rapporteur, n
I remember being 18, living in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and also attempting to survive the sinking ship of a long distance relationship with my boyfriend that I’d left behind in California in order to go to college. I had just left my psychiatrist’s office in Highland Park, whom I, after utilizing a high school AP-level understanding of mental illness, had just gotten to write me a prescription for mood-tranquilizers generally given to people with bipolar disorder. Oh, and I’d also gotten diagnosed as being bipolar.
In retrospect, I’ve never been bipolar, but I think being eighteen, in love, and finding myself in both a foreign geographic region and an isolating social climate lead me to believe I was. And as mental illnesses go, if you believe enough in your self diagnosis, it’s easy enough to make a PhD holding professional believe what you want them to. I guess back then I really couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone might be happy one minute and sad the next – even in a situation where I was happy getting to know some new friends of mine and then, seconds later, sad because I’d just received a text message from my boyfriend saying he wouldn’t be calling me that night because he was hanging out with “Andrew.”
Anyways, it was afterwards, at a Walgreens, while I wandered down the aisle, numb, waiting for the pharmacist to fill my prescription. My phone vibrated with a message from this guy I barely knew back in California letting me know he had something to tell me. Dealing with everything I was dealing with at that moment – you know, my newly professionally cemented bipolar disorder label – I brushed him off. I think his name was Steven. I didn’t talk to Steven again until a couple of months later when I’d found out what he had to tell me via other means. I got in touch with him to confirm what he had been trying to warn me about and to apologize for not listening to what he was trying to report.
In retrospect though, maybe I’m more thankful for the extra weeks of ignorance. And for those weeks in which my filled prescription finally went to work and left me completely guarded and unfeeling towards what I was about to endure.
