Dorothy Parker once excused herself for missing a deadline by telling her editor "Someone else was using the pencil." 

I see that pencil, Dotty, and raise you a set of Berol Prismacolor pencils missing flesh tone, a floaty pen with hula dancer and palm trees that says "Our Honeymoon, December 5, 1941," a rubber stamp alphabet, a Waterman pen that I dropped in a daiquiri that doesn't work, and a tiny red pencil from a bowling alley, all inexplicably in use.

I was young when I first learned to fight my temptation to write.  At 12 I had an idea for a novel.  I thought cultures and political systems might be evolving much like an individual psyche. 

For years I mused on this idea, drawing comparisons in my mind but admirably restraining from writing them down.  I gloated privately over my audacity and insight. 

When I finally shared my idea with a friend in college he said my book had already been written by a corrupt interloper named Thomas Mann and was called The Magic Mountain. 

I couldn't bring myself to read it.  It just doesn't do to think big.  It's been done before, more lavishly, with more depth, with greater social impact, and undoubtedly with greater literary merit, than I could ever muster. 

I now satisfy my urge to write with shopping lists, which are yet to become a genre in their own right but for which I have shown considerable aptitude.

It hurts to write.  My thumb, injured when planing a door years ago, throbs miserably after only a few lines, then carpal tunnel syndrome sets in and my whole arm hurts up to my shoulder. 

At the computer, it's only seconds before the degenerated vertebrae in my cervical spine cause spasms in my neck and my hands become numb. 

Fibromyalgia turns my pain amplifier up to '11.'  I'm sure if I keep writing it'll get worse and worse until I have to crawl to the phone to call 911, and then the paramedics will come and, oh lord, I don't want them reading anything I have up on screen and telling my next of kin. 

I can't possibly write with all this going on.  And luckily, no one is ever using the sofa.  

Once, after I was comfortably snuggled up and the meds were kicking in, I began to have creative stirrings.  I couldn't get up to hunt for my journal because the cat was lying on me, so I turned on the TV. 

It was Oprah.  She was interviewing a man who paints porcelain miniatures with his foot, a paraplegic woman who is writing her tenth novel with her teeth, a political prisoner who wrote a stirring manifesto on the walls of his cell in blood, and an insane patient who creates rapturous frescoes in his straight jacket by rolling in paint and hurling himself on the walls of his cell. 

I wept, utterly ashamed, humbled, transported, reformed.  If I'd felt better, if the cat had moved, and if I'd found my journal, I'd have been dangerously close to writing again.

Luckily, though I've given in to its seduction many times, my writing is often undecipherable.  I once read a note in my journal: "Send stuffin." 

Was it Thanksgiving in some third world country and they need stuffing?  Should I bake the stuffing and send it overnight, or mail it dry in the bag? 

Fortunately, I couldn't ever make sense of it.  I suspect it may have been an exhortation to myself to send out more queries and submissions to publishers, which only leads to madness.  

It's not uncommon for me to come upon an inscrutable journal entry written in the wee hours of a troubled night long past, the page tear-stained, the fervent scribbles crawling upside down and sideways around the page like poison ivy seeking light. 

One such entry reads, "Now I understand how my years of self-hatred and mystification, both intellectual and romantic, are transformed by the miraculous, regenerative power of *msf#@ng!" 

Thank God I have my therapist on speed dial.

In spite of myself, my hunger to write continues.  Like a rogue wave, determined to hold up the meaning of my life against the undertow of my culture, my past, and my family's fundamentalism, it surges and ebbs. 

I want to trust it.  To be carried into the deeper waters of the things I do not understand, to let the questions remain unanswered. 

I've stood too long on the shore, hoping to feel capable, hoping for the authority to speak, the confidence to pit myself against all the rigid certainty of my past.

I've been waiting to be transformed into a Borzoi of a writer.  Sleek, refined, reserved and competent.  Unconcerned with the approval of others. 

Instead, I'm a gangly golden retriever, rocking and swamping my little boat.  Eager, boundlessly expressive, full of hyperbole, and loving - above all, loving - everyone and everything because they're here, because they're fleeting, because I can.

I want so much to steer this craft cleanly between compassion and rage, not damaging anyone, but I lurch and keel like a novice. 

I've tried to see my childlike and wounded family with dispassionate and merciful eyes, and waited for my parents to die so I wouldn't hurt them with what I have to say. 

Now that they've obliged, I'm certain they can hear my thoughts and read even my unwritten words. 

Oddly, they seem mild and tolerant.  Perhaps they were all along.

I so long to drop all pretense:  the pretense of insight, the pretense of confidence, and the pretense of detachment, and in the end, just to write with abandon like a lover. 

To be dissolved and carried on the waves in that self-forgetting joy, the emptying that lets the beloved world flow in.

So, Dotty, hand over that pencil - I know you have one - and let's have at it one more time.  

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Cat Robson, an over-educated, passionate, liberal ex-evangelical survived childhood molestation, an amusing and baffling family that hungered for redemption at the expense of individuality and even sanity, adult abuse, drug addiction and multiple suicide attempts. 

Despite years of dedicated self-examination and often misguided psychotherapy to find the common threads in her chaotic personal and professional life and her often brilliant accomplishments in the arts, she continued a tightrope walk between crippling depression and manic episodes of dangerous adventures and erratic relationships until she was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Now in Santa Barbara, she enjoys a life of intense creativity, a playful relationship with her psyche and the world, and a redeeming revisioning of her own history, all of which she shares with deft humor in her memoir "Out of My Tree."

~~~

Note by site author Douglas Eby:

This essay won First Place in the 2006 Santa Barbara Writers Conference Workshop Genre Award for Nonfiction, under the title "If Only I Could Write," and is part of a collection of autobiographical essays titled "Out of My Tree."

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bipolar disorder

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