My divided world.

It's July 10, 1990, my thirtieth birthday. I'm in a phone booth, hemmed in by Nevada desert, beneath a yellow moon. The man I married earlier today is with his brother in a barbecue joint. I manage to escape with a lie, saying I have to call my mother. The number 0 on the telephone is an open mouth, trying to scream a warning. I'm shaking.

Against my will, I close my eyes ... and see the massive glass doors of the federal courtroom in Albuquerque where I stood trial in 1988, accused of conspiracy against the United States, accused of smuggling Salvadoran refugees into the country as part of the Sanctuary movement. I see myself speaking into the polished microphone on the witness stand--then flash to the image of a machine gun in the hands of a Salvadoran soldier. Two years after my acquittal, I'm convinced that I uttered something, I don't know what, that resulted in the disappearance and death of somebody in El Salvador.

I reach for the phone, hit 0.

"I don't know what's happening to me," I tell Norty, a doctor, a family friend. "I haven't slept for nights. The world seems to be going ... dark. I'm afraid. If you could send me a few sleeping pills, I'm sure everything will be fine."

He pursues a line of questioning I never anticipated. "Have you had any tendencies, as far as your moods go, towards highs and lows?" Norty asks.

I pause. "Since I was a teenager," I say. "Maybe even earlier."

"Have these mood swings become more frequent of more pronounced?" he asks.

"Yes," I say. "But I'm sure it's just the insomnia that's causing everything."

But Norty won't bite. Instead, he drops a bomb: He thinks that I could be suffering from bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depression. Characterized by severe mood swings, the illness, if left untreated, can grow lethal with age.

For a blessed moment, I remember elation sweeping over me, only to give way to sadness so black I could paint with it. My mind racing through the night with ideas for books to write, countries to visit, causes to embrace--only to detour down a dark alley of paranoia and paralysis. Any sense of a center, of a stable identity, had long eluded me. Routines--the loom upon which one weaves a life--fell apart whenever I did.

But always I'd blamed myself. For all my outward successes, I'd failed to cultivate equanimity.

Others seemed to pull it off, in varying degrees. They exercised, ate right, meditated, kept better schedules, chose more compatible partners, went into therapy, and climbed into bed at the same time every night. They were better, stronger, more moral people. I moved among them with grace, but I was a perfect fraud.

"I'm tired," I tell Norty. I look to the distant barbecue joint. I have to admit I've been exhausted. For years. Long before this terrible week of obsessively tending a corpse, which now my friend is suggesting may be a figment of my imagination.

Bipolar disorder. The words are rolling around in my head like dice. What if this is my lucky day? What if I'm not a fraud, or a moral failure, but someone struggling with an illness? What if I don't deserve the death sentence after all? Is it possible that in this glass confessional, I am being absolved?

And if this is an illness, then maybe it can be treated.

"What should I do?" I ask. It's late, I've got to get back to the restaurant.

"I'll fly you home," Norty says. He wants me to see a doctor he knows.

"I can last a few more days here," I tell him.

"I'll tell my doc friend you'll be calling," he replies.

That night I don't sleep, but a few hours, yet my spirit rests. I can live with this suffering a few more days--because someone called it by its true name, called it out of the mists.

April 8, 2004: Today there are only thirty-four people in front of me waiting to pick up their medicines at discount, part of a program for the indigent affiliated with the University of New Mexico Hospital--not the sixty-one people waiting the Friday before the Martin Luther King holiday. This is a modern-day breadline. A computer-generated voice says, "Now serving seven zero one at counter number four," then repeats the words in Spanish over the static cackle of a broken TV set.

We are all colors, all ages, but we look alike: We are tired. Tired from working day shifts and graveyard shifts with no health insurance to show for it. Tired from looking for work, or working for nothing as we care for children and elderly parents. We're tired and dreading the day, once a year if not more often, when we have to gather pay stubs, utility bills, tax returns, etc., to prove that we haven't made a penny too much, thus disqualifying us from this program. We're tired but grateful. At least we see doctors for a reasonable cost, and can afford our meds. But fear lurks inside our gratitude: fear that this safety net, like so many in the United States today, will shred beneath us, leaving us to drown.

As a self-employed writer, I can't afford the $300 a month cost of my meds or visits to doctors to get refills. That's why I'm here. HMOs want nothing to do with me, a bipolar patient who, despite her success with pills (no therapy, suicide attempts, hospital visits), is automatically classified as high-risk, a threat to profits. I'm here because the few plans that would take me cost so much that I'd have to cease making house payments. At which point I'd lose my membership in the indigent health care program--and be sent away to enroll in the local health care for the homeless program.

I don't think of myself as poor. And this is precisely what's wrong with me and with too many of my tribe, the forty-three million Americans running around without health insurance. The Republican agenda demands that we think of ourselves as temporarily unlucky or worse, at fault for our plight. I'm a Chicana, a feminista, and--yes--"loca," one of 2.3 million adult Americans with bipolar disorder. But poor?

When I was a little girl in a middle class family on a very tight budget, I began noticing a breed of kids with nice clothes, big houses, and maids. My world divided like a cell: There were the wealthy, and then the rest of us, including the kid who did his math assignments on neatly cut brown paper bags because his family could not afford notebooks.

Now, my world is dividing up again. But forget the clothes, houses, and maids. It's the insured that I envy to my core. Even as I admit that they, too, are vulnerable. A job loss, cancer that won't quit, a need for grief counseling ... threaten the profits of the health care industry. You, too, can be sunk.

Poor? Yes, I am poor--by this I mean hideously vulnerable--as are millions more. Friends tell me they will help me find a solution should I ever find myself thrown out of the indigent program.

But try telling that to the woman who still remembers the shrieking 0 of the phone in a booth in Nevada.

Try telling that to the woman seated beside me, uninsurable because of lupus.

I was saved by a collect call to a doctor friend, but salvation that is purely personal is a sham.

The only solution to my problem is political, involving a collective movement beyond fear and exhaustion, a movement beyond the denial about class, a movement to put the United States on trial, to seek the justice that might make us whole, despite our illnesses--and strong enough to work toward the vision of a healed Earth.

Every night before bedtime, for almost fourteen years, I've swallowed a palm-full of pills. The only side effect I've experienced is good mental health. For a long time following my diagnosis, I grieved for the great swaths of my life that had disappeared: aborted relationships and projects, the deadness I so often felt in the face of beauty, the secret terrors.

But always I drew consolation from the word "insane"--because the word is ancient and richly evocative of so much of human suffering. "Insane" yokes me to the masses of those wounded to the core, and there is great consolation, and political energy, in knowing that we are not alone. Our wounded world teems with people who have been disappeared: due to racism, war, poverty, and tyranny of every sort. In the end, I could see that I was not insane. Injustice is. I wiped away my tears. I rejoined the human race.

Demetria Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel, "Mother Tongue," set during the Sanctuary movement. A religion writer covering the movement in the late 1980s, she was tried in connection with allegedly smuggling refugees into the country. A jury acquitted her on First Amendment grounds. She writes a column for the independent progressive weekly the National Catholic Reporter. Her collected essay, "Confessions of a Berlitz Tape Chicana," will be released in 2005.