Floating in the Forth

I'm the third and final child of a deacon and a Sunday school teacher. Staunch, diehard conservatives. Congressmen and other politicians have stood in my parents' kitchen. My mom has spoken for presidential candidates. They've attended funerals where the key speaker was a former president.
They've hosted parties and banquets and have been teachers, leaders, keynote speakers. More than one person has confided in me on how and when my parents stepped in and helped them or saved their lives in some way or another.
They are not fickle people, they're steadfast and stalwart in their beliefs. Loyal, true, honest, hard-working, with a real, take no exceptions, miraculous, American dream as their reality.
They're the ones that taught me to say something when something's not right. If no one is going to step up and do it, you're the someone. You've got two arms and two legs, you can do it, so you should. So I did. So they taught me.
They're a people worth knowing and whom a lot know. There's not a lot of places that I can go where someone doesn't recognize their name and then--

Pause

"Oh! You must be their daughter!"

There's so much in a pause, you know? It's the pause that tells you what's about to come. It's how the tone changes, the face shifts, and the answer comes out.

Yes. Hello, that's me. I'm that one.

Of course, I don't know for sure if that's what the pause means. Maybe they're trying to remember my parents had two daughters and they can't quite place me in their most recent memories. But I can tell you that I've been a part of more than one weekly prayer group. I've had a pastor catch up to me in the parking lot of church and let me know he was glad I made it. So, it might just all be in my head, but then again, I've been sent emails too.

I was raised within a mostly safe life; church being my main social outlet. I was grounded a lot and spent a lot of time alone, reading, writing, mostly. Arguing politics on AOL message boards with my dad's email.
At church, I graduated from a youth group member into a youth group leader and then a youth group teacher. I served on teen mission trips and chaperoned as an adult later on.
I wouldn't date anyone who wouldn't go to church with me on Sundays and I barely even kissed before marriage. I told my first husband I wouldn't marry him if he wasn't a Christian. He converted that Easter and we were engaged less than a week later.
I had some issues in high school but they seemed to sort themselves out when I enrolled at the Christian private school. There were only 8 people in my grade and I was the only one from public school.

I married a man seven years my senior whom I'd known for eight months, five months before my nineteenth birthday with only a three-month-long engagement. There were almost three hundred people at that wedding. It rained.

For the most part, I was the definitive 'case for Christ.' I argued with people online about theology and I was very outspoken about being a Christian. It was very normal for my conversations to center around Christianity, Christian values, and everything that came with that.
I never experienced mistreatment by an entire entity such as a church, sometimes I had issues with "members of the body" but for the most part, as far as I was aware, I was surrounded by wonderful people who just wanted the best for everyone. It was solid and it was safe and it was secure.

Nearing my mid-twenties, I broke away from that world, almost completely, around the same time my bipolar symptoms were just beginning to resurface.
My parents exited the church we'd been attending for a decade, they stepped down from their roles and started going to a different church across town.
I'd grown up in this church. We'd come to it a few years after moving here. It was brand new and nice and fun and welcoming. The church we'd previously been trying out did not feel welcoming and I didn't like the pastor (I've been very opinionated my entire life). I felt like I had a part in building this church. My husband was baptized in it, I was married in it, my siblings were married in it. All of my precious memories were at and with this church.
But there was a larger issue that I wasn't a part of and don't have the permission to discuss that caused my family to leave the church and caused myself to withdraw and self-isolate from any church-like community. After being so close to what I considered a family for so long, I'd reached an age where I could see the social politics in the church and I couldn't emotionally process it.... so I just didn't. I withdrew instead.
During this period, I wrote 'And Then There Was David.'
My mom told me it was beautiful and my dad cried but they both agreed, "David and Caroline need Jesus."
I would remind them that this is contemporary literature and not Christian literature. That is not how the story is written.
They invited me back to church and I politely declined. "It's like a divorce, you know, I'm just not ready to get back on the horse, yet." I made the joke several times.
On the surface, this was my life and I was happy and things were good and stable. Under the surface... I hadn't been okay for a really long time. No matter what I did, I felt more and more alone, more and more isolated.
I'd reach out but the anxiety of exerting myself beyond that was excruciating. So I made friends with the nearby edges of other groups. Because then when I had to sit in silence for sixteen hours instead of seeing them it didn't bother them.
From these edges, myself and another girl, brought a group of writers together that became very close.
I became wrapped up in a different world, a different family, after that. The safe, comfortable, church family was a fading echo and this new one was fun and they liked my writing and they liked my photography and they liked me. And I definitely liked them a lot.
They were also safe. I have to point that out. They were also very safe people. Our idea of a wild night was going to Olive Garden and comparing our waiter to Christian Slater while I spent too much money on lemon cream cake.
Losing your mind doesn't happen all at once, although it may feel like it. It takes time. It's a journey. It's a ride. Insanity is the destination, baby.
You sit back while your diseased brain crafts delusions and you believe every word. Why not? Why would your perception lie to you? Wouldn't you know if you were sick?
Within mania, there were no closed doors. There were levels beyond reality I can't even begin to explain. I lived there for a very long time. Anything that threatened the delusion was shut out, ignored, or downright attacked into quietly submitting. I was removed from reality, outside of it.
In this I--
took a backseat for a while.
I remember trying to hang on. The last tail end of 2014, I was desperate to hold on. I was lost and confused and the world was moving at such a rapid rate around me I couldn't process decisions, I could only do.
I can't say that I gave up in the early months of 2015 but I know that's when I stopped being able to even slow down remotely. I had to keep moving, faster, forever.
There were a lot of things happening in my personal life that were hard to deal with. Some were caused by the first signs of the bipolar episodes to come, some weren't my fault, some things were just things that couldn't be helped. But it all resulted in the same action.
The same decision.

I said fuck it. And I left.
I'd always done the right thing, the moral thing, the Christian thing. And at the time I was like, "this hasn't gotten me very far." (That was the bipolar talking though. In reality, yes, there were issues, but I was a lot farther with those decisions than I ever got without them.)

My departure caused a lot more damage than I thought it would. When I left, I honestly believed they'd forget about me in a few months and that would be it.
That was not it. That was not it at all.

My writing group and connected parties-- disconnected.
What remaining church members I had left-- mostly disconnected, some stayed
My parents employed every single person that they thought would care to pray for me because they knew something wasn't right.
They would beg me to see doctors, to go anywhere, and get myself checked out for a few days and see what happen.
I would decline. I would tell them that I was fed up with them. I was fed up with all of it. I was way happier without them than I'd ever been around them. My brother would ask me to come home and I would tell him I wish he didn't exist.


Five years later, we're here and I'm finally processing everything that happened. (welcome to this blog, hello.)

Sometimes, I feel like there's a layer of dry ice between my brain and I. I can't really touch anything yet because it's not ready.

I'm now stuck in this place of within and without. An in-between place where the next phase isn't clear. I want to return to where I left off but I'm a new person. A different person.
They tore down that church I went to for a decade and the writers' group I was a part of doesn't exist anymore.
Life is very different now.
And it's not like I don't want to embrace the difference either, I definitely do. Let it be different, let it be new. There are so many things about this new life that I love.
But then I go out and I meet someone who knows someone, who knows my parents. And they look at me and then--

Pause