Free Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Page A

pleased, she was still weak and shaky. And there, as she sat opposite me, I could see her wings. Black and shining, her wingtips were tilted to hope, curious for sky, quizzically trying for a fledgling happiness. It was so right for her situation after the flightless and frightening cancer weeks, and I told her what I could see. Once again, I didn’t think they really existed, but it was like seeing an actualized metaphor, and I sketched her, and both of us hummed the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird singing’.
    The Christmas lights along Regent Street were like reindeer horns and made me feel trippy, the shoots and offshoots and offshoots of the offshoots, all curling and dendritic, like a visible and outward design of invisible and inward mind-lines, how one thought shoots off to another and another. My mind lit up and my heart felt full of love for my friend, and we passed a shop selling mugs and bought one for her saying ‘JOY’.
    It is ravenous, this hypomanic state; all-consuming and auto-consuming, and I could feel it yearning towards mania, wanting a higher reach. But aces in this bipolar game are both high and low, and after eventually managing to sleep that night, I woke with my face in spasm, muscles leaping through reflex of emotions unbidden. In this crash, London was a terrifying place to be, andI wondered how I could manage to get home. I needed to be near my doctor.
    Technically, he was a GP, but more truly he was a mind doctor, a psyche- iatros , as the root of the word ‘psychiatrist’ attests, the most gifted doctor I’d ever met. He was also, in the deepest sense of the word, a healer. I had told him that in one early appointment, and he had gently turned the compliment aside, in a self-deprecating only-doing-my-job kind of gesture.
    I held on to these appointments as if my life depended on them, and this is no exaggeration. I felt at the time, and still feel now, that my doctor saved my life. In the course of the crisis, which lasted into weeks and months, I saw him dozens of times and, partway through, I began to wonder what it felt like to listen to a mad person so desperate to talk, so much and so often. Madness forces you to concentrate on it. It is attention-seeking because it wants an audience. Madness wants to paint its vision so the world can see what the human mind is capable of seeing. It wants to play its passions so the world can hear the song. It wants to write and speak because it seeks to be understood and to understand itself. It wants to utter – to outer – its inner knowledge. It is as if the human mind, on its continuum from normal middle C to the upper reaches and lower depths, needs some people to play the highest Cs and to be played by the cavernous bass, so that everyone may know of those realms, even if they themselves are never dwellers there.
    It is troubling to find oneself in mid-flight and uninterruptable, hijacking people’s attention. I suddenly remembered that joke about the egotist at a party: Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me? ; and told my doctor, who laughed. After that, I tried to save up any joke I heard or remembered, and take it to appointments to lighten his load of listening.
    I feel sorry for doctors: we take our dodgy psyches, our warts and bad breath, our boring aches and nondescript pains, our malfunctions and mishumours and moods, our putrid life experiences and biliousness and vaginal discharges and itchy foreskins and diarrhoea, and our bums-with-grapes and our leaking noses and eyes, and our swellings and protuberances and our history-ofs and our tears and our sleeplessness, and our skinninesses and our obesities and our corns and earwax and ingrowths and outgrowths and groins and acne: and we stick it all in front of the doctor, all this dirt and ugliness. Good doctors leave me in awe.
    Several people – particularly those in the caring professions – have asked me what exactly my doctor did that was