Content warning: suicidal ideation

I have not disappeared, though I wanted to once: I was locked in a room under 24/7 video surveillance with a thin mattress on the floor, eating bland spaghetti with a plastic spoon (though not really eating since I’d stopped that, too) because I kept cutting my wrists with the tines of a fork in the hospital cafeteria; or swallowing fistfuls of pills — Lithium and Ambien and anything else in the medicine cabinet; or eating an apple, and only an apple, a day and then throwing it up; or jumping into a frozen lake — a failed Ophelia.

I kept trying to disappear for good and my doctors kept locking me away. “We need to stop you from killing yourself,” they said, earnestly believing they could help me resurface from Bipolar’s concurrent mania and depression.

I have my hospital records from those years, six inches thick. My attending psychiatrists’ notes are repetitive in their simplicity: “Generally unresponsive. Resists the group therapeutic milieu. Paces the hallway for hours. Counts steps. Rigid focus. Chronic, recurring, persistent. Stabilization unlikely. Husband informed.” I could, in my various doctors’ eyes, read their real diagnostic assessment: “What a waste.” My records, in all the emergency room intakes, include details about me such as, “young, pretty, well-groomed, thin, professor, PhD, published writer.” Details that don’t add up to a patient locked in a safe room banging her head against the cinder block wall in an attempt to stop her brain from hurting so much and all the time.

I have not disappeared, though I wanted to once.
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At the time, I believed the doctors’ assessment because I didn’t know anyone who had survived — much less thrived — in spite of or because of Bipolar Disorder. Then I rediscovered Carrie Fisher. As a kid, I’d idolized her as the fierce Princess Leia, asking my mother to braid and loop my hair around my ears like hers (as I know many, many young girls did), but I grew up and stopped believing in galaxies far far away and instead disappeared inside my own black hole.

Meds didn’t work, but Fisher’s book, Wishful Drinking, did — a gift from a friend while I was an inpatient about to go through my own long bout of electric shock treatment. I read her brave, in-your-face account of her own difficulties with addiction and mania and depression, and her own course of electric shock treatment. She transformed her pain and shame into a generous, funny, self-forgiving story, and lived a large life because she’d managed to turn away from a little death.

Carrie Fisher is why I can write without shame that I have Bipolar Disorder. From 2007–2011, I was hospitalized more than 20 times. Her recovery inspired mine. Since 2011? I no longer drink booze and now eat to sustain my body. I take my prescribed medication (only one now, Lithium, compared to my unstable, acute phase, which had included Lithium, Abilify, Trazadone, Klonopin, Seroquel — all at once — and which at times left me in a deep, drooling fog). I am stable. But I am also stable because I am living a visible life again. Though Carrie Fisher wrote fiction, it is her truth that I follow.

My doctors couldn’t see that what was killing me was not just Bipolar Disorder and my anorexia, but the absence of desire and love in the dumb, dark silence of the underground bunker that was, in part, my unhappy marriage. I was forever wondering if I was good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough, confident enough, lovable enough for my then-husband. By the end times of our marriage, though still sharing a home and wearing our wedding rings, my husband had already left me for a flesh and blood woman instead of a ghost-wife made of smoke and ash.

My illness, and my suicide attempts — active and passive — offered an escape from myself and from a marriage likely made too young. That I was too young to be tied to a husband — and one who wanted the perfect, pretty me (or that’s what I believed he wanted) — exacerbated the escalation of my Bipolar Disorder. I was 22 when I met my husband, just out of an abusive relationship, and he seemed like the answer to all my pain and loneliness — he saw me, for a few years, as someone who was beautiful and desirable. I felt seen when for so long I had been invisible in that abusive relationship, feigning happiness, despite the degradation and bruises.

Of course, that statement — he saw me — reveals the source of so much of my later pain and need to escape through my own death, the only way I could see out of my bunker. How else could I say, “Cut!” and abandon his script — happy wife, happy life, no strife? How could I have imagined divorce when I was unstable and taking care of two very young children? How could I have imagined our ending as something other than failure and contraction, when, in fact, it might be necessary and expansive?

