I I am riding back from dinner and a movie with Elizabeth Vega. She is forty five and speaks to me about all the things that have happened to her in the last five years. I notice a yin yang pattern, an oxymoron of life and death, in the things that she tells me. At forty she broke up with a man of a five year relationship; she fell in love with another man. She became a grandmother; her grandmother died. I interrupt her, caught up in my own 1 AM thoughts.
“Elizabeth? Do you think I ever will fall in love?” I begin explaining my question over a context of relationships and people. She knows me well enough to pin a truth on me.
“You’ve got to be open to it.” It is so easy to splash the truth on the face of someone else like icy cold water. I am closed. I hide so much. I lie every second, not in what I say, but in what I don’t say.

II Now I am sitting on my bed with butterfly bended knees, with a laptop keeping my feet warm. When we were in the theater, I was thinking at a thought that has been growing in my mind. I healed myself. I had so much help along the way. Overcoming bipolar disorder as much as I have has taken such a combination of drugs and factors, of people watching their little sister, their little girl, their friend do things that made them wonder for years where their girl had gone. And all along, I was required to grow up, as is forced on the 18 year old with the mindset of a child. So yes! Much of my survival was my sister and brother keeping me on a remote farm cove house, naively hoping I would drop out of it. People who knew me in all of my personal shapes and sizes looked at me then and said I was gone. Mental illness is something that takes a lot to understand. After the hospital, I felt they looked at me differently, with stigma. When people return from war, we are so much different. I was changed. They did their best. And so did I. I healed myself. Without my medicines and support, I would never have made it. But without my determination, my love of life, my prayers and hospital yoga, I would have cut myself to pieces like so many people. I was hospitalized for four episodes, if I count right, and I am proud to say that I lied every time when I entered the hospital. People must be suicidal or homicidal to be admitted there. I never gave up on myself, and fortunately, found a path past that violent anger.
When I was hospitalized, my priorities were smartly set. I needed to fix my mental state at all physical costs. The medicines were not good for my body. I grew strict with myself strict in many ways. I was so afraid of losing my mind again, that I kept my virginity. I kept my body clean of coffee until about three years ago. I had been to Costa Rica where huge tracts of rain forests are lush and protected with easements. I had a contract with myself, an attempt to keep sane and stable. I would make straight A’s at the college there. I would do nothing social. Even when my friends found me, when a band of anarchists came my way, I maintained a straight edge. Even when I took breaks from school, semesters, years at a time, I went to bed by midnight. I would not compromise with my need for nine hour nights. I rose with the sun. I did not see chocolate chips or greasy foods as involved at all in my mental well being. I grew twice my original size. I was for a long time afraid to crack a joke. I was for a long time afraid to laugh, afraid of my mania, afraid of who I was, of who I could be. Children made me nervous. I started to drive a Honda Accord with three colors of rust. I slapped stickers on the bumper. A series of stickers that have faded or that I peeled off for change. My mother bought me the car so I could commute to college. I never bought her anything significant. Nothing up to the scale of what she gave me. I lived with my mother for years. I resented her because the house was small. I resented her when I learned the best thing for my insomnia was to write the night through. Living there made me unstable, but it was not my mother’s fault at all. I was largely unstable from my deep paranoia of being out of control.
I called the car she gave me Independence because that was what I wanted deep inside. But I had no idea how to achieve it.

III. I am so hard to contain, so stubborn and willful. But for years I lacked the kind of independence that risks laughing at the expense of worrying family people I might develop a mania. I got my first adult friend, a woman my age who knew what to tell me to help me grow. Until that time, my relationships were so stunted, unequal, full of conversations with only one person talking. She made me listen and asked challenging questions. Out of love. I joked that I could pay her for these therapeutic phone calls. It felt good to laugh. We earned about the same amount of money then, and I did pay her a few times for her labor of love.
I picked up another friend, a mother of an eight and a six year old. Both friendships have the air of permanence for me. I began learning how to be socially normal. I embraced my differences.
I did an internship where I learned about my capabilities. There were things I had written off as possible. Like coffee late in the evening, or letting my insomniac energy roam. There were three other women all growing in their own manner and capacity. I developed some interpersonal conflicts. Being so isolated there with them on that mountain top did not help. Meditation Rock changed my views of things, for sure, if just for the green rolling valley it exposed to me. I loved to go there and listen to chickadees. I learned to be wild, as one of four women dancing in the nude, playing baseball with the other employees, stealing Lauren’s ice cream from the refrigerator and watching her liquored up, vulgar reaction, being verbally coached by Lauren and Dylan on pleasurable masturbation, supporting a tearful Tessa when I did not know I had it in me, withdrawing emotionally, surviving.

IV.
When I bought the painting, Jeff Enge gave me the first good pot he ever threw. I called it my Winnie the Pooh pot until, of course, when it shattered on the pavement that same evening. I knew the symbolism immediately when it fell and broke. I had just impulsively purchased a 300 dollar painting. It meant to me that I needed to take care of myself. I know now that means my whole self, especially my body.
The wise people I know always told me about my need for holistic healing, holistic being. I cannot say that I have solved that riddle yet. I need to take care of myself, for sure. But how do I best go about doing that, when my body craves red meat and soda and my once sacred spirituality is caught in a fight against proselytizing Christianity. I healed myself – to a point. But I did not heal myself entirely yet. However, tonight, I unwrapped Elizabeth’s riddle. We saw a movie about a young boy seeking out something that was not real or plausible. Yet, the boy found it in himself. He found his strength and his love and his compassion.
My life too is a riddle, with that general conclusion. I hold the lock. I don’t have the key. I walk by myself in this little town of thought and paper. I can only solve one riddle a day. I don’t have the answer here, yet. How can a latch learn to open?