Label Me

Thursday, December 12, 2013

No matter what I accomplish in life, to my family, who watched me struggle with a mental health diagnosis from an early age, I will be a fuck-up. When I was 12 years old I swallowed an entire bottle of migraine medication and laid on my bed, waiting for the painless sleep to wash over me - naiive from to much television and looking for an escape. It hurt. It hurt so bad I cried out, I begged for a quicker death. I got the ER, an empty stomach, and a hospital stay. The moment they closed those thick metal double doors behind me as I shuffled to a room, shaking and wide eyed in blue paper scrubs, my fate was sealed. I was officially the family fuck up.

If I cry, Oh its just her bipolar. If I am angry or offended, it is just her bipolar. I enjoy sex, didn't you know that Bipolar patients are overly sexual? Its a impulse thing, I'm a medically certified whore. I respond sarcastically or defensively to something you've said, no matter how rude? Oh, I'm having a mood swing. Name a medicine, any medicine, I've tried it. I've been sat on and small beige pills forced down my throat. I've been threatened until I swallowed white horse pills dry, gagging on the chalky taste - scared of "the group home" which was my mother's favorite method to shut me up.

I'm a grown woman now, a full time college student with a 3.8 GPA, two small children, and two grown men who wouldn't know what to do with themselves if I stopped finding their keys, doing their laundry, and cooking their meals. I'm still a fuck-up. My aunts and mother joke that they should come teach me how to shop, how to cook. They make excuses for my bad attitude when I don't find their humor funny or I disagree. She can't help it, she's crazy.

I'm so tired of this label. Tonight I got in an argument with my sister she "jokingly" yelled down the hall way how it wasn't fair that we paused the movie so I could put my 6 year old to bed while my husband wrangled the baby. I told her she was being rude and it escalated, she went to storm out and I told her to just take her shit and go, I didn't have time for the bullshit. I was rude. I admit it. I was snappy. I told her she was being bitchy. " Fuck you, you bipolar cunt, take your meds." .........

Label me.