A Companion Called Fred

It's like a cardiac arrest, only it happens in the brain - something responsible for holding the gray mass together abruptly shifts, there is a sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen, and next thing your head is experiencing the awful sensation of being emptied out. From somewhere inside the power goes down and the body seems to collapse into itself like a marionette being folded into a box. You look for a way out, and what's left of your broken brain does its best to oblige with images of high bridges and frozen ponds and nooses dangling from balconies.

In January this year when my family brought me to the emergency room at our local hospital I could never imagine eleven months later that I'd be writing about anything I had to be thankful for, much less paying tribute to this beast inside that sent me there in the first place, the one that goes by two names, both of them woefully inadequate: manic depression and bipolar.

May as well call the thing Fred, as far as I'm concerned.

For most of my life, Fred has been my constant traveling companion, even as I denied his existence and tried so hard to pretend I was a master of my own fate. I'm normal! I kept insisting over and over, much to Fred's quiet amusement.

Twenty-one years ago I was well on the way to proving it. After all those wasted years at the mercy of the very condition I denied having, I landed on my feet in New Zealand. I had successfully completed my second year of law school there, and I was married with a beautiful three-month-old daughter. There had been some other Americans in our birthing classes and we invited them over, together with another Kiwi-Yank couple we knew, to celebrate Thanksgiving. I recall lifting my glass to make a toast, but then words failed me.

We were seated on cushions on the floor with the turkey and all the fixings on a low table. But the stars of the show were the new citizens of planet earth. I looked at the proud parents and their newborns and all the baby paraphernalia they had brought, and simply choked out, "thanks".

Life was beautiful.

Little did I realize in ten years I would find myself in another country, broke and alone and unemployable and in search of a convenient bridge to jump off. I couldn't blame it all on Fred. Besides, Fred has a way of convincing you he doesn't exist.