I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without
dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over the essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison
There are for all of us certain moments in time or place when we say something changed our lives, for me it is most often music or the written or spoken word. When asked what attracts me most to someone, it is the way they speak, the words they choose to use, the way they romance me with their words, not by gender but merely by being, or it is in a certain phrasing or idea or the way words are written and woven, it’s often a sentence or two that stays with me long after I’ve closed the back cover of a book or novel, or even the last page because that last page is often read after the first four or five, it’s always been so for me, the need to know how something ends before it’s even truly begun.
There is a passage on page 24 in the novel Angle of Repose that I have kept hidden from others as I’ve claimed it for my very own, not wanting to share it, not wanting others to declare it theirs for fear it will be weakened, watered down in some way, a mere shadow of it’s true self, to take the force out of it as it is that power and force that excites me, it’s the freedom felt as something comes at you fully, the pitch of it almost deafening, that has kept that hidden part of my mind that is filled with secret treasures free to add more and more. It is one of my truths that Wallace Stegner opened up the boundaries of my soul but most especially my spirit, the very spirit that longs to be free to fly far, far away in times when the winter of my discontent drags on and on no matter what season it is, and in the imagery of his words, of which I had no way of knowing what they would eventually mean to me, stayed with me all those years until it was finally revealed to me why, the why of the impression they had made on me.
There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you – a train, say, or the future – has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of an object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hope deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.
The sound of the pitch going away always comes, just like what goes up must come down but when the mania is alive and well, when I’m on that locomotive I have no remembrance of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hope deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. They simply don’t exist, it’s like they were never there to remember, all there is is that moment, that one solitary moment and then it’s the next moment, it’s when life couldn’t be anymore grand and luminous, just as I couldn’t be any grander or more luminous because that’s where true magic lies, within the boundary-free mania.
At times when the mania is at its highest, richest, loveliest, when the sound of my life coming at me is filled with lust and awe for and of life, when it’s a pure kaleidoscope, a symphony of colors, when the colors are brighter, when everything around me glows and I am filled with not just possibilities but also of dreams dreamt and lived, when I know the sound that is coming at me is a kind of invincibility that nothing can destroy, until those times when the mania accelerates and I’m lost in a world I can’t comprehend and most certainly can’t control. It is then that I am lost, truly lost in a world of my own mind’s making and yet the real irony is those are the times when thoughts cease to exist, when motion, constant motion is my only reality.
I swear each time the crash comes, when I didn’t think that sound coming at me would ever abandon me and in the ensuing darkness there is a natural remedy to the mania, it is called day terror and night terror and that becomes the whole of the world, it encircles me, it pulls me down into a place few have seen because the one ounce of sanity I hold onto is the vanity, a haughtiness that allows no visitors in to see the real truth, the madness, except my son.
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial impotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against – you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
You yearned backwards a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.
The price that is paid for that manic high stays with me and always will. The price my son has paid and to a lesser extent the price my family has paid is substantial. We have all relinquished parts of ourselves but none so much as me for no one that hasn’t experienced being manically depressive can understand the high cost of the illness but they also can’t know the other side, the high pitch that is coming at you that makes other lives pale in comparison, the ordinary, run of the mill life, the daily life that we just manage to get through, as Michael Jackson has said, "I don’t know how to do the everyday life." And for some, the hope is to never have to again.
The hard barren truth for this unquiet mind, the one that has manic-depressive illness running through it, the one that tried so valiantly, and often succeeded, to triumph long before the diagnosis was finally made, that hard barren truth is the dark side that takes over and the slough of despond that is there to call me in. The sound of that mania going away is a silence that would be eerie except there is no there there, when I awaken to it being gone I am too far in that black hole to know I had ever had it in the first place. Beauty achieved and beauty forgotten.
People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind’s rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet. I remember singing "Fly Me to the Moons" as I swept past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly funny. I saw and experienced that which had been only dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration.
Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word "real." But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on my elegiac beauty, and I don’t see Saturn’s full image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one that I should willingly give up.
I can honestly still say that one of the things I miss most in my life are those high mania times, the feeling that I can do anything at all, the fearlessness of going at life instead of waiting for it to come to me, the illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars and across fields of ice crystals. As I look back on it now it is as Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison said in her book, An Unquiet Mind.
