I settle into my chair, a kid’s school desk, in the Baptist church classroom. I barely fit. Around me, others take their seats as well. I know most of these people. We’ve been coming to these meetings together for months now, all of us here to cope with our various mental illnesses.
Tonight, there are two new people, who seem familiar with one another, a young man who appears to be in his early twenties and an older woman, maybe fifties.
The facilitator, Dawn, is handing out the laminated booklets held together with a keyring. On the back of each page is a heart with the words “You are not alone” written on it. When I first joined these meetings, I thought it was a sign, but I thought everything was a sign at that point. At least it was a positive sign.
Dawn looks at her watch, at the door. She stands and closes it. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go ahead and get started.”
Everyone is quiet, waiting for Dawn to take the lead. She starts out by reading the meeting introduction, and then we go around the room, reading three meeting guidelines each, things like “We will not interrupt,” “We acknowledge that this is a safe place to share,” “We accept humor as a way to cope.” I like the humor one. It reminds me that it’s okay to have levity about these things. Levity is something I very much needed when I first came to these meetings.
After reading the guidelines, we take a few minutes to introduce ourselves, even though most of us know each other.
“I’m Dylan,” says the guy to my right. He’s the youngest of us all and seems to have some autistic traits. He’s all about routine and structure. “Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Type 1.” We share a diagnosis although he’s been dealing with his for much longer than I have.
“My name is Reginald,” says the older man next to Dylan. “I’ve got schizo-affective disorder and PTSD.” He’s a mild-mannered man, but I know from him sharing before that he’s been to jail for violence. I can’t imagine him violent. I’ve noticed he can never sit still. He bounces his legs and fidgets restlessly.
“I’m Yvonne,” says the woman next to him. “I have major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.” She smiles sweetly. She reminds me of my grandma, calm and quiet.
The new person in the room is next. He came in with the older woman who sits next to him with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap. He glances about at all of us nervously. “I’m Tyler,” he says. “This is my first time here, and I’m only here because my mom made me.” The woman next to him sends up a wave.
“Welcome Tyler,” Dawn says. “We’re happy to have you.”
I recognize his nervousness, his unwillingness to be here. Even though I came to my first meeting on my own, I was still unsure if it was for me. Early on, when I felt nervous, I would share and feel a sort of nervous energy zap through the room, as if I was unknowingly passing on my emotions. I do feel a little more nervous after Tyler’s introduction.
Dawn turns to Tyler’s mom.
“My name is Diana,” she says. “And I’m here with Tyler. He was just recently diagnosed with schizophrenia and seems to be having some trouble accepting it.”
“Because it’s bullshit,” says Tyler.
I glance at Dawn. I’ve never been to a meeting with such aggressive speech, and I wonder how she will react.
“We’ll have time to share next,” she says. “Let’s finish introductions first. Alex?” She turns to me, the last in the room to go. I introduce myself and share my diagnosis of bipolar. I look at Tyler. He doesn’t seem to be paying attention. I remember from my first few meetings, how everything everyone said seemed to be some sort of veiled message to me. If Tyler is like this, he doesn’t seem to be affected by me.
“Now, let’s take some time to share,” Dawn says. I’ve learned since starting these meetings that it’s less about sharing and more about listening to others share. This is good because every time it comes time for me to share, I clam up anyway.
Sharing isn’t what I originally expected it would be either. I thought it would be everyone telling their story of what happened to them when they were in the midst of a psychotic episode or a manic episode. But Dawn tends to steer the conversation away from those stories. “We aim to stay in the present.” Another group guideline. We usually talk about our therapists, about coping strategies, and a lot about self-care. Take a bath. Eat a sweet. Do something nice for yourself.
Dawn looks at Tyler. “Would you like to start?”
Tyler shrugs, seemingly unaffected. “I lost my job, and I didn’t sleep for a bit, so my mom got me into a doctor. They said I had schizophrenia, but I think I was misdiagnosed.”
