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The Middle Ground

Is life without mania worth living?

That is the question that has been floating around in the back of my mind with a couple of other questions. What if I don't deserve to die? And what if my life, train wreck though it is, actually has value.

These may sound like absurd things to ponder unless you realize that I have spent my entire life laboring under the certainty, dead certainty mind you, that the following things were irrevocably true:
I was supposed to be superwoman.
I was born deserving to die.
I had to justify my existence.

Now while I still believe we all need to answer for our lives at the end of them in some way, more or less, that is not exactly the same thing as living every moment attempting to justify one's right to take up space. In fact, the act of constant self justification rather takes one away from doing the meaningful work that might actually give life value in the first place. It seems that one has to come to peace to be able to do work that has any meaning, or to leave any legacy behind.

So, how does one possibly come to peace inside the idea that one A) deserves to die and B) is required to be super human. Deserving to die is a personal myth, springing directly out of the failure to be superhuman. The myth of being superhuman is not personal to me, but in fact belongs to the entire American culture. It is the idea that the individual can overcome all odds, transcend any circumstance, any disability, any history, any abuse, any obstacle.

The problem with that myth is two fold: First, any one individual can overcome an amazing number of circumstances, achieve a kind of break through velocity and out last the gravity of whatever weight fate has placed upon him or her. Statistically it is impossible that such stories will not occur. But our interpretation of these stories does not take into account the waste in human potential caused by the failure of those who do not make it off the ground. That one child might make it out of a ghetto where there is a 90 percent illiteracy rate means there were 99 children that did not make it out; and what of their lives?

The second problem with the myth is, having been one of the wunderkind, one of the 1 out of 100, I can tell you that it takes a manic effort to overcome such obstacles, and that the effort cannot be sustained and the obstacles do not stop coming. We used to speak about it taking more than one generation, perhaps 3, to transcend class. Now we no longer speak about class in our culture as though it exists, and we punish ourselves for our inability to transcend it as though the inability to do so in a single generation is a personal failure. Meanwhile, the gap between the classes widens to the degree that it may no longer be possible to achieve transcendence in a single generation anymore.

And so, after having lived through the ravages of making a super heroic effort on more than one occasion, almost making it off the ground, only to fall back when a major illness, the mistakes of youth and inexperience, or shift in the economy wiped out my shallow resources, I know that another manic attempt to break out of the underclass is not going to work. Anything is not possible for me.

I have an illness that gives me the ability to do amazing things. I have, in the past, been able to hold down three jobs at once and go to school; juggle a freelance career and two jobs; juggle a growing business and a full time job; work for days straight without sleep; produce months worth of work in weeks worth of time; become a published writer within a year of my first submission; created a cooperative to teach young artists how to build their careers; I have also burned out my adrenal glands; given myself chronically infected kidneys from all the coffee I drank; had bronchitis and tonsilitis so many times I had to have my tonsils out at 24; developed something like chronic fatigue syndrome that couldn't be diagnosed; shattered my leg; cracked a disc in my spine, filed a medical bankruptcy and gave myself an ulcer. And the ravaging depressions we will not talk about.

My resume is amazing, if you edit out the crashes; people think I'm amazingly accomplished, if you don't count the number of times I've burned out. I have never done drugs or alcohol or cigarettes or maintained any major vice beyond a stint of bad relationships in my younger days. But being super woman didn't work. I am still poor. I am relatively healthy. If I stop trying to be superwoman, my life settles down to a nice, manageable existence. No greatness. No miracles. No beating the odds. Nothing remarkable except that through abuse, poverty and illness, I am still here. Something millions of ordinary people manage to accomplish.

Is that a life worth living?

I have an IQ of 163. I was supposed to have done something with it. Something important. God knows I've tried.

But all I have really managed to do with my life so far is survive it. And anything more than that seems to make me ill, especially at this stage of my life when I don't really have any more organs or limbs to spare before I get to the really big ones like, say, my heart.

So I take medication that eliminates my ability to do the superwoman thing, even if I were tempted. And I wonder is there life after mania? Life is certainly slower. There is less drama. There is less flurry. There is less driving back and forth across the country. There is less flying back and forth across the country. There are fewer lunches, fewer phone calls, fewer meetings with important people I'm trying to impress.

There is more love. More time to love. There is a wedding coming up. There is walking back and forth to work. There is doing a good job at my job and looking for a better job every week. There is a little time to write. There is some quality pondering. My dreams are still vivid. I listen well. I guess I'm still a good cook. I try to be a good friend. There is worry over things I don't seem to be able to do anything about, like old debts I cannot pay and doctor bills I cannot afford, but these things are such constants that they fade to the background like a dull whine. I will do what I can when I can.

I have a disability. I have not overcome it with flying miraculous super human colours. I am living with it in peace, and faith, and love and community, and hopefully work I can be proud of. Obscure work, but good work none-the-less.

I write excellent press releases and news stories for the Nordic Heritage Museum. I take good care of my Labor of Love clients. I am trying to catch up on all the paperwork that got out of integrity during my years of being ill. Things like back taxes and old licenses.

And I hope, that with time and discipline, I shall do more. That when the decks are cleared of the debris of the old life, something may grow out of this new life that I can look back on and be proud of. Not to justify my existence, but at least to know that it has not been wasted.

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