Part II of my Bipolar and Depression Talk - Poem: The Night of Your "302"

I began my Understanding Bipolar presentation last nite (May 11) at Holy Redeemer Counseling Center by reading a poem.

It contains so many truthful elements of the bipolar experience: riding in a police car, being out of reality, shedding part of your clothes, and then coming back to reality with some amazing medication.

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The following poem was written when I worked as a psychotherapist at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services in Bristol, PA. “302” is a nickname meaning “involuntary hospitalization.”

I watched
through the glass doors
of our mental health clinic
for the person to be 302d,
he would walk through
the outer doors,
a man who’d lost the
finer workings of his mind,
and would be delivered up
for safekeeping by the cops,
escorted into a tiny room that locked
and was filled with windows
that can’t be broken.

They were wild sometimes,
flailing,
crying out in broken words,
fighting to escape their captors,
believing until the end
deliverance was at hand.

From my perch at the door
the doctor joins me.
She is eating an apple and
talking about going out for
Chinese food after.
302-ing makes you hungry.

I tell her that once
I had ridden
in the back of a police car.
My senses gone,
alert,
radiating to the
staccato points of night
and the babble of the police radio,
I leaned forward in my backseat nest
like caged Hansel in the gingerbread forest
and stuck my little finger
through the iron grates that contained me.
It was all I had of freedom.

“Were you scared?” the doctor asked.
“Why, not at all,” I said.
“I thought they were taking me to a live
performance of the Nutcracker Suite.”

Thinking I was kidding
she crumpled up with merriment.

We watched as a police car
pulled in sideways.
Black letters like ribbons scrolled
across the door.

I watched as
a man stepped from the car,
steady, unafraid,
handsome as a game show host
striding on stage
to marvelous applause.
Barefoot,
his hair uncombed with
great prodigal waves falling upon
his brow,
his face had a pulled-down look
I hadn’t expected to see.
He’d played his chips and lost.

Chin up, I whispered.
This is your hour,
for now --
for all time.
Use it well.
Don’t get hurt,
run a comb through your  hair,
And, for God’s sakes, pay attention
with whatever’s left inside you,
for this is the night of your 302.

I pointed out to the audience that during the 20 years I had bipolar disorder I was extremely productive. Working as a psychotherapist, I needed to "process my feelings" about some of the patients I saw.

I did this by writing little stories about them or poems like the above.

My good friend and fellow writer Helene Ryesky told me about a contest sponsored by the Leeway Foundation for Women Artists.

She urged me to enter and nudged me every single day until I got my entry in.

Sure enough I won a $5,000 prize.

But I don't write in order to win prizes. I write because I can't help myself. Life would be meaningless if I could not express myself with the ABCs.