I relied on my husband to show me myself, rather than holding myself in my own mind’s eye, fixed with intent on a life of my own. Consequently, for years, my inside self, my Bipolar self, was invisible, and my husband was the only one who saw its ravaging effects — cuts on my arms hidden under long sleeves, meals thrown up in the toilet, hours spent ruminating over suicide methods. Carrie Fisher was still Princess Leia and Wishful Drinking was not yet a life-saving gift; I didn’t yet know that stability comes not just from giving up substances and behaviors that kept me sick, but living my truth in the open, sleeves pushed back, and writing my story, too.

I relied on my husband to show me myself, rather than holding myself in my own mind’s eye, fixed with intent on a life of my own.
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Those doctors couldn’t see that what I wanted was a noisy naked life, with my inside self aligned with my outside self. It was impossible for them to see this as I was a shadow on a negative; if you held that negative to the light, you might wonder: Is that her? Likely, you wouldn’t see me at all. Before my last hospitalization, I remember standing in a dressing room trying to find a dress that would fit my body because everything, even the smallest of sizes, was too big. I looked in the mirror, and then quickly away, unable to see myself because what was visible was not a body but a ghost — there was nothing beautiful or desirable left. In the throes of manic depression, I felt a tragic satisfaction: Soon, soon I would disappear.

We wear our wedding ring on our left hand’s fourth finger because the vein, vena amoris, runs from the heart to this finger. But that wedding ring around my finger, beautiful as it was, with a vintage diamond (I picked it out myself), was a cinch cutting off the supply of sustaining blood from the heart. When I finally took off the ring, selling it for so much less than its worth, I understood that its worth depended on its disappearance and my worth was in my reappearance.

The most important romance now? I take me for my beloved in sickness and in health.

When I learned of Carrie Fisher’s death, I mourned my fierce princess but more, the warrior who showed me how to transform invisible pain into visible strength. The etymology of “visible”: “a condition of being seen, conspicuousness.” In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Fisher said, “I think I do overshare and I sometimes marvel that I do it. In a way, it’s my way of understanding myself. I don’t know, I get it out of my head. It creates community when you can talk about private things.”

I take me for my beloved in sickness and in health.
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Also under “visible”: “range of vision under given condition.” When we tell our true stories, our invisible selves manifest, and vision expands because we are no longer cinched by the conditions of secrecy, shame, and silence. “Visible”: “prominence, fame, public attention.” Carrie Fisher used her celebrity to help me — that woman once locked in the safe room, almost locked away for good in a state institution (truly invisible) — to find my way back into a life of my choosing.

I am here. You can see my shame and beauty, my regrets and joy, my teetering in the dark and exultation in the light. I am visible. My heart is my sleeve. This becoming is an unbecoming: an unraveling into a noisy, honest, authentic, raucous, give-no-fucks, almost-45-year-old, single, stable, sane, sober self. My thumb is on my throbbing pulse, and I am wet with longing. My desire runs wild and it is for myself.

I am here. You can see my shame and beauty, my regrets and joy, my teetering in the dark and exultation in the light. I am visible.
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I sit here, writing this on the cusp of another new year, on the cusp of another chance to love myself with abandon. I am eating an orange split into two halves, one in hand and one in mouth, juices spilling down my chin. This is what I taste like, flesh and blood, sharp and sweet, and I devour each half whole.

The first Leia Organa that I knew and loved was a princess, although she wasn’t like any of the other princesses I’d seen in movies. She was smart and funny and loud and strong, and she had a true gift for getting in savage digs against anybody who looked at her crosswise. She didn’t need rescuing, and she had cool hair. For 9-year-old Anne, that Leia was basically perfect.

But in the wake of Carrie Fisher’s death, I’m not thinking about Leia the princess. Right now all of my thoughts are of the woman she became in 2015’s The Force Awakens: the older, wiser, battle-scarred leader of anti-Empire rebels. The Leia I need now is General Leia Organa.

General Organa doesn’t have the same glamor she did when she went by the name Princess Leia. She’s not young anymore, and she’s traded in her snowy white robes for a more serviceable outfit in drab earth tones. She doesn’t wear any insignia or other obvious indication of her rank. She’s given up her fancy updos for a more matronly hairstyle. She could be any other middle-aged woman, except for the way that she carries herself: with the swagger of someone who has grown accustomed to being in command.

