I put the pedal to the metal and swerved around several vehicles, cutting them off as I had cut off the jerk who — in my mind at least — had started it all.

My wife was in the seat next to me, clutching the handle in front of her and all but screaming for me to slow down.

I did manage to realize what I was doing after a few cars honked at me and flipped me off.

No one got hurt, but afterwards I felt badly — I had lost control — that I had come so close to the point where I might have ended up in jail or on a slab in the morgue next to my wife.

There’s a scene in The Silver Linings Playbook where the main character is so frantic looking for his wedding video that he knocks his mother down by accident. This is the kind of violence that people with bipolar disorder are mostly known for. Like the Bradley Cooper character I never set out to harm people, but I came too close for their comfort. People were afraid of me.

Therapists often tell us to forget about such things, to write them off as “things we did in mania”. They are trying to save us from the daily self-torture known as guilt. Every time we are reminded, we think we must put ourselves on a rack and stretch until we cry out.

But I don’t think that is a very good answer because I have seen people give themselves too much license. “I did that in one of my episodes, so it is OK.” They miss the point: many of the things we do in mania are harmful. A few of us have spent large amounts of money — run up credit cards and stolen to feed the rampant materialism of mania. We may choose to ignore the anger that overwhelms those around us. Or the acts of vandalism — one guy I know put a hole in the wall with hist fist — that frighten those we love.

I don’t think the answer is feeling guilty but part of my recovery has been to feel a proper amount of shame for the demonic releases that I perpetrated while I was high on my illness.

Guilt doesn’t do anything except make us feel awful. It is torturing ourselves over and over again for the things that we did.

I prefer to engage in shame. What is the difference? Guilt punishes us repeatedly. Shame reminds us that the thing we did was harmful. We don’t muse over it, we don’t spend our time getting the high again or inflicting emotional damage like an experimental psychologist might electrify the floor of a cage to punish a rat.

In guilt, we keep revisiting the scene of the crime. In shame, we simply say “What I did was wrong. And I will not go back there.” This means that we take steps to prevent future episodes of mania and live as responsible human beings. Our episodes are no longer an excuse: they are things we avoid.

My mother medicalized everything. When my father stopped at every drinking fountain on hot days, she mocked him for it and suggested that it was a sign of diabetes. She abraded my brother because he had acne and suggested that it was because he didn’t wash his face enough: when a pimple irritated her, she wrestled him to the bed and popped it — supposedly a medical procedure done with a specialized medical spoon. She had me screened for tuberculosis because a Hungarian girl in an upper grade at Holy Rosary School had it. (I never had contact with the girl.) She checked my arms for trackmarks and examined the pupils of my eyes. I was always tired, mostly because I lived in anticipation of what new attack on my person her obssessive compulsive disorder would launch. She took this as a sign of sickness or drug addiction, but not — God help her — of the mental illness that it was.

Her nagging, I think, turned my father off to seeking medical reasons for his pain. He preferred to tough it out, I think, because her hectoring used up the energy he might have used to think about that cookie for himself. So as the pain acid-splashed through his chest and into his shoulders, he kept silent. He didn’t want to hear her go on about his every bite of steak and potatoes, his watching television instead of walking, or the flush of blood into his face. Private physical discomfort attracted him more than her public declamations on the way he treated his body.

I don’t know if my father chose to die or if he simply downplayed the significance of the dizziness, the pain, and the shortness of breath. I do believe that my mother’s nagging did not help because she always linked it to insult and dark foreboding. This is why I do not tell her about my condition. I do not want her talking about my every bite of food, the size of my stomach, my feeling winded at the top of stairs. When she nags me, she invades my head and pillages my tranquility. Even if I do the things I am supposed to do, she never lets up. Finally, there is no talk about life if I do things right.

I have, however, asked Lynn to nag me. But in a different way. Think about the vacation. Think about conquering the Silverado Motorway when you feel better. Think about the long walks you can take in Whiting. Think about the renewed energy you will have. It’s not about the ills that will befall me — I am all too aware of those — but of the good changes that will happen.

