Rahla Xenopoulos - A Memoir of Love and Madness. Living with Bipolar Disorder

Published by Zebra Press
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg. No. 1966/003153/07
80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town, 8001

PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.zebrapress.co.za

First published 2009

Publication Zebra Press 2009

Text Rahla Xenopoulos 2009

Cover photograph Jonathan Harris

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

ISBN 978 1 77020 025 8 (Print)

ISBN 978 1 77022 189 5 (ePub)

ISBN 978 1 77022 190 1 (PDF)

To Jason ... my beginning, my middle, my everlasting

pninadavidgigijonty-lviahgerald,

the Fenster family for their divine inspiration and humour

The triplets, Gidon Greg, Layla Tallulah and Samuel Jacob,

my daily reminder that there is a God and that miracles do occur

Anne,

the angel of my every word

Shauna, Mary, Ronel and Roxanne,

my shepherds

Dr Leigh Janet,

for introducing me to life in this world

Rahla has a very serious disorder I know from personal experience, when she set fire to my closest friend. It is a miracle she was able to lift a pen rather than swallow it. So, just for being able to sit up for so long, I think she deserves to sell if not one, then at least three of her books. Please, I beg you to help her she might be a genius. Considering shes nuts, she can write like a dream.

As someone who comes from the dark side mentally, she makes me feel not so alone.

Ruby Wax

Its 4 a.m. and my brain is buzzing, ideas swarming and galloping through my head, bombarding me with their imagined brilliance. Ive been up all night, writing poetry and dancing to the Waterboys The Whole of the Moon. Ive tried phoning everyone I know, but everyone I know is asleep. All around me is silence even the birds are silent an overwhelming stillness that provides a startling counterpoint to the hullabaloo going on inside my brain. Theres no one out there, no one can touch me, I fly too high, I wear a shield of mania.

Just a few days later and I crash into darkness, a resounding fall. Thud. No poems, no ideas, no energetic dances. Nothing inside me but the ache of sadness, stagnant, silent, reverberating from my stomach throughout my body. Each sound, the tip-tap of the dogs paws on wooden floors, the phones incessant ringing, the whoosh of passing cars, every sound is an assault, a shrill shriek puncturing my fractured nerves, flaying them raw. Im shut away in a place too dark, too narrow for anyone else to enter. I crouch behind a macabre wall of pain that no one can penetrate. I am empty, desolate and utterly alone.

I cant say that bipolar disorder has made my life easy, but it has educated me, and it has certainly humbled me. Its made me vulnerable and forced me to tell the truth at times when lies would have tripped more willingly from my lips.

But sickness is our cure. On days when Ive thought, So this is it, surely now I cant take another breath, Ive discovered that illness comes with inner resources and a strength that none of us knows we have until life forces us to find them. It has cured me of inertia and it has compelled me to live a healthy, disciplined life. It has thrown me into violent chaos and forced me to be a serious person, when I wanted to be a homecoming queen.

Some days, regardless of the weather, it has compelled me to see gloomy grey clouds outside my window and on other days, it has had me, a mad person, flying about, chasing summers long since past. So, while sickness certainly has not been a pleasant companion these past forty years, it has somehow been poetic.

This book is about a girl who grew up in a warm and eccentric family of brilliant people always committed to helping her. Even when no one knew what was actually wrong with her, they carried her through anorexia, bulimia, episodes of unmanageable mania and financial ruin. They held her close through deep depression, three suicide attempts and years of self-mutilation.

It is also the story of a girl who fell in love with a tall, dark stranger from a faraway land, a stranger whose arms became her home a home in which she danced, sang out loud (with an abominable voice), cried even louder, laughed, and struggled for years to have a child.

This is the story of a girl who was on Ritalin from the age of seven, who had dyslexia and remedial problems and was hyperactive. After failing two years, she dropped out of high school to become a career psychiatric patient. But then, of course, love arrived, as did a doctor with the correct diagnosis, a combination of drugs that worked and, finally, the call of blank pages that wanted words on them.

In the story that follows theres no rigidly chronological structure. It is a collection of the themes of my life, because this is how my mind works, how I remember things. Now I fear the time has come for me to read whats already been written, and Im afraid Ill be put off writing because of the awkwardness of the sentence structure, the clunky vocabulary and the frivolous self-centredness. My trembling hand will never again find the page. Its such a tenuous thread, the yarn that keeps me writing, as tenuous as my link to sanity. But then the sun comes out, the camellias blossom and the empty page beckons.

Dont be fooled into thinking that this story about madness is a sad one. No its about love and happy endings! I wasnt a writer when I set out to write this book; I was just a girl, at times too sad to brush my teeth, at times too insane to eat. At times I was amused, but always I was in love and, most of the time, I was grateful.

Popular psychology teaches us to aspire to a state of balance. How to do this has always confounded me, because theres no balance in the known world. Not in its seasons or geography, or even in our very bodies with their strange biorhythms and propensity for growth. Life doesnt meander along on a well-balanced, staid path. For the best and the boldest of us, its a hell of an unpredictable ride.

This is in no way an apology for the structure, or lack thereof, in my life, but the truth is, as much as Id like to have written a neat, concise story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, well, my life just hasnt afforded me one. Instead, my life continues on its insanely, predictably unpredictable path. Dreams fail me, and dreams come true.