Marya Hornbacher - Madness: A Bipolar Life (2008)

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But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.

Marya Hornbacher
And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.

Marya Hornbacher
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

Marya Hornbacher
And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

Marya Hornbacher
You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

Marya Hornbacher
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.

Marya Hornbacher
For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.

Marya Hornbacher
The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

Marya Hornbacher
In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

Marya Hornbacher
Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

Marya Hornbacher
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

Marya Hornbacher
Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

Marya Hornbacher
When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

Marya Hornbacher
I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

Marya Hornbacher
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

Marya Hornbacher
Soon madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you're worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

Marya Hornbacher
The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

Marya Hornbacher