it was when I woke up in the emergency room of St. Boniface Hospital. I had apparently gone off into a frenzy of haptic and visual hallucinations that scared the living soul out of Tyler. Children on fire, my mother chasing me, some other nonsense. In the midst of it I threatened to kill myself and threw a knife at Tyler that, thankfully, missed. I was discharged in a few hours, but not without seeing the psychiatrist first.

“Miss Helgason, your MRI came out and looks like there are no physical abnormalities that we need to be worried about. Neurologically, you are also fine. However, our blood work has shown some questionable chemicals and substances, and I am here to talk to you about that,” Dr. Shunmugam said as he pulled out a chair next to my hospital bed.

“What do you want to know? There isn’t much to say other than I was just having fun, I am not addicted or anything,” I replied apprehensively.

“Well, I can see that you are not dependent, yet, but what you did was still dangerous. We found cocaethylene in your system, you were drinking while using drugs. That is incredibly dangerous and you are lucky you are alive considering how feeble your body is”

I felt irritated when he said that my body was feeble. It was slim and tall - not weak.

“What medications are you currently on, Miss Helgason?”

“I am on Venlafaxine and Quetiapine.”

“What were they prescribed for?”

“Borderline Personality Disorder and Mania.”

“When were you diagnosed?”

"In the Spring at the Child and Adolescent Treatment Center by Dr. Lint.”

“Are you suicidal? Have you thought of harming yourself?”

“No, doctor. I just wanted to have fun; I have threatened suicide before without meaning it. I am just fine and dandy,” I lied.

Dr. Shunmugam drilled me with some more questions and left me with a discharge note and a prescription for Lamotrigine. I put on my coat and stepped outside the gates of the emergency room. A beautiful autumn’s day. I pulled into a cab, closed my eyes, and thought about all the wonderful things in life. The smell of fresh parchment and mint toothpaste. The sound of my sister’s laughter. The touch of my cat Crookshanks’ ginger fur. The sight of my mother coming home with pizza because she is going through her depressive phase. The taste of Erik’s lips against mine.

I thought of those sensations again as I brought myself back to the present inside the warmth and stability of my bedroom. I had made a habit of practising positive emotions when I felt negative ones overwhelming me. My mother and her erratic behaviour often triggered me and this psychotic episode of hers was putting me at my breaking point. It didn’t help learning that she may be one of the reasons why I am this ill. I had attempted to find meaning in my relationship with my mother - the vestiges of a once loving and fulfilling relationship. But it was fruitless. All I could find now was my resentfulness against her for how her unstable behaviour had affected the lives of her family members. Her illness had infected us all with its unpredictability and shaped our day to day lives where we had to walk on eggshells. I wondered if my disease were to one day grow into something that contagious.

——

The way to Dr. Rumi’s office in the Psychiatric Ward of the Health Sciences is easy to remember. Enter the unit and then say hi to the receptionist. Go straight down the hallway and pass that permanent patient with Tourette’s after which you take a right. Walk down the staircase, 10 steps total in case you are hallucinating and can’t tell, and then walk straight towards the blue door. There sits the man who has put sense into my life. As if he extracted all my emotions and put them into neatly labelled drawers. To tell him how much I appreciated him I painted his wrinkled and kind face onto one of my handmade canvases. Blue strokes around his grey hair to reflect the melancholy of the man. A sunflower inside his lapel. His hand is held out in benediction, for he has blessed me with a new beginning.

——

I never stopped painting after that. My art became my solace. I could put intangible feelings into tangible realities. Two years later, I had stacked up to 1200 paintings in the basement of my house. All shades from the rainbow poured into my home, breathing in life and hope. My nightmares stopped too. I think it was because I started to dream my paintings and then paint my dreams too. I painted his face, my mother’s too. I painted that baby blue bird and that black cat. I painted Tyler and his cocaine and Cassandra when she was young and still my friend. I painted loss and change and the transition of my life like they were seasons. In the end, it all fell into place.