Revelations Hospital

an excerpt from a memoir about living with bipolar disorder

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In 2010, in a residential mental health and addiction treatment center that I’ll call Revelations Hospital, I stood—somehow shocked by the immature behavior of people in residental rehab—and gave a frenzied monologue that I don’t remember. Only in the immediate aftermath, when my rehab friends were talking me down, did I learn that I’d delivered a sermon about personal responsibility. Yeah, I was the dude in rehab passing judgment on the other patients in rehab.

I’m a great performer. I can fill 5,000 seat auditoriums with my stage presence and voice. I’m a great interview. I’m funny. I’m not afraid to say the inappropriate things. I’m a quote machine. You might think I’m being arrogant. But I do possess those talents. In bipolar mania, I often become grandiose but sometimes, my irrational grandiosity matches with my real life. And that’s when my grandiosity can lead to impulsive and self-destructive behavior.

But, sometimes, I’m quietly theatrical.

On a winter day while writing this memoir, and while severely depressed, I shared a grocery store elevator with a stranger. I was wearing sweatpants and an old fleece jacket. I’d worn them three days in a row. There are times when I’m too depressed to get out of bed. Then there are other times when I’m still deeply depressed but manage to accomplish tasks. Call it a functional depression. I hadn’t shaved in a week. My gray whiskers made me look older than I am. I hadn’t showered but I had swiped deodorant under my armpits. So instead of smelling like shit, I smelled like a pine tree covered with shit. I’d just removed my stocking cap so my wild greasy hair looked like a salmon-killing oil slick.

Call it Shabby-Ass Chic from an Abandoned Sears in a Dead Mall.

Call it Depressed Indian by Ralph Lauren.

I was going into the supermarket with a shopping list that included only different varieties of chips and salsa. Yeah, I eat too much. I’m continually trying to medicate my sadness with salt and crunch.

And then I saw my haggard and blurry reflection in the elevator’s tin wall.

And I remembered a repeated punchline from Parks & Recreation where Tom and Donna, off on their once-a-year luxurious spending spree, proclaim, “Treat Yo’self.”

In my mind, I said “Treat Yo’self” to my disheveled reflection. I was being ironic. I’d done nothing to take care of my needs. I’d made no effort at luxury or even basic management of myself. Again, in my mind, I said “Treat Yo’self” to that depressed Indian’s reflection. I’m not always self-aware inside my bipolar mood episodes but, in that moment, I was cognizant of my terrible appearance. I said “Treat Yo’self” for the third time but I didn’t realize that I’d said it aloud until the stranger in the elevator spoke.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“You said something.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Are you somebody?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“You look familar,” he said. “Are you famous?”

“No,” I said, though that wasn’t exactly true.

“I recognize your voice,” he said. “Are you on the radio?”

I often get recognized in Seattle. I get recognized nearly every time I’m in public. I sometimes get recognized three or four times in one day. There’s no way a literary writer like me should get recognized so often, even in a book city like Seattle. But I’m a tall Indian with a very long torso and short legs. I’m built like an orangutan. I’ve got a hydrocephalic blimp for a skull and Jackie Chan hair. I am so bow-legged that my legs look the empty space between two parentheses. My  eyebrows are the antennae of 100 insects living beneath my forehead. If I’m not smiling, I resemble an Easter Island statue. If I am smiling, I resemble a smiling Easter Island Statue. So, yeah, I’m distinct in appearance. Easily recognizable, especially in a very white city like Seattle. But, despite my unusual feaures, I think I’m physically attractive. I’ve been told by a quorum of people that I’m attractive, though an Internet book blogger once described me as “the ugliest man in literature.” She posted that every writer, even the homely ones, look better sitting next to me. Yeesh.

There are credits and debits in the life of a famous writer.

I fondly look back at a David Letterman bit from the 90s. He held up a fake magazine that was called Handsome Fat Guys.

I could be the cover boy for that mag.

I could also be the cover boy for Easter Island Monthly.

Did you laugh at my jokes about my looks? Did you feel guilty about your laughter? Did you recognize your own self-critical nature? Everybody is talented at self-denigration but I wonder if bipolar people are geniuses of self-denigration, or worse, self-negation. And if you’re a good writer who has bipolar disorder then that self-negation sometimes turns into literature—sometimes turns into a memoir.

So, yeah, I don’t blend into a crowd. And I get recognized in very uncomfortable situations.

Once, after I’d clogged a bookstore toilet with a lot of my personal stuff. I panicked when I saw the water rise and spill over the rim. It was fight or flight. And I flew. I charged out of the stall and out of the bathroom.

Well, I was stopped in the bathroom doorway by a man who said, “Hey, you’re Sherman Alexie.”

I paused, heard the toilet water hitting the floor behind me, and said, “Yeah, man, be careful in there, some asshole clogged the toilet.”

That, dear readers, is a declaration that was anatomically accurate.

But back to that supermarket elevator where the stranger said, “You’re on the radio, aren’t you?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m on local NPR a lot.”

“You have a radio voice,” he said.

After we exited the elevator, and after that stranger had walked away with his grocery list, I stood near the shopping carts and insulted myself.

“I don’t have a radio voice,” I said aloud. “I’m a lisping tenor with the vestiges of a reservation sing-song accent.”

And then I laughed at myself. I don’t have a great radio voice but I have one that is unmistakably mine.

I realized, after months of being as fragile as a carton of already-broken eggs, I was strong enough to tease myself. It wasn’t self-loathing. It wasn’t guilt and shame. It was a brief moment where I accepted my eccentricity with peaceful chagrin instead of negative judgment.

I understood that my oddness is a half-broken treasure.

I understood that my writing gift is holy, even though I’m not.

In that supermarket, I pushed an empty shopping cart through the produce section, and thought, “Sherman, if you feel good about yourself for a moment then you can do it again. If you learn how to string together five minutes of self-esteem then you’ll begin your recovery.”

But, God, I wasn’t recovered when I delivered my sermon in Revelations Hospital. I’ve tried to remember exactly what I said. But it’s gone. I wonder if I was good. Did I change hearts and minds? A grandiose part of me believes that I gave an awesome performance. This is weird, enit? I’m hoping that I delivered an awesome soliloquy in rehab. I do remember being pissed at those adults behaving like dumb-ass teenagers, so pissed that I took the lectern to lecture them. And I do remember my rehab friends’ calm voices. But my voice wasn’t calm.

“I gotta get out of this place,” I said to them. “There’s gotta be a better place.”

And one friend said, “No matter where you go, you’re still gonna be there.”

His accurate tautology knocked me back into a dissociative state. My rehab friends said I kept quoting from other people’s books. I don’t remember that. They led me to the nurses station and the kind nurses put me to bed.

It feels odd to write about my dissociation. I need the eyewitness testimony of others to more fully tell some of these stories. And, yes, there are times when I’ve gone into full psychosis. On a book publicity tour, I hallucinated that one of my mother’s quilts was hanging in a hotel hallway. But I’ve never been the victim of a full-blown Messiah Complex. As I like to joke, “I never thought I was Jesus. I was just convinced that I knew what Jesus was thinking.”

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