LITMIR.BIZ

      I am small in stature, barely an inch above five feet. But I can put up a good fight, something I’ve been doing all my life, often with family, friends, and strangers but mostly with myself. I am bipolar and have struggled with it since it surfaced shortly after high school. I ascend to heights of frenetic energy and confidence only to plummet to hellish depths of madness, guided by unseen voices and terrifying hallucinations. Imagine you’re watching a DVD or a video, and you pick up the remote and punch fast-forward. Suddenly, those images flash by in milliseconds. The “screen” of my mind operates in the same fashion. It is in manic phase when I sketch voluminous drawings of people, places, horses. And I’ll sketch them on anything: paper, napkins, walls, wherever I can create. If I’m not sketching, I’m writing volumes and volumes of poetry or prose with unchained thoughts in my journal, until finally I crash into days of sleep. It is exhilarating while in it, but exhausting coming out of it. More than once I’ve found myself within the confines of mental institutions, and many more times I’ve gone off the deep end after tottering on the edge of reality and fantasy, unable to maintain my balance against a whirlwind of raging emotions.

      I’m forty-three years old, but my life feels twice that. People say I am an angry woman. I am. When you’ve had to fight through so many things, it’s hard not to be. I have been hungry, cold, abused physically, tormented emotionally, homeless, and frequently out of control. But I’ve also, at times, lived a seemingly quite normal life with my three children and their father. And against all odds, at forty years old, I became the first African American woman in Chicago racing history to win a race and only the second in U.S. history.

      I continue to struggle with being bipolar and always will. But psychotropic medicines, which have not always been available to me, spiritualism, which in my case happens to be Buddhism, and—most important—my love of horses keep me from looking at life as one continuous battle. My life has been a race to outrun the disease that attempts to consume me. To that point, I tell my story in parallel to my biggest race, that cold day in December 2007.

      I haven’t always been able to live life on my terms, but I’m optimistic I’ll get there—even if it is a long shot.

      Sylvia Harris

       July 2010

      The Race