The Beast: A Diary

I was diagnosed bipolar when I was 14 years old. During one of my mom's pep talks on one of many mornings that I refused to get out of bed and go to school, she said to me "Isabel, you can't let the beast win." And thus the affectionate pet name for my lifelong companion, my illness. I believe we all have our own beasts, and we struggle with them in our own ways. This blog is a record of mental illness, and the memoir of a beast within. This is a story about a girl and her beast.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

My assignment was to "speak my truth" and write on the theme of "possibility". This is what I came up with.

Red, White and Blue in the Face

Dream the impossible dream

he said

The possibilities are endless

he said

The world is your oyster

he said

These are the lies my country told me

while that oyster drowned me in a sea of abandonment and degradation

it tried to swallow me whole

If only I could “pick myself up by my boot straps”

and work hard for the money

so hard for it, honey

A dream is a wish your heart makes

beating with possibility

HOO-RAH

Ripped from my mother’s womb

The founding fathers are dead

but

I have some serious daddy issues

Arm yourselves

because love is a battlefield

Dream on, sweetheart

Talk to the hand

that’s cracked from hard labor

Should I give up, or should I “just keep chasing pavement”?

Don’t step on the cracks

or it’ll break the backs of those who built this country

Sure I have a dream

you lying, cheating, son of a bitch.

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I'm kind of angry, I guess.

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"my beast comes in the afternoon he gnaws at my gut he paws my head he growls spits out part of me.

my beast comes in the afternoon while other people are taking pictures while other people are at picnics my beast comes in the afternoon across a dirty kitchen floor leering at me

while other people are employed at jobs that stop their thinking my beast allows me to think about him, about graveyards and dementia and fear and stale flowers and decay and the stink of ruined thunder.

my beast will not let me be he comes to me in the afternoons and gnaws and claws and I tell him as I double over, hands gripping my gut, jesus, how will I ever explain you to them? they think I am a coward but they are the cowards because they refuse to feel, their bravery is the bravery of snails.

my beast is not interested in my unhappy theory—he rips, chews, spits out another piece of me.

I walk out the door and he follows me down the street. we pass the lovely laughing schoolgirls the bakery trucks and the sun opens and closes like an oyster swallowing my beast for a moment as I cross at a green light pretending that I have escaped, pretending that I need a loaf of bread or a newspaper, pretending that the beast is gone forever and that the torn parts of me are still there under a blue shirt and green pants as all the faces become walls and all the walls become impossible." -Charles Bukowski