Right now she’s analyzing Musee des Beaux Arts, a poem about suffering and its consequences for the human condition. It’s a fairly straightforward work, but handholding is required if she’s going to get it done at all. The main focus of the poem is the Icarus myth, which mainly illustrates how much of a bad idea it is to tell a teenager what not to do; I’m sure that most people are familiar with the points of the story. If you’re not, you can read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus.

This story in particular has always struck a chord with me – being bipolar has always been like walking on that very thin line between burning up and drowning, and it’s difficult to keep balanced for long without falling. I refuse to use it as a crutch, but I can’t help but think that if this disorder weren’t a part of my life it would be much easier for me to function on a day-to-day basis. Even with the medication I’m taking, some days are just a struggle to get out of bed.

When the bad days happen, it’s almost painful that no one else can see it happening but me. Smiling and saying you’re fine apparently fills the empathy quota of others more fully than I’d thought. Similarly, when the mania comes it’s easy for people to just write you off as excited, while the feelings burn you up on the inside, make you stop sleeping, stop eating, stop everything but small caprices that no one will ever see completed. As long as you say ‘I promise, I’m okay’ no help will ever be forthcoming, unless you have some particularly concerned friends hanging over your shoulder right then.

The most painful part of all this is that without those extreme highs and extreme lows I have no idea who I really am. I’ve only just begun to define myself outside of this disorder and I’m nineteen. I should have done this ages ago and it scares me that I might not ever catch up.

And no one cares, because no one knows.

Auden was right – those old masters knew what the hell they were talking about.

Amy’s a nursing major, doing rounds at an old folks’ home. This means that conversations with her boyfriend are peppered with mind-breaking phrases to people like myself that listen sporadically to others’ phone calls.

“And I watched when he stuck the tube in, and then he squeezed the ball and the penis popped up!”

And that was the part where I choked on one of my trays.

I sit in the waiting room, holding an ice pack to the side of my face and talking to a skinny blonde girl with short hair that’s just come out from the back. A larger, heavyset black woman who is obviously some kind of social worker is watching our interaction carefully – from what I’ve been able to glean from the conversation, this woman lives in some kind of rehab facility, and the older woman is the person that’s babysitting her for the day.

It turns out the dentist can’t do a full mouth exam because according to my insurance plan I’m only allowed to have one every five years, so all they can do is take bitewing x-rays and hope they’ve found all the cavities that way. My dad’s medical plan has gotten a lot cheaper because of the economy, and I don’t really like the solutions that Obama and McCain have come up  with to make it better: socializing healthcare isn’t really something I want to do, but a $5,000 tax credit does jack shit for my family of six. That doesn’t even cover my healthcare – psychiatric support and eyeglasses are pretty expensive right now.

Since they’ve just managed to squeeze me in for a diagnostic visit today, I’m supposed to go back at 10 tomorrow morning to get the actual work done. They’re going to fit me for a night guard so I stop grinding my teeth (which only exacerbates the already existing problems), but it’s not covered fully by my insurance so I’ll have to cut down on extraneous expenses this week. I have carte blanche right now to spend more than I normally would because my grades, so far, have been superlative; I just don’t feel like making things for my family worse. I don’t even want to know how much we’ve lost in the past few weeks.

Here’s hoping that the dentist manages to fix my teeth in time for class, and that the local anasthetic doesn’t react negatively to any of my meds. I would hate to have to do this without.

It’s hard to find the right ones because the papers tend to blur together after you’ve been studying them for a while, and I only have fifteen minutes of review time between the end of the class period and the beginning of my exam; of course, having the two older women in the class talking directly into my ear is not helping my focused search.

So far, my classes have been going shockingly well – I have a 102% average in my Criminology course, and a 94 on my second midterm. I haven’t gotten the rest of them back yet, but I’m expecting 90′s all around. Because I’ve been slogging on the pre-med path for so long, doing well in classes again is somewhat shocking, and I’m trying not to let the success get to my head. The second part of the semester will, undoubtably, be much harder than the first – I’ll have papers and journals due, none of which I have begun yet.

I have an appointment with my psychiatrist tomorrow morning. I’m on medication right now, and a couple of them need to be tweaked, switched out, or stopped altogether. The new med, Zyprexa, has been making me very sick indeed, so to combat it he’s prescribed some kind of drug to make my insulin more effective, killing the ravenous appetite Zyprexa causes. Even though I’m not a science kid anymore, drug interactions are always kind of cool.

For now, though, I’ve managed to pull everything together. There are some organizational issues that I really do have to work through (a lot of it I’ll be doing for tomorrow), but right now I’m doing fine.

I did manage to find those papers, but it was too late for anything but a quick once-over before the test hit my desk. I’m not sure how a paper can manage to reek doom and destruction, but this one was managing quite nicely – until I saw the questions, all things I knew the answers to. I flip open the test to the first page, click my pen, and begin to write.

I’m frankly disgusted with how the school system today puts pressure on its children. We are encouraged to believe that we are all special stars, but at the same time college is presented as a necessity rather than an option, and people that may not be ready or willing to put themselves into the system of higher education are forced to do so.

I’m writing this because I am living proof that failure in college is not the end of the world – I lost a year because a health crisis lead me to straight F’s across the board. It’s going to be difficult for me to get myself back on track, and it’s a bit scary, but it’s what I’m going to do and I’m not going to sit around and let someone take that from me.

I’ve switched my major from biology to criminology, which puts a focus on the social rather than the scientific aspects of crime. I want to keep a log of my progress, because I want to see whether or not I can navigate this mess and come out on top.

I want to make other people understand that it’s possible to get back up again after a mishap of this magnitude – but largely, I’m writing this for myself.