I have been one of the lucky ones, I’ve only had three bouts with madness in my life, twice when I was in my twenties and most recently in 1998. I was hospitalized for both in my twenties, I understood very early on that to survive in this life an absolute necessity, for me, is to seek therapy. I simply would not still be alive without the help of professionals. My greatest fear since I was a very young girl has been that I will be institutionalized for life because I’m batshit crazy insane. I had come to peace over the years that that would not happen but then 1998 came along and my intention to stay on this earth with a sound mind was sorely tested.
The years leading up to the last episode of madness were a mixed blessing of personal tragedies and amazing success in jobs that I thrived in and loved. I commuted between San Diego and Sonoma every week for a few years. I met many people in power, elected officials both statewide and in Congress. I had meetings in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. I worked 12 hours a day and another 3 or 4 at night. The pace was frantic but never so much so to slow me down, I was never short of energy, the faster the pace the faster I ran. I didn’t eat or sleep and yet functioned remarkably well. I was passionate about what I was doing, I loved my job, the challenge of never doing anything like it before and people’s trust and confidence in me added energy to a well established mania, a mania I refused to acknowledge, a mania that fed my very being.
My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed translation of new ideas into papers and projects.
When I flew back to Sonoma for the weekends the quiet was deafening. I would usually land in San Francisco between 11 and 12:00 at night. I would get in my car, throw open the sunroof, turn the stereo up and drive to the ocean. I would park on a cliff overlooking the sea, put on a sweater and lie on the hood of my car. I spent hours looking at the stars, listening to the waves breaking, believing this life, my life was sublime. I would then drive home and throw my bags in the house and walk across the street to the park, sit on the swings and fly as high as I could, faster and higher with each thrust of my legs. I walked back to my house as the sun was coming up.
And as I sat down at my computer to start the day at home, I still hadn’t eaten or slept and either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Of course it was part of the mania, I had a lot invested in ignoring it, of staying in denial. And the memories of years past, pushed away, so far away they were irretrievable.
"To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds."
When the campaign was over and I flew home for the last time I honestly thought I would rest, that I would gather myself up and enjoy the quiet, the peacefulness, the serenity. But the darkness had a different plan, it wove its way into my mind, I stopped making sense, I couldn’t say what I wanted to, the pieces of my vocabulary didn’t fit, sentences seemed to fly around in my head, chaotically, it was unnerving to try to understand it all until all that was left were sounds with no beginning, middle and end, and no one was there to help me make sense of it all.
The chaos of my mind became so acute I couldn’t stand anything that stimulated it or me. No music, no running of the car’s engine, no shoes on the hardwood floors, the only room I could stand to be in was my bedroom, many times I crawled to the bathroom, I would sit on the tile floor and hold my head in my hands and say, "shhhhhhh," over and over, "shhhhhhhhh."
Often times the way I knew I had slept were the jarring dreams that would awaken me, there were vicious dogs plunging towards me, I would wake up wet with perspiration and immediately become clammy with fear. Then the chatter would start and I’d crawl to the bathroom again, lie on the tile floor holding my head and softly repeat "shhhhhhhhh," " shhhhhhhhhhh" for what would be hours.
Then the day came when all I could think about was death and I went about the planning of it, where, what and how, I knew the why. I was obsessed with it, I paced the rooms of my house, looking for the answer of how, but my mind couldn’t focus enough to remember what I had thought of, there were knives but the scars on my wrist were a remembrance of the failure of that attempt. I hadn’t thought to go to different doctors and pharmacies to gather drugs that would let me slip from this earth easily and yet in that state it was too easy to let go of life that way, it was just too easy to simply fade away.
I walked the property in the dead of night searching for the answer as if it would suddenly appear and my mind would be clear enough to recognize it. The sun would rise as I crawled across the land searching, searching for the answer. The lights of other’s houses would come on, there was motion now, too many faces with bodies attached would be walking by my house soon, friends had become strangers for they didn’t know, they couldn’t come near, they were no longer a part of me, they couldn’t know because I had lost myself so utterly and completely, all I knew was finding my way to death.