“Why do you think that?” Dawn asks. She usually doesn’t speak much when others are sharing. The other attendees and I share glances. This is an unusual meeting for sure.
“Because I know what happened to me,” he says. “I was there. There were these people at my work who’d been out for my job for years. They were all trying to get me fired. And it finally worked.”
“Why did you get fired, if you don’t mind sharing?”
“They said it was because I kept coming in late and didn’t show up one day. But they already had these plans.”
“Did you come into work late?”
“Yes,” Tyler’s mom chimes in before he can answer.
Tyler glares at her. “My car broke down one day, and my alarm was messed up. It wasn’t my fault. And they knew that.”
Dawn nods. She seems to understand him, and I wonder what she’s thinking. Dawn has her own crazy story that she’s shared over time, child abuse and military PTSD and domestic violence. I often feel like my story pales in comparison to hers, like I’m not allowed to complain about my semi-humorous story of thinking I was an alien when her life has been so rough and mine hasn’t. Maybe that’s the point of sharing. To give perspective.
I’ve often wondered what the others see when they see me. It’s possible they see me as put-together, wonder what I’m doing there. I don’t know how to tell them my mind is like a trap, that I’ve been to hell, that I feared exploding at one point, that the things I’ve seen were enough to tear me from my old life of drinking and smoking and shit-talking. Enough to humble me, grind me into the ground like dirt. Enough to stupefy me, to leave me anxious for years, afraid to be alone, afraid of the dark. Maybe my manic episode seemed funny on the outside, but inside, I was quite literally losing it.
I wonder if Tyler is facing similar fears. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything, rather angry.
“They had all these group messages going without me,” Tyler says. “I know because I saw on my friend Jimmy’s phone one day.” I wonder if this is true. It sounds like a paranoid delusion, but paranoid delusions sometimes have a shred of truth to them. When I was going through my first manic episode, my husband and my sister were texting each other about me often, messages pinging back and forth about their concern for my abnormal behavior, particularly my claims that I was an alien.
I try my best to share a comforting look with Tyler, but he’s not looking my way. He stares at the floor in the middle of our circle, as if he sees someone there, as if he’s directing all of his conversation to this invisible person.
“I need to work again,” he says. “I’ll feel better once I find a new job. But they follow me everywhere.”
“Who follows you?” Dawn asks, her face a cool mask of acceptance.
“These people who don’t like me,” he says. He glances up from the floor at Dawn for a moment. “They keep trying to get me fired. They’re everywhere.”
Reginald speaks up. There’s a book he’s been reading that talks about anosognosia, the condition causing people with mental health issues to not be aware of their illnesses. Reginald is always recommending books. I know about anosognosia because I read the very book that Reginald is speaking of after he recommended it to me too. It’s why I went off my meds the first time, the belief that I didn’t actually suffer from bipolar.
“That sounds interesting,” Diana says, looking sideways at her son. She looks unconvinced, as if she already knows he won’t be reading a book.
Tyler sighs heavily. He’s staring back at the center of the floor. I can tell by the look on his face that he thinks this is a waste of time, that we are a waste of his time.
“Let’s have someone else share now,” Dawn says, tactfully. She turns to Dylan. Dylan has about the same share every week, and this week is no different.
“I have been going to my sangha once a week. I make time for prayer and meditation every morning and every evening. I like to keep a routine, but recently I’ve been having some intrusive thoughts.”
I look over at Tyler. He’s watching Dylan now. I wonder if he has intrusive thoughts. I did when I was manic, thoughts that felt like someone else taking over my brain. They were my thoughts, but somehow they also weren’t. They said crazy things, things like I should kill myself before I combust like a bomb due to my alien metabolism, killing everyone I love. It was terrifying at the time, less so now when I can look back with clarity and see that I was psychotic.
Tyler’s leg is bouncing. Reginald’s leg is bouncing. My leg is bouncing. I stop it as soon as I notice it. It’s a new habit I’ve been trying to kick, this sudden inability to sit still.
