Read Online Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher - Free Book Online Page B

forget! My mother wants you all to know this comes from my father’s side. She’s as normal as the day is long.
    But imagine this though. Imagine having a mood system that functions essentially like weather—independently of whatever’s going on in your life. So the facts of your life remain the same, just the emotional fiction that you’re responding to differs. It’s like I’m not prop erly insulated—so all the bad and the good ways that you and most of the people in adjacent neighborhoods and around the world feel—that pours directly into my system unchecked. It’s so fun. I call it “getting on my grid” or ESP: Egregious Sensory Protection.
    But ultimately I feel I’m very sane about how crazy I am.
     
    But periodically I do explode. Now the good thing about this is that over time, the explosions have gotten smaller and the recovery time is faster, but what is guaranteed is that I will explode. So what I do, because I’m a good hostess (except for the Greg thing)—I provide my guests with bibs. So they don’t get my crazy juice all over their nice clothes.
    You know how most illnesses have symptoms you can recognize? Like fever, upset stomach, chills, whatever. Well, with manic-depression, it’s sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse—and that just sounds like a fantastic weekend in Vegas to me!
    Oh! This’ll impress you—I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?
    But when I was told about the textbook, I was told I was in there with a photo.
    And I said, “Huh? What photo???”
    It’s not like anyone ever called me and said, “Have you got a little snapshot of yourself looking depressed or manic?” (Like from my show, for example.)
    So for years I wondered—what picture?
    Well, I have excellent news. Recently I found the picture, and rather than describing it to you, would you like to see it? Because I really want to show it to you.
    So I’m not crazy, that bitch is. Anyone who would wear a hairstyle like that has to be nuts! Right?
    Having received word at an early age that the rest of my life was going to be challenging (at least at very odd intervals), I started seeing a shrink when I was fifteen. The first was recommended to me by Joan Hacket, and he was a psychologist and not a psychiatrist. (Psychiatrists are medical doctors as well as the rest of the psycho stuff. So they’re better trained to diagnose mental illness and—oh so much more importantly—prescribe medication for it.) In any case (so to speak), this doctor failed to diagnose my manic depression. Though one day, after I’d been seeing him for many years, he suddenly asked if I’d been hyperactive as a child. Yeah, right
    and I’d just somehow forgotten to mention a little thing like that. I mean, it wasn’t as if I had an endless supply of life struggles to discuss with him at that point. Although surely adolescence is a struggle in and of itself—but not so much so that I’d somehow forgotten to mention my hyperactivity. But I think that my first doctor saw something in me that was amiss but as to what that something was, for that moment, would remain a mystery.
    My second doc knew exactly what was up (and down) with me. And though generally it’s useless to di agnose someone as bipolar who is engaged in ingesting large quantities of drugs or alcohol—which I was—because drug addiction and alcoholism, done properly of course, classically mimics the symptoms of manic-depression.
    So when I was twenty-four years old, Dr. Barry Stone told me that it was his utterly professional opinion that I was hypomanic, also known as bipolar one, which is the lesser version of manic depression—excessively moody—as opposed to bipolar two—excruciatingly moody, which includes the occasional hallucination and lockup ward visits. As it turns out, I was ultimately determined to be the