i. here, then

(freefalling)

 

The first time I was a prophet, I glimpsed heaven and saw hell in it. Wandering, lost in the woods behind my best friend’s house in Michigan, on my first winter break in the US. An otherworldly entity had called me, and I answered her prayers. I saw the stars and their patterns were my braille; the touch of my fingers gave them meaning. The trees sang to me and I knew to be quiet and to listen. I walked between the trees and pressed my palms to their trunks and felt their song move through me. The leaves beating against each other in the breeze building a rhythm only meant for me.

I smoked my cigarettes like they were offerings. I wore my red sweater and it felt like a warning. My skin touching the material that clothed it screamed in protest. Like a scab picked off, I was raw and tender and vulnerable.

All I was trying to do was to hold on to the magic and to stay alive. How can one live in the danger of this enchantment? I hungered for touch and burned under its fingertips. My skin on fire, my brain on fire. I wanted to write it all down (& I did) and none of it made sense.

I spoke in tongues, my nonsensical name, my always sin. My eyes were bright. They saw the world within the world on the edges of sanity and leapt off its cliffs. My eyes swallowed my whole face, bottomless seas in the mirror. Alien even to me. Unattainable, insatiable.

I wanted to touch everything. I wanted nothing to touch me. Starved for affection, I clawed at myself and called it love. I let strange men claw at me and called it nothing. Only after the comedown did I realize that I meant none of it, and that all of it was all of me. This body possessed; she had my voice, my face, my otherworldly eyes but she was someone else. She was me but I wasn’t her.

*** 

When I’m not dancing with madness, I am a fairly responsible person. On the right combination of medication, I am able to function in a society rigid with expectations. I pay my bills on time and show up to work early. I don’t miss appointments. I take my meds every day as prescribed. I go to therapy. I see my psychiatrist regularly. I feel and behave like an adult.

As the eldest of five children, my parents bestowed responsibility upon me like a birthright. Caring for my siblings as a child raised me to be a cautious person. Much of my life is shaped by the anxiety inherent in taking care of small children.

My overprotective and conservative parents left me with a dearth of ways to express myself and my creativity. I discovered writing as an outlet very young and have been writing feverishly for as long as I can remember, pursued by and in pursuit of words that made sense. That could make sense of my life. In a household where I was actively discouraged from self-expression, I danced with words, let them be my freedom.

I hope writing can save me. I write now, in earnest, trying to comprehend the urgency of this life stuttering and stopping and starting in manic episodes. This life that veered from track to track as I immigrated and found my feet in a new and strange world.

***

For years I lost my mind, delirious, euphoric. My thoughts careening into each other too fast to catch. The earth speaking to me in her own language, whispers meant only for my ears. The spiderwebs and the stars and their secret tongues. For years I lost myself. Wandered into the woods and never came out.

There’s a girl that looks just like me between the trees. In a red sweater and a black wig. She knows my name but won’t tell me hers. She vibrates and falls down and falls up. She is still lost today. I hope I never find her. Which is to say, I wish I was her. Which is to say, the intoxicating mania made being bipolar feel like a superpower. And a curse.

***

Two months into my move to Chicago from the Emirates, a decade ago now, I went crazy. The cold of Chicago winters seeped into my bones, so vastly different from the year-round summers I grew up with. The first gray days, the first snowfall of my first ever winter, marking the threshold between sane and insane. Over the next few years, I ended up in the psych ward over and over, desperately trying to figure out a combination of medication that would still my mind. That would keep it from swinging wildly and violently from ecstatic euphoria to crippling fear and stifling sadness.

My mind moved too fast and I didn’t know how to get it under control. It was only after I had given up on a life not interrupted that my doctors and I landed on the right combination of pills.

Suddenly, blissfully, my mind, held gingerly in my skull, was stilled enough for me to put together a kind of life not constantly marked by strife.

During those years, pre-pandemic, the US had just granted me asylum, so I had more certainty about my future than I had when I was trying to figure out how to immigrate. I only knew that the Emirates wasn’t my home, but I wasn’t sure what was. My sudden stability made room for my brain to settle, for me to find sanity.

In my early years of sanity, on a too high dose of my lifesaving medications, I found myself having to choose between sanity and writing. For years I lived in the drought, words refusing to flow through my body. My stubborn brain stilted, my language contrived, forced. None of my doctors listened to me. I despaired in the face of a future without my constant companions and saving grace, my words.