One morning when the sun came up I was sitting on my bed looking out at the mountains that were behind my property and as I did I saw it, I recognized what I had failed to see, the answer to so many days of seeking it, the barn, inside the barn was the way. I felt a sudden rush of anxiety and relief, I grabbed a robe, threw it over the dirty tshirt I had been wearing maybe for a day, perhaps much longer, I crept towards the door slowly ever watchful of leering eyes and when I reached it I threw it open, ran inside and shut it quickly.
I spent days and nights in the barn, the day terror and night terror fully awaken inside my mind. I crawled along the dirt floor searching, picking up bolts and pieces of wood, rolling them over and over in my fingers wondering if they would be the way. I pulled old trunks down and with it spiders and webs, scorpions and bugs, they mattered not to me, I smashed them dead and went about my obsession, I could feel it was there, all I had to do was take the time to get it right, time was my friend and my enemy, what if someone came looking for me and what if no one did?
Then in the dusk of the day I saw them, such exquisite beauty, waiting for me, they were there all the time, patiently waiting, perfect and strong, stable and unrelenting, I was there at last facing the instrument of my demise, they were high enough, they were sturdy, they were mine.
I spent the rest of the day clearing the floor beneath them, there couldn’t be any surprises, I had to get this right. I found the ropes that had been used years before to move me in, I moved old tables under them and tried to stack chairs on top, then I remembered the ladder but it ended up being too rickety. I turned my attention back to the ropes, I started trying to make them into nooses, over and over I tried, it wasn’t working, I closed my eyes and tried to visualize what they looked like but it didn’t work. I tried for hours until the sunset and then until it grew dark enough to be safe to go back to the house and look it up on the computer.
Before dawn the next day I took a printed page of instructions and a picture of a noose back to the barn. I spent day and night in the barn until I had three perfect nooses on the end of three ropes. I carefully stashed them away in places it had taken me hours to find and then decide on. I still had to find what I would stand on but was no longer worried, the beams in the barn were low enough, it was the nooses I had been most concerned with, I would take them out one at a time and feel them, running my fingers over every inch of the knot, the way it twisted around and around, the perfection of the loop up top, then I would put them away and try to rest.
The next day I was going to work on the ladder, find the right spot to place it just, make sure it was as level as I could get it, make sure it would hold me but was easy enough to kick away. It was so close, so close and then suddenly there was furious knocking on the door, cowboy boots were trying to kick it in, and then the screams came, it was Derek yelling to let him in, his voice was the first thing I had recognized for days and he was screaming "Mom, let me in, Mom, let me in."
I didn’t know then how he got me back into the house, I was in the bedroom when he was on the phone, I was crawling to the bathroom when he came and sat down next to me, he put his arms around me and pulled me to his chest and cradled me, he rocked me and talked to me in a soft low voice, his tears were running down my arms as he wept. We stayed there until the police and the ambulance came, he had called my doctor of nearly twenty years also who left a waiting room full of patients to be there for us. They sedated me, hospitalized me and let me sleep for two days, then began the long journey back to sanity and away from the madness.
At one point I was determined that if my mind – by which I made my living and whose stability I had assumed for so many years – did not stop racing and begin working normally again, I would kill myself by jumping from a nearby twelve-story building. I gave it twenty-four hours. But, of course, I had no notion of time, and a million other thoughts – magnificent and morbid – wove in and raced by. Endless and terrifying days of endlessly terrifying drugs – Thorazine, lithium, valium and barbiturates – finally took effect. I could feel my mind being reined in, slowed down, and put on hold. But it was a very long time until I recognized my mind again, and much longer until I trusted it.
I found An Unquiet Mind as I was coming out of the madness, at first I just held it to my chest for long periods of time, then I was able to open it up and read a few paragraphs, it then became one of the ways back to the world and reality. It isn’t just that it changed my life, it helped to save my life, I saw on every page a reflection of myself, it gave me the will I needed to turn another page and another one after that, it also put someone else right there with me, someone who was articulate and bold and daring and someone who had made it through, a survivor both true and courageous enough to share all of it with those of us who needed to know someone like her had come out whole and alive.