Dylan is explaining how he got over his intrusive thoughts by meditating.
Dawn says sometimes you have to tell those thoughts “no.”
Tyler scoffs.
Dawn’s eyes shift to Tyler. “Do you have intrusive thoughts?”
For the first time, Tyler looks sheepish, as if he doesn’t know how to respond. His mom is watching him, waiting for his answer. “They help keep me on my toes.”
I watch this unfold, thinking that this person is in the middle of a psychotic episode as we speak. Tyler glances at me suddenly. Can he hear what I’m thinking?
When I was going through psychosis, I felt that I could read people’s thoughts or at least intuit their motivations. Tyler is watching me like he can hear my every thought. A familiar feeling creeps over me, the same suspicious feeling I got when I was manic.
“Remember,” Dawn says, addressing the group. “Intrusive thoughts are not our own thoughts, and we can ignore them.”
Tyler is still looking at me, and now I’m completely on edge. I avoid making eye contact. Now I’m the one staring at the ground.
Dawn has moved on from Dylan’s share to Reginald, who continues to give us book recommendations, probably mostly for Tyler’s benefit. I sneak another glance at Tyler and am glad to see him watching Reginald now, his gaze fixated, his jaw locked, the muscles in the side of his face twitching.
“My wife helped me this week,” Reginald says. “She was able to catch one of my episodes before it got bad.” He explains how his wife talked him down from a “boiling point,” his words.
I let out a sigh at my pent-up nervousness and feel my face go hot as everyone turns to me. I guess the sigh was louder than I’d meant.
Dawn’s calm gaze is on me now. “Would you like to share, Alex?”
“I don’t have much to report,” I say. “I’ve noticed I’m feeling more down than usual, but I think it’s just the weather.” This comment gets nods and murmurs of agreement from the group. When in doubt, I talk about the weather. Everyone seems to agree on its impact on mental illness.
“Have you had anymore mood swings?” Dawn asks.
“No,” I say. “Not since last time.” The last time was when I went off my meds, when I was clearly manic and not sleeping for days. Dawn already knows this story though. Despite her attempts to lead us away from talking about our episodes, I’d let it out in an uncharacteristically open share a few weeks prior, going into details about how I’d slipped into psychosis after not sleeping, how I’d had delusions of being an alien trapped on the wrong planet.
“Are you an alien?” Tyler says suddenly.
I turn and stare at him. His face gives away no hint of a joke, no sign that he knows anything about my previous share. Had he read my mind?
His mom puts a resting hand on his bouncing knee. “Tyler, don’t be silly. No one here is an alien.” She turns to me and mouths “Sorry.”
“Let’s not interrupt each other,” Dawn says to Tyler, but she looks concerned now. Maybe she remembers my alien share and doesn’t want to trigger me.
Too late.
My knee is bouncing again, but this time I let it go. “Am I?” I ask, then let out a laugh, as if I’m cavalier about the whole thing, as if this is all some funny joke, and I’m in on it. “Maybe.”
Dawn’s voice comes out stern. She’s watching me, but I see the concern in the fold of her eyebrows. “Alex, you’re not an alien.” She looks around at the group and smiles. “Even though we all may feel like it sometimes.”
Tyler is still watching me, and suddenly I want to jump across the room and scratch his eyes out.
“Anyway, Alex. You were saying…?”
I don’t know what to say anymore. When I look at the faces staring back at me, I see concern and sympathy, the same expressions I saw on my husband and sister’s faces when they took me to the hospital, the same expressions of the nurses and doctors. I suddenly want nothing more than to be out of this stifling room.
“I…I think I’m done,” I stammer. “I pass.”
Dawn moves onto Yvonne, and the attention is finally off me. But I can’t stop thinking of Tyler’s words. Are you an alien? It was as if he knew my story somehow. And now I was wondering, again, if maybe my manic episode hadn’t been an episode at all, but something real. Something real that Tyler could also sense.