I forced myself to write and hated it and myself. I wanted a clear head, I wanted stability, but I had to reckon with losing a part of myself I have always relied on to give me meaning, to define myself in my most generous attempts. It took me years to find a doctor who would listen, who would work with me on lowering the dose until I found the delicate balance between sanity and creativity.

 

ii.   there, then

(tripping)

 

My madness is not a curse. I am my madness. We are twined, we are one tapestry, we are the patterns in this holy fabric of life. It didn’t start at twenty-three, a few weeks after my move to Chicago—it was always there. That melancholy child. That girl that felt too much. Emotions like boulders, unstoppable, forceful. Unrelenting, constant. Always swept up in the violent frenzy. Up and down and up and down.

I see the traces of the adult manifestations of my madness in my childhood and teen years. My parents, teachers, and peers dismissed my feelings as frivolous or unnecessary. If it weren’t for the force with which I felt them, I would have walked away too.

***

“Let your emotions wash over you like a wave,” Faisal always used to say. Faisal, who was my therapist and mentor from my late teens to early twenties. I remember how furious I was hearing him say that. But it’s not a wave! It’s a fucking tsunami!

“Anger, fear, happiness, and sadness,” he would say. “All emotions boil down to those four feelings.” He wrote it on his business card and handed it to me during our first session, thirteen years ago.

It was the first thing he taught me.

He died four years ago.

I remember him in his clichés, the sayings he used to love to say to me.

“This too shall pass.”

“The only way out is through.”

I hated them, back then, in my late teens and furious at the world. Armed against its assault with a scowl. I was so angry at him. I wasn’t angry at him at all; I was angry at everyone else, and he was the only one that held space for my intense emotions.

***

The last time I saw Faisal, a decade ago, he gave me his copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, a book of quatrains by a poet known as the Astronomer-Poet of Persia. Faisal inscribed it with “To Rabha, on loan from the Faisal Memorial Library,” dated it “8/23/2016,” the day before I left for Chicago for good, and signed it with his name. He handed it to me.

“I love this book,” he said. “So you have to bring it back.”

“Of course!” I responded. I had every intention to come back. I was never supposed to be away this long.

I haven’t read it yet. If I read it, what else do I have left from Faisal, that death hasn’t taken away?

Faisal was the only one who saw me in all my intensity and fervor and saw something worthy of nurturing. He was so proud of my poems. He was so proud of me when I decided to move here. He wanted me to have a chance at a life not under my parents’ thumbs. He listened to me and cheered me on and encouraged me in a way no one has before or since.

***

Home is a thing in flux. Home isn’t a fixed point in space and time. Home shapes me and is shaped by me. I can find it in the most unlikely places. The kindness of strangers, someone’s bed, someone’s extra room.

I thought eventually the land of concrete and air conditioning would call me back. The hot stagnant air of the Emirates, its humidity, would wrap around me again, making it hard to breathe. The azure waves of the beaches that border its cities, the glass and metal skyscrapers, the smooth highways and clean new cars speeding between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the cities I have lived and grew up in. The athan five times a day, the sprawling malls, the thousand different tongues of immigrants from everywhere, the cigarette smoke on street corners, the sheesha cafes. My sisters, my sisters, my sisters. The threads of our lives that used to be intertwined, that have now been loosened by distance and time.

I am a home. As severed as I am from the home that built me, the life that I thought would always be mine, I am still a home to my dog, to my fiancé, to my friends. I am a homecoming. Home doesn’t have to be a structure, doesn’t have to live outside me. Home has always been uncomfortable, an exercise in trial and error. From my parents’ house, to my college dorms, to my parents’ house, to Chicago. Home has always frayed my edges, but without it I am without center.

When an exile, an immigrant, an asylee, you can’t claim what you left behind, as much as it makes up everything you are. You have to walk away, to redefine. To start over. Home has to be a loose definition, so that you are not deprived, but adjusting.

***

It is easy to say that I miss Faisal but hard to let the grief wash over me. My madness absorbs all the grief, and I know it will be waiting for me the next time I go crazy. My brain strains at the weight. I feel the madness behind the wall, her hands pressing through it, an undeniable imprint. The distance asylum and exile had put between Faisal and me for years dulls the emotion, allows me to delude myself that he is home, alive, waiting for me to return one day. As though one day I will step off an airplane, and as the smell of humidity, petrol, and sea wash over me, I will find him on my phone, welcoming me back. He had been a refuge through my worst moments in the Emirates. His voice has guided me since. The voice in my head that still reassures me I can succeed, find stability, build a home.