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The Leia I need now is General Leia Organa.
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This Leia is not the smart-alecky ingenue of A New Hope. She’s the brilliant strategist who has to make a split-second decision after learning that their star system is the Starkiller base’s next target. She’s the compassionate leader who is willing to break up a meeting with high-ranking resistance officers in order to thank and comfort Finn. She’s the woman who senses that Han Solo — the only man that she has ever loved — has been killed, and after taking a moment to register that she swallows her grief and returns to her work.

She has done this over and over: swallowed her grief, returned to the work. At this point she has eaten decades of grief. This is a Leia who has lost almost every important person in her life: Her biological mother died shortly after her birth. Her biological father was a literal monster who barely knew she existed. Her home planet was destroyed when she was just a teenager, and her parents were killed in its destruction. Later, her son Ben was drawn to the dark side, and her brother Luke, who had been Ben’s teacher, was driven by his grief and guilt to an unknown planet at the edge of the universe. It was this same grief that presumably led her erstwhile husband, Han Solo, to reassume his role as a wise-cracking criminal.

Leia could have run away too. It would have been both easy and forgivable. Instead, she did what so many women have done throughout history: she held it together. She kept going.

Watching the early Star Wars movies, it’s clear that Leia was never meant to be the protagonist; she was meant to be the protagonist’s sexual prize. The audience is supposed to root for Luke, the Chosen One with special Jedi powers (never mind that Leia is also sensitive to the Force and probably would have crushed Yoda’s bootcamp), or else they’re supposed to love the roguish Han Solo. Leia was never supposed to be anything other than someone’s main squeeze. But something weird and magical happened in the story arc from A New Hope to The Force Awakens: Leia became the sleeper hero of the Star Wars franchise.

We have Carrie Fisher to thank for that, for bringing something to Leia that was deeper and more resonant than superficial specialness or charm. Leia was written as an empty vessel, and Fisher poured herself inside: her own pain, her own quiet struggle, her own resolve. With Fisher animating her, the princess who was supposed to be an object of romance became instead an engine of revolt. Leia is in it for the long haul. She fights and fights and fights, even when her family quits on her and the odds seem impossible. For Leia, doing whatever she can to bring down the fascist Empire is more important than her feelings or personal life. Without her steadfast presence, the rebellion would have been quashed long before Rey was born.

Like Fisher, Leia earned every tiny ounce of respect that came her way. She was given the title of princess because of who her parents were, but she earned the rank of general through hard and often miserable work. We love the mythos that heroes get where they are because they are special or chosen, and the people we hold up as icons reflect that. But the rebel army isn’t made up of Jedis — for the most part it’s just ordinary people united to fight for the same cause. And Leia, in spite of having once been royalty and maybe having some ability with the Force, is mostly as ordinary as any other soldier; she rose through the ranks not by manipulating the Force but by learning leadership skills and military tactics.

Simply put: Leia got to where she was by showing up and quietly learning to do the work.

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In times like this steady fighters are needed, the ones who have seen the Chosen One come and go.
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Princess Leia was wonderful, but General Organa is the one I’m looking to these days for guidance. It’s hard not to give in to a numb sort of nihilism. As the future grows darker and more uncertain, it’s easy to believe that our individual actions are worth nothing compared to humanity’s obvious and urgent desire for self-destruction. Like Luke, I’m sure we all feel the temptation to run away somewhere where no one can find us and nothing bad can reach us; since our leaders seem so intent on blowing us all up, we may as well go somewhere picturesque to live out our last days. It’s also tempting to hope that the Chosen One is out there somewhere, ready to swoop in and fix everything. Both of those options absolve us of having to take any action. But it’s in times like this that the steady, stubborn fighters are needed, the ones who have seen the Chosen One come and go and still refuse to give up. The ones who don’t back down even when everything seems impossible. The ones determined to believe that there is a future in spite of the evidence to the contrary. The ones who would rather die for what they believe in than live to be complicit in a fascist regime.

I hope we can all find a way to be General Organa, for ourselves and each other. May we all be able to get up every day and, in spite of our pain and loss and fear, put on our boots and our earth-tone vests and plan to destroy the Empire.