I step into the small convenience store located at the entrance of the Garland building after my appointment. It’s a few feet away from the elevator and can't be any bigger than 100 square feet. I generally get anxious waiting in large, open spaces alone so I’m either pretending to be occupied on my phone or I make sure I’m not the first to arrive. I slowly scan the two aisles as I wait for the Uber app to tell me that a driver is arriving. I’m pretending to search hard for a specific treat even though I already know I want the KitKat and Mamba that I'm already holding.
I check out with these two items as the Uber app pings. I take a quick, short jog to the vehicle because it’s raining outside. Rain always makes me laugh and think about my father. He would tell me that I wouldn't melt whenever I would dramatically sprint to the nearest dry spot. I've always hated the rain. It was something about my whole body being wet at once that made my skin crawl. I still wash my hair in the kitchen sink or bathtub before my showers on (hair) wash days.
I call Kenny as soon as I get into the back seat of the car. Kenny is my boyfriend at the time who lives in London. My friends insist that he's not a real boyfriend whenever I turn down advances to entertain local men. I really crush on Kenny. The majority of this is due to the fact that anything he says sounds sexy coming out in his accent that's equal parts Nigerian and British. I love his patience with me which is probably attributed to him being 10 years my senior.
I met Kenny when I was in Vegas for my brother Mario's 31st birthday a month prior. Mario and I had gone to Vegas the year before and planned to make this a yearly sibling tradition. I was at a party where TI was performing when him and I met. Joanna (Drogba) by Afro B. was my song of the summer and Kenny came to ask if I'd sit at his table with him as I continued to sing the lyrics loudly. He asked me if I was Nigerian and I answered with my classic response of, “No, I’m regular black.” I spent the rest of the Vegas trip glued to Kenny.
Presently on the phone, Kenny wants me to tell him everything that occurred at the appointment over our Whatsapp video call. I tell him about my BPD2 diagnosis and how I have so many mixed feelings towards it. There's a bad stigma towards people who are bipolar and I have my own hesitance to it as well.
“I don’t know how I feel... I mean.. I guess it makes sense. Lee specifically told me that I'm bipolar type 2/mixed mood since I’ve never had any extremes,” I tell Kenny. There were a handful of character traits that overlapped with ADHD so I can understand how Wendy misdiagnosed me. I was having overwhelming racing thoughts when I thought that it was just me struggling to focus. I didn’t realize that some of my other personality quirks could be attributed to something so specific. I always joked that my ability to maintain three different conversations at one time with one person was my fake super power. Some people would tell me that they were “lost” whenever I jumped back and forth as they tried to keep up. I attributed my rapid, uninterruptible speech as me being long winded and a fast talking Chicagoans.
I fixate on things and will OVER educate myself on things that bother or interest me until I can basically teach a class on the subject. I once watched two documentaries on cats the night I adopted Kit and Kat. As soon as I get out of this Uber I plan on going upstairs to connect my phone to the charger so that I don’t run out of battery while I research BPD2. I quickly find multiple behavioral descriptions that parallel my “quirks”. My mother is also diagnosed bipolar and I read that this disorder tends to skip a generation so I’m questioning her diagnosis of it. She has a long history of drug abuse so her behaviors and personality make it difficult to really diagnose or even deal with her.
Dr. Lee wrote me a prescription for Lamictal and told me that I would either hate it or love it. I loved it! The morning after I took the medicine for the first time was equivalent to the first time I put on eye glasses. You don't realize that you don’t see clearly until you’re looking up and see the individual leaves on the trees instead of green or brown blurs. It was amazing! I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was able to REALLY hear and process music lyrics the next morning. I had just turned left to merge onto the Dan Ryan going South from Garfield Blvd when music became poetry as the words began to flow together. It was no longer just catchy, fast talk. I could now understand why some artists were described as 'lyricists'. I know that saying I could hear for the first time sounds silly and exaggerated but it’s not. Talk about “Brain on Fire!” I always jokingly tell people that I can hear better when I read the captions.
My inability to focus concern fell under the category of “racing thoughts”. The world was so much quieter. I stopped spending half of my days overthinking every interaction and premeditating multiple possible outcomes. I stopped interpreting what I thought people really meant regardless of what was said. My relationships with friends, family, and significant others improved tremendously. I tolerated being around children for longer periods of time since I wasn’t overwhelmed so easily. I no longer needed to drink so much in social settings to calm my nerves and loosen up. No one noticed at a Friendsgiving one year that I had only been drinking water until I was reluctant to take a birthday shot. I was called out by the girl making the toast and had to swap my water for alcohol. The list goes on..
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