Today is Mother’s Day, and I lost my mom’s present. Even worse, because I spent so much time yesterday and this morning dumping out drawers and checking under furniture for the gift I bought her a month ago, I forgot that I hadn’t even written in her card. I just tucked it into my purse, still sheathed in the plastic sleeve it was sold in. Normally, I’d just write it off as absent-mindedness; I’d write in the card later and hope her necklace pops up. These days, though, it set off a torrent of anxiety.

I have a small notebook I keep tucked next to my computer. I bought it just a bit before I wrote Words and Weakness, two blog entries ago. As of now, several of its pages are full of short notes which would probably not make sense to anyone but me. I’ve been recording each time I make an odd mix-up with words, like writing “thoughs” instead of “those” or “know” instead of “now.” Just in the last week, I’ve added to those pages times when words just look wrong, even though I am sure they’re spelled correctly. What do you do when you can’t trust your own brain?

As someone with bipolar disorder, I know very well the power of the brain to deceive. When I was sickest, my mom would tell me certain things over and over again and say, Rebecca, this is truth – your brain is lying to you. My parents and I have had many conversations over the years about how a Christian in the clutches of a mental illness, sitting in darkness and despair, can still believe, and even hope. My struggles now seem like the other side of the same coin. When I was depressed, I could still look at physical objects and know without hesitation that they were there. Now, it’s the ordinary objects, letters, and words that I’m unsure about. Whenever I’ve explained what’s going on, though, I say, At least I catch it all as I write. Last night, it suddenly dawned on me that, if I was making odd mistakes in my notes, I couldn’t know if I caught them all unless I went back and looked.

This morning, as I hurried around my house, sweating and half-dressed, searching still for my mom’s gift, little prickles of anxiety crawled over my skin and settled in a pool somewhere under my stomach. I gave it no quarter, mostly because I was rushing, then driving, then at church with my parents. It wasn’t until I got home from a Mother’s Day lunch that I realized that anxiety was still bubbling in the background. While I was again tearing the house apart looking for that necklace, my problems with my brain started leaking into my conscious mind. How many times do I walk into a room and have no idea why I’m there? It would be easier to count how many times I don’t. Or how many times do I forget whether I fed my cat or not? (Jasper’s already overweight, he doesn’t need extra food.)

I tried to put it all out of my head. I got my flute out to practice, but my fingers were flubbing notes on the simplest of scales. I put the instrument down after only 20 minutes; I was frantically asking myself whether my fingers were disobeying my mind because I was tired and distracted or because my brain is starting to just… give up. I did myself a favor and went into my office to do a little cathartic writing. The notebook full of my daily “symptoms” is lying on the desk next to me. I’m not spiraling or freaking out, because, in the irony of ironies, writing things down, poor spelling and all, makes me feel better. I worry about losing my ability to write when I’m not writing, but never while I am.

Things are a little bit scary right now, but not terrifying. A man named Jean-Dominique Bauby, after a seizure left him almost completely paralyzed, wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly using only his left eye to signal which letter he wanted written down. Humans are resilient and capable of great things, which makes it all the more amazing to know that God’s weakness is greater than all our strength. What does that mean for me right now? I know that God used the emotional shipwreck of becoming bipolar to do marvelous things in my life. With a little trust and a little faith, I can rest in the knowledge that he could repeat that miracle. Still, every time I scribble another odd word swap in my notebook, I wonder. And then I write.