"It Wasn't What I Expected," by Nelly W.
What was I expecting? It is like exceeding your expectations when you have none? I used to wait tables in a place where they’d make you pass out comment cards. Each one would be worth like 10 cents. This would translate into the company’s own dollar buck system where you could get food or swag. Exceeding expectations is like that. Like when you have to pass out a comment card as way of spending dollar buck bonuses at a place where you are waiting tables. Almost a total pointless loop. And they will raise your salary 25 cents in the next two years if you get dozens of comment cards that say, “exceeds expectations.”
Or you have to rate your professor, or even worse, be rated as a teacher by 14 year-olds who want to tell you about how much weed they can buy with a million dollars, but are not interested in your academics as a teacher. How are you supposed to exceed expectations then, huh?
It was very hard to give testimony to get the diagnosis last week. I had to put a lot of things into words that had impressions and feelings, and may have been left untold. There’s a myriad of conditions, factors affecting every moment.
Richard Dawkins has said that the specific gravity of the doctor delivering you has more pull than the gravity of the stars on the night you were born. There’s no way of telling which of the conditions count, what’s the signal to noise ratio.
How up do you feel, or down?
Music engineers can see a soundboard and read the dials and knobs. To them it’s not just clutter, or noise, or a ripped up Doctor Who set in disrepair!
The conditions: the sunny day, the amount of iron in my last meal, my B12 levels, noticing fun, accessing joy, harnessing gratitude, intrusive thoughts, a loop–who knows the conditions?
And maybe I was missing something crucial. Or prevaricating, or embellishing. I come from a long line of lecturers and educators. Rover says, if I were faking it, I would have to be a “Muchauser”, a baron? I loved that Sarah Polley/ Robin Williams film as a kid: Baron Munchausen. Is that what he meant? I guess the point being is that I would have to be the most supreme faker of the century if I were able to pull this off this presentation of conditions without having the actual thing.
Last week, I did not get a chance to deal with spilling the trauma stories in a white-walled office, the potential diagnoses, and I then had a reprimand at work… and maybe not such a reprimand, my lurking unfriendly narrative of myself would call it a reprimand. More than a reprimand: confirmation of my fears, my imposturing, confirmation that everyone hates me as much as I thought, so that I may hate myself more and get ahead of the train.
I guess that’s part of the conditions too, being wretched to your own inner dialogue, hating your body, wanting to press the eject button on this cartoon-proportioned reality and emotional scale, but really that’s part of it too?
I wasn’t what I expected, although I have had it all my life. I now have a diagnosis. The doctor said alcohol is often running with it, body treats alcohol like a benzo; alcohol actually treats some of the conditions. It’s gonna be a process.
Almost fist fought the pharmacist when he said my meds were ten times what they were last month… but we’ll try again next week. My sponsor says they’ll figure my hormones, my thyroid. However, in her line of work, she thought it may be…
My arm is pockmarked by all the labs, I will have to deal with this my whole life, and maybe I will have more of a life. It will swing and swing again. I…
I have several diagnoses this week, no iron stores, pernicious anemia, ADHD, generalized anxiety, abysmal ferritin, perimenopause, tanking estrogen, stories surfacing and changing colour being refigured under the heading that it might be, or has always been…
Lots of research to do. I guess about it, now that it is on the books. It is written. Maybe I say it out loud. Say it at this pre-formed stage. Don’t know what it means yet. Say it before I discover… say it before my expectations about it take over.
I am bipolar.
Rather, I am bipolar, too.