In the fall, I am trying not to fall, and I’m prone to flying. When the trees paint themselves in the colors of sunsets, orange and yellow and red and burning. The madness lurks in every background of every moment I feel intense emotion.  I can see the bottomless ravine between my hard won moments of stillness, and I am afraid. What if I lose everything? What if I have no one left when I finally reemerge? What if I wake up to reality having lost this tenuous home, this small family I now call mine? My fiancé, my dog, my friends, my support system I have had to stitch together every day for a decade of estrangement from the family that had raised me.

This world doesn’t allow for the insane to indulge in their madness. Ignorant bystanders, lost friends, families that can’t handle the weight of this blessing turned burden. Doctors with a God complex, psych wards that strip the mad of our agency, insurance companies that don’t consider mental illnesses as diseases in need of treatment. Judicial systems that criminalize the poor and the crazy, employees that abandon at the first sight of inadequacy, at the first moment of inconvenience because of need. As long as I can hold this sanity in place, I can be allowed into polite society. But as I descend into insanity, my brain and this unjust world revoke my rights to a normal life. My madness is pathologized, stricken away, relegated to the dark corners, the in-between places that never become home.

But what if this madness is opening doors for me into unknown worlds full of miracles? Full of fear and danger, too, but I will not make a case against adventure. I will venture into these parallel lives, they all belong to me, I am all of them. I have seen the magic in the stars and the trees and I don’t want to go back to a time before it. This blessed curse that has shaped me, that has given me words and stories and inspiration. This brain that has endured in spite of and because. Without those lost years, I wouldn’t have found myself, found my voice. I wouldn’t have seen all the colors of the universe, the music behind and shaped by every sound. I wouldn’t have loved so fiercely and fought so unashamedly. I wouldn’t have found my feet on the ground after years of being lost in the woods.

Is this madness an ailment or just an altered state of being? I know the statistics on bipolar disorder. That 60% of us try to commit suicide at least once, with 15% to 17% succeeding in taking their own lives. That it is the sixth leading cause of disability in the world.  That it, as a psychiatrist during one of my hospitalizations told me, ruins lives.

“Mourn,” he had told me. “For the life you might never have.”

But I do have one. Here I am, living a full life.

 

iii. here, now

(landing)

 

I live in a perpetual state of waiting. Waiting for the next thing to happen. Waiting for my father to call me back, for my fiancé to come home, for my sister to pick up the phone. To hear back about the apartment, the job, the book. For the day to end. For the morning to come.

I live in anticipation, always looking for the next thing, step, move. Life is always incomplete.

Disaster is always forthcoming. Or release, salvation, resolution, closure. None of them exist in the now.

Always waiting to lose my mind again. Like a precarious ferocious thing on a fraying leash, it wanders, and tries to break free, but I swallow my five pills a day and pray for absolution. Pray for stability, for security, for something resembling sanity. Every fall I watch out for my falling with bated breath, but lately, my feet remain firmly on the ground. I am solid, unswayable. I am equal parts disappointed and relieved.

The allure of madness is hard to turn away from. It is living without living, living without having to participate in the mundane and the ordinary and the frankly boring. Madness lets me soar past the petty mechanisms of functioning in everyday society. It frees me from the shackles of interpersonal conflict and resolution.

I am flying, and nothing matters.

***

Lately, I am nowhere to be found. I am lost, scared, and overwhelmed. I have to participate in the everyday and it weighs me down. I’m no good at it. These nuts and bolts, slippery in my grasp, unyielding and obstinate, vex me. I fumble, I break things. And now, I don’t have the excuse of going crazy. I am solidly and undoubtedly here, sharing this reality, not running away into my own.

This sanity I have been in pursuit of for decades bores me. Leaves me missing the high highs, chasing after its phantoms. I want nothing to do with its reality, this waking, this alertness, these rules that don’t bend. These sure things that remain sure, inevitable.

Which is to say this habit of running away feels like a life sentence. Madness constantly tempts me with its magic, promising to take me away from my troubles, to make them simply disappear. But it’s an illusion. A delusion. Life keeps happening, crazy or not.

Consequences wait, they don’t go away, they lurk behind the excitement, and once it wears off, once the excitement inevitably runs out, the fire doesn’t go out on its own, but rages on undeterred.

***

It’s fall, I’m in the woods, and the trees hold their silence. Stoic in the face of insurmountable beauty and the countless risks we take every day in the name of living.