The orange bottles of happy pills lay on my bedside, it matched the orange tinted shades he’d gifted me on my 25th birthday, a few days back, with a note to look at the brighter side of life.
“Yes! I promised instantly, I will Bob, I promise.” The desperation of being accepted by him was clear, “I am truly trying.” This always followed a bunch of excuses and stories from my side and words of reassurance from him.
There are days when I am full of life, fired up, vibrant and the best thing to be around and then there are other days when I am sulking, angry mostly with myself and all messed up.
My friends called me whimsical and temperamental.
Most of my friends have disappeared putting labels of moody and crazy, I have lost my contracts with companies, the dark phase makes me slow and sluggish at times. I wasn’t able cope up with the speed with which the smarter people worked but when I finally would sit at the desk, my creativity was unmatched and so the part of work I did for Bob still stayed with me. He was patient and always inspiring me to push myself a little more.
I decided to see a doctor. He wrote “bipolar disorder” in my report and handed me a prescription of these orange pills.
I called Bob and he came home. It was a chaos, my studio gears scattered around, my socks thrown in different directions, my desk was full of papers with no space left, I was perched on my bed with my laptop pretending to work, my unfolded clothes lay in a big heap in one corner.
It was a site, I never wanted him to see. I was scared and needed somebody to tell me I wasn’t a mental patient and that I was a sane person with the intelligence to function normally. I had aspirations and goals in life. I wanted someone to tell me that it isn’t over for me yet.
Here, I was all vulnerable, about to burst into tears in his arms and there he stood with a cheesecake with an orange smiling sun sculpted beautifully on the cake.
“What is it that you’re celebrating?” The frenzy rising in my voice again and at the same time tears were welling up in my eyes.
Bob, smiled and looked at me and then he looked at the orange bottle of pills lying beside the tinted shades.
He calmly walked in the room, cleared my desk with one hand and made space for the cake. He then picked up the shades in one hand and the bottle of pills in the other. He said, “It is so perfectly okay. You didn’t find a problem suddenly, you found a solution. Your kind of intelligence is unique, you are the most creative person I’ve met and like this shade helps you to see the world brighter, these pills will help you see yourself better, so why not?
It is okay to not be okay at times. So let’s celebrate a new phase of life which will be full of self-love and acceptance and support of true friends because the fake ones won’t be able to stick around anyways.” We both laughed at that. I allowed the tears to drench his shirt.
Then we celebrated the festival of friendship and unconditional love, we cut the cake and smeared it on each other’s faces, dropping cream on the floor, he laughed and said, “and that adds up to the mess you can create young woman!” I chuckled and noted that down in my mental checklist of to-dos before the mind goes back to the slo-mo mode.
See you in the comments.
National Cheesecake Day,
July 30, 2018
