The Story of Stephen, Part 2.

The first year was a nightmare.

They were experimenting with drug cocktails, trying to determine what would balance out Stephen’s erratic moods. He was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which was a term he quickly came to loathe. Mood stabilizers and anti-depressants, a small dosage of an anti-psychotic, ‘just to try’, ‘see if it helps’, ‘how does it make you feel’.

Stephen was told to monitor his moods. No one ever told him how.

He didn’t know what feeling ‘normal’ was like; his idea of normal was, apparently, ‘wrong’. Often, he would give vague answers, or ones he didn’t even know whether or not they were true. He would tell his doctor that one medication made him feel worse, or better, without knowing for sure if he was telling the truth.

What was better supposed to feel like? What did worse mean?

Most often, he simply quoted his girlfriend – now roommate – and told the doctor what her impression seemed to be. She seemed to know better than he did, what ‘better’ was. Following her opinions and basing everything off her observations, they finally settled on medication, and he began to take it steadily. They increased the dose, as the doctor seemed to think best, and he took the pills without question.

Then…he took them a bit less.

It was starting to frighten him. The equilibrium he’d reached made everything feel muffled and grey. Or, perhaps more aptly, it made him feel not much of anything.

Stephen felt as though he was losing his sense of self. As much as he dreaded the low points…there was something he missedabout the highs. The good emotions, the bad emotions. At least he had been feeling something.

His girlfriend was less his lover, and more his roommate. He didn’t feel as connected to her, as he once was, and she wasn’t oblivious to it. They both knew they were drifting from each other.

It wasn’t killing him, that their relationship was falling apart. He wanted it to be killing him…but he couldn’t muster it. Stephen was hardly alive, anymore, and that was what he was mourning, above all else.

He started skipping his medication. The withdrawal made him worse – they would fight, and scream, and he would revel in his own despair simply because it wassomething other than dullness. He drank, sometimes, and spent the nights blacked out in an alleyway next to the bar. He turned down offers of drugs, if only because his experiences with the medication made him wary.

He didn’t want to be reckless. He just didn’t want to feel like a zombie, anymore.

His girlfriend gave him two months to find somewhere else to live.