People closest to psychotic episodes seemed to always see things others couldn’t. Dawn would say this is because they are hallucinating, but when I was psychotic myself, I’d felt they were closer to the truth. Maybe Tyler can see the truth where no one else can.
I’m not listening to Yvonne’s share. I’m thinking about the words my mom said on the phone when I was in the psych ward after I’d told her that I was afraid of the world. “But honey, you’re not of this world.”
Those had been her exact words. She’d then gone on to try to convince me that as a daughter of Christ, I was special. But I’d listened less to that part. I’d heard all I needed.
You’re not of this world.
Are you an alien?
Yvonne finishes her share, and Dawn brings up the topic of self-care. “Especially during these cold months,” she says. “We need to take care of ourselves. Let’s go around the room and each share one thing we’re going to do for ourselves.”
I zone out as everyone is speaking, remembering the feeling I’d had of urgency when I’d been running through my neighborhood at night, eyes up towards the star-speckled sky, looking for a spaceship that would never appear, how in the hospital I felt I was being captured to be studied like an alien lifeform. Surely, those were all manifestations of my psychosis. Certainly symptoms of my manic episode, my diagnosed bipolar.
“Alex?”
I look up from the floor to see everyone’s eyes on me again and remember self care. “Take a hot bath,” I say, at ease when Dawn smiles at the suggestion. This is a normal thing a human would say, I think. Good answer.
“Tyler?”
Tyler is back to staring at the center of the floor, his leg still bouncing. “I’m gonna look for a new job.” I wonder if that’s code for something, something he could be trying to convey to me. I have a job, but maybe he doesn’t mean it in the literal sense.
“Well, that’s something you want to do, sure,” Dawn argues back. “But what are you going to do to take care of yourself? You know? Something nice for yourself.”
He shrugs, slumping back in the child’s desk he barely fits in. “It would be easier to think if there weren’t aliens watching me.” He glances my way again, agitated.
“Tyler,” his mom says, warning in her voice.
I feel my body go rigid. I look away from him to the others in the group. They look as if they are collectively embarrassed. But he had said aliens, plural. Maybe one of them was an alien too. I study each of them to see how they’re reacting. Dawn is once again explaining that no one is an alien. Yvonne is cool, calm. Reginald looks nervous, fidgeting with his fingers. Dylan is looking at me, and am I imagining things or does one of his irises appear larger than the other behind his glasses? Is it possible he is also an alien?
“Diana, do you have any suggestions of what Tyler can do?” Dawn asks.
His mom looks at him. “You could go for a hike,” she says. “You love hiking.”
“Yeah,” Tyler mumbles. “I’ll go for a hike.”
I doubt he will.
Dawn closes the session by thanking us all for coming and collects our ring-bound booklets. Diana approaches Dawn to ask about the leaflets set up in the corner, one for each type of diagnosis.
“Take this,” Dawn says, handing her the pamphlet about schizophrenia.
I look at Tyler, who still hasn’t moved from his seat. He’s watching me again, his stare penetrating and eerie, as if he knows something I don’t. What do you know? I think at him. If he can read my thoughts, he doesn’t answer.
“Bye Alex,” Dylan says, and I turn to wave to him. When I turn back, Tyler is standing to join his mom. I follow the others out of the room, but before I get past the door, Dawn calls me back. Tyler and his mom pass by me, and this time I avoid looking at them. I’m creeped out enough.
“You okay?” Dawn says.
“Yeah,” I say, putting on my best okay voice.
“You seemed a little bothered by what Tyler said.”
“Nah,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m fine.”
“Okay. Remember that everyone is going through their own stuff.”
“I know.”
Dawn gives me a hug. “You’re gonna be fine.”
I nod and hurry out of the room. Out in the parking lot, I see no sign of Tyler or his mom. They must have left in a hurry. I wonder if they’ll be back to support group again, but I doubt it.
In the car, I let the windows defrost for a moment, blasting the music to hopefully drown out my thoughts, but it doesn’t work. I’m bipolar, I think. I was psychotic.
I’m a human.
I’m not an alien.