These lessons came to me because I watched what my mother did to my father, how she wore him down, how she made him feel powerless. Towards the end of his life, he spent five days of the week in an apartment 150 miles from our home in San Bernardino. I know he hated coming home because during that week he’d have a room of his own. They often fought on the weekends and sometimes he drove back to China Lake on Saturday night. He was thinking about divorce, a stunning step for a Catholic CCD teacher.

I only half blame him.

I remember an incident that happened the summer before he died. The fuel line in the car I was driving had sprung a leak and needed to be fixed. We met at the Volkswagen dealer. He was angry that I “had let this happen”. At the heart of it, I think he saw in me my mother’s panic (they were always complaining that I was like one or the other). So he treated the breakage of the fuel line like he treated reports of high chloresterol — an exagerration. The mechanic immediately confirmed that the line needed to be replaced, vindicating me. We went for a walk. I could feel his rage. It was hotter than the unclouded five o’clock desert sun. He was looking to slap me around and I was doing my best not to give him reason. Just as we left the lot and crossed the sidewalk that surrounded it, he heaved in. The air hissed as he drew it through his teeth. His face turned red and he bent over, pointing his left hand at the sidewalk until the tip of his fingers touched the curb. I asked him if it was all right. He became indignant and I dropped the subject.

What should I have done? When my mother heard the story, she blamed me for not taking him right away to the hospital. She expected this twenty year old boy to coerce a large man to do something he didn’t want. What was I supposed to do? Wrestle him to the ground? Send an ambulance to his apartment? Have him arrested for neglecting his health?

If I had it to do over again, I think I would do this: Simply say “There’s a way to get rid of that pain. Let’s go over to the hospital right now and deal with it. It will take some effort to free yourself, but you will be able to enjoy all kinds of things.

Perhaps if I had done that, he would be around still, contemplating life in his eighty-first year. I know that I don’t want to see the end before I am fifty, that I want to see that eighty first year myself. Lynn helps me by accenting an end to the suffering that I feel and the promise of a richer, freer life afoot in the wilds.

Today’s topic: Write about an injury.

My brother called me, twenty to thirty years after the fact, to tell me that he’d told Mom that he’d broken my arm with a baseball bat when I was five and he was eleven.

I always remembered that I’d fallen on the sidewalk. At least that’s the story I spat out when asked about it. After I hung back, I thought about that afternoon. We were roughhousing on the front lawn, playing characters from the current Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. He had the bat — a thick softball bat — and he swung it around like Excalibur. Robbie always got to be King Arthur.

Arms waved about. And, to tell the truth, I don’t remember the exact moment when I put up my left arm to stop that bat from hurting me in a worse place. Through all the waving of our arms, though, I confess that’s probably what happened because I don’t remember falling. My mother, who came ambling up from a neighbor’s house after the fact, says that I didn’t cry. I think she’s right. Sudden physical shock never brings on the tears like a sorrow rolling in the gut. What I recall is that he coached me, that he pointed to my arm and to the sidewalk, that he designated a spot between the magnolias.

That’s the spot. That’s where you fell. You broke your arm on the sidewalk. You must tell that to Mom or else we’ll both be in trouble.

I guess I did. I memorized the story and told it to people whenever I was prompted to relate what happened. My parents took to me to St. Bernardine’s where they x-rayed my arm. The radiologist could find no sign of a fracture. I couldn’t move my fingers very well, however. My mother made me wear a sling. My father griped that she was making his son “a cripple”. But she persisted, arranged for another x-ray, and on this second attempt, the doctor pointed to a hairline fracture across one of the bones of forearm. He put my arm in a cast and for a few weeks I was the king of afternoon Kindegarten, the guy who collected the signatures of every classmate on his arm.

That might have made up for the violence. I got to be the center of attention. Even my brother signed the cast. I was cool.

Alice wrote her own broken arm story. Check out the account of her misadventure with her dog.

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about circling the edge.

I go into an office building where I used to work. I walk the hallways – illegally because I don’t have clearance — looking for someone I knew from those days. I give up and go to sit in a big easy chair in the cafeteria. I fret that they will kick me out, but then I remember that this is not a restricted area.