Love, Sex and Aripiprazole

One word in this phrase seems to have wandered into the wrong company. Love and sex–fair enough. Aripiprazole takes a little more effort to pronounce. It sounds like something from the leaflet you fold back into the box and try not to read again.

But in my life, these words get along just fine.

I love, want intimacy, work, make plans. And I take medication. Sometimes I draw something funny. Sometimes I deal with bills. Life doesn’t divide itself into neat compartments: the person here, their feelings over there, and a diagnosis kept well away from everything else.

I have bipolar disorder. Several years ago, during a manic episode, I ended up in a locked psychiatric ward. At one point, I was restrained on a bed. It’s difficult to talk about this without the story becoming either frightening or a lesson for someone else. I don’t particularly want to make it either. It happened to me. I received help, and I continue to live with that experience.

Lying there, unable to move, I discovered that I could still feel free. I was still myself. Later, that became the comic Still Free.

But life continued after the hospital, and another question came with it: how do you see yourself once you know something like this can happen to you?

I know the urge to keep improving yourself until you finally earn the right to be happy with who you are. I used to spend weeks polishing a single letter of a typeface. There was always something to fix. Eventually, I realised I was chasing an image that existed only in my head. There would never be a final correction.

You can do the same thing to yourself. Wait until you’re stable enough, successful enough, until you understand yourself properly. Until everything that might be awkward to explain to another person has disappeared. Only then allow yourself to get close.

I don’t want to keep waiting.

I want to be able to say: this happened to me. This is what I take now. Sometimes things are difficult. I also have desires, a sense of humour, work, and an interest in life. All of this exists at once, and I’m not going to erase part of it to make a more appealing portrait.

That’s why sex belongs in the phrase too. Without it, the conversation can become a little too respectable: someone with a diagnosis gets sympathy, wishes for good health, praise for their resilience. But they still have a body. They may want touch, pleasure, tenderness, the chance to feel desirable. I don’t want to spend my whole life cast as someone who is recovering.

For me, intimacy means allowing myself to be seen. That can be frightening, especially once you’ve learned things about yourself you would rather not have known. But I don’t want relationships that depend on keeping up a presentable version of myself for someone else.

At the same time, I don’t expect love to do my doctor’s job. The person close to me has a life of their own, limits, and the right to get tired. I value support where I can ask for help and get an honest answer. Sometimes it looks very ordinary: someone beside you, breakfast together, a conversation about something other than how you’re doing.

Aripiprazole is a specific word from my everyday life. I could replace it with something more poetic, but I’d lose some of the honesty. My life includes the name of a medication. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise.

I don’t see my crisis as a necessary price for making art. I like working when I can finish a drawing, get some sleep, and come back to it the next day. There are still plenty of things I want to make.

Love, Sex and Aripiprazole makes me smile because it sounds like an unlikely combination. For me, it’s ordinary life. Taking medication is part of it. So are wanting someone, loving someone, and getting back to a drawing I haven’t finished yet.