A Tragic Kind of Wonderful

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HAMSTER IS RUNNING

HUMMINGBIRD IS PERCHED

HAMMERHEAD IS CRUISING

HANNIGANIMAL IS LEVEL/MIXED

Dr. Oswald doesn’t seem old enough to be a psychiatrist. She’s slim, with dark skin, nice bone structure in her face, and wearing a stylish off-white sweater, like an eggshell, with navy slacks. None of the young psychiatrists I’ve seen were any good. I mean to talk to. They’ve been okay about tuning my meds.

She sits there with this nice, open expression, ready for me to … what? I don’t know. And the stress of not knowing, plus maybe telling her about the Hanniganimal today, has shifted my moods even faster than usual. This is our third session and the office is less empty this time. The shelves have more books. There are more framed diplomas on the wall, a Van Gogh print of birds over a field, a bonsai tree on her desk with a tiny origami crane in its branches—

“It seems like something’s on your mind,” she says. “We have some time left.”

We’d talked about the routine stuff after I filled out the long weekly questionnaire: Manic Episodes? (no), Depression? (the usual amount), Irritability? (no), Rage? (no), Sleeplessness? (nothing I can’t handle), Obsessive Thoughts? (they mostly mean about sex, and no), Suicidal Thoughts? (definitely not, and that should be the first question), and so on.

Annie called right before my appointment—couldn’t be a mistake this time, not with my name and picture popping up on her screen—and my mind started racing as I declined it. She left no message and that made it even worse. I’m not going to mention tweaking my meds.

“Want to talk about it?” she says. “Or anything else?”

No. Yet I also don’t want to say no tomorrow when Dr. Jordan asks if I gave her a chance. I swung by the house on my way here to bring my charts, but I’m getting cold feet.

“You’re the doctor,” I say. “What should we talk about? My meds are working pretty well. No one at school even knows there’s anything wrong with me.”

“You are doing very well, way above average for someone with your symptoms. Mainly because you aren’t resistant to medication. That’s a lot of the battle right there.”

“I don’t feel like I’m winning anything.”

“Battles are never won. Only survived.”

“Then what’s to talk about? There’s no cure. I’m as good as I’m going to get.”

“Dr. Fletcher wrote in his notes about things you haven’t told your friends, to protect yourself. Some trigger topics—”

I stiffen and she raises a hand.

“I won’t bring them up with only a few minutes left today. But you have painful, real emotions, which aren’t symptoms. Talking about them will make you feel better.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’ll give you a stack of blank forms so you can fill them out before you arrive. That way we can spend our time talking instead of you filling them out here. Okay?”

Has she guessed that I fill them out slowly on her sofa to use up time?

“You’re saying next week I have to talk about …”

“No. You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

I watch her carefully.

“It’s okay, Mel. Dr. Fletcher had … an aggressive style of talk therapy. That’s not how I work. We can just talk about the weather every week till you go off to college if you want. But I do want us to talk. Okay?”

Dr. Oswald gives me a real smile, not some obvious bullshit psychiatrist version.

I want to believe her. Only it wasn’t just Dr. Fletcher. Every doctor except Dr. Jordan has pushed me, or thought I was exaggerating my symptoms, or both.

“So …” she says. “I came from Seattle. Does it ever rain here?”

I smile. “Not much.”

“That’s a shame. I like the rain. Do you?”

I’m relieved. And grateful. Maybe I can try this after all.

I take a deep breath. “When my parents divorced three years ago, six months after … you know … what happened with my brother … I was pretty messed up. We moved here and then a year and a half later, I … had my breakdown. Grandma Cece was friends with a psychiatrist living on the same floor of her retirement home, Dr. Jordan, and … well, he won’t talk about my meds—he’s retired and won’t be my real doctor—but he taught me things that pretty much saved me.”

“You were thinking about hurting yourself?”

“God, no, nothing like that. But my dad says there’s lots of ways to ruin your life.”

“How did Dr. Jordan help you?”

“Too many ways to tell you in just a few minutes, but …”

I pull the printouts from my pocket and unfold them. These graphs are my life decoded; I’m not keen on showing them to anyone. They’re like pages from my diary, or poems I wrote from the deepest, most secret place in my heart, the kind other people would think are silly. I hand them over.

“He taught me that bipolar disorder doesn’t just mean bouncing between manic and depressed. That my rapid cycling isn’t just doing it faster than most. That my mixed states aren’t just being depressed and manic at the same time. He showed me it’s all much more complicated than that, but also how to break it down.”

She looks at my graphs and sits up straighter.

“I’m a mix of all these forces. We talked about it like they were all different animals.”

Dr. Oswald looks at me thoughtfully. I don’t know what her expression means. It doesn’t seem negative.

“The Hamster is my Head, for how clear my thinking is. When my Hamster is Running or Sprinting in its wheel, I’m sharp or racing. If it’s Stumbling, I can still think fast but I’m muddled and can’t put two thoughts together, or I can’t stop thinking something over and over. The attention-deficit part.”

She’s listening. So far so good.

“The Hummingbird is my Heart, how much energy I have. When my Hummingbird is Flying, I want to run around, or if it’s Speeding I stay up for days without sleeping. If it’s Perched or Asleep, I want to lie down.”

She’s not judging. Not yet, anyway.

“The Hammerhead is my physical Health. Cruising when I’m fine; Slogging or Thrashing if I’m sick. And I’m the Host, which is my mood generally plus the combination of the other animals. What Dr. Jordan and I started calling the Hanniganimal—”

“I’m sorry, the …?”

“The Hannigan Animal. The HANN-i-GAN-i-mal. Me.”