When I was finished reading it for the first time I asked my mother if she would read it also, I told her I needed someone close to me, a member of my family, to know what this part of my life was like, I needed her to understand. She had been there during my first manic time when I saw things and heard things and was too frail and afraid not to sleep with her, not to cry out at night in bone chilling ways, not able to have boundaries around me, walls near me, doors closed or fences with gates locked. And yet when I called her back and asked her if she had read it she told me no, she had tried but it was just too horrific, she had to stop.
I wanted to tell her if reading it was too horrific what did she think living it was but I didn’t because I realized the price she had paid was already too high, she had never imagined having a child would mean what it had come to mean for her at those times when she didn’t know if I would live or if I might be insane. Being my mother was watching my life come at her at a very high pitch and then feeling it as it left me in madness, excruciating and terrifying and filled with this.
a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hope deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.
We birth our children, they come into our world and we share the good and the bad, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part. My son has taken this vow seriously as have I, we’ve been in this life together from the moment he was born, we’ve walked side by side throughout the years, we’ve been that person who doesn’t flinch but understands because we know the soul of one another, the heart and the spirit, and we’ve pledged to be there ‘til death do us part. I told him not so very long ago that I will die a natural death not of my own doing or making. He smiled as did I as we shed our tears for what has been, knowing that the pain will always be there because of the mania and madness, but for now and hopefully from now on, it will stay there, safely tucked into the past and allow us to have a future built from the past but not of the past born again.
This essay may seem self indulgent without the following, it has been the hardest essay I have written since I’ve come to be a member of this community, I have laid myself bare on more than one occasion, it’s never easy, I pace, I question myself and my motives, I am usually an emotional wreck before I hit the submit button, it takes a special kind of moxie, I believe, to remove myself from it enough to post it, because I do so believe that my story is the best of what I have to give, so I take the chance, time and again, to be judged or ridiculed or belittled and in so doing what I receive is an enormous amount of love and caring.
Several weeks ago Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison was on Oprah, she talked about her illness, bravely and forthrightly, she was asked questions and she never wavered in giving an honest, true answer, it took me back to a time when I was teetering on the brink of disaster, not alone but with my son. It was her raw courage in writing An Unquiet Mind, that helped to pull me from the brink to solid ground. As vulnerable as I feel right this minute writing this, she had much more to lose than I ever have. Her career before her diagnosis and since has been in the very field she chose because she had an unquiet mind, she knew of what she spoke and studied and yet she dared to put it all on the line and speak her truth so others might understand. I want to look back and know I had courage enough to as well.
When I gave my mother a way to understand and she couldn’t bring herself to step into my shoes I wondered if there would ever come a day when anyone would understand, I wondered if the stigma of manic-depressive illness would always haunt me, the specter of it being revealed somehow, looking into the eyes of someone who thought me a crazy motherfucker because I was born not with a heart condition or a cleft pallette but with a mental illness that has no cure, there are no magical fixes and the question was always there, what does it mean when the price of who you are costs those you love so much pain. How do you even begin to bring someone else into the fold of your unquiet mind and if you don’t dare to, do you live your life without love?
Thankfully for me there is a medication that works, I feel blessed everyday that that is so. Another question that appears quite often is if given the choice would I choose to live with the disease knowing the downside, is the upside worth it? The question is irrelevant, I can't live it any other way. That’s where the understanding has to begin, the answer is yes because it's what we have. Am I grateful my son doesn’t have the illness, you bet your life I am. I rejoice everyday that my grandsons have been spared, I do the same for all of you and your loved ones who haven’t been touched by it but the truth for me and so many others is that we can’t change it, no matter how we answer ‘would we,’ it is beyond our means to say because we can’t.
I’ll give you my answer first and then I’ll let Dr. Jamison speak for me as well. The question I ask myself everyday is, "is this the life I want to be living?" Everyday I answer that it is and that is so because my journey has taken me to a place where I don’t just appreciate who I am, I’m damned proud of who I am, and I don’t have a clue who I would be without manic- depressive illness. But I will say this, I doubt that I would be or could be a better version of myself because locked up in there with this unquiet mind is the person I was born to be without it, a person who is inclined to be filled with love, happiness and optimism, a person who is just of heart and soul, someone who is fun and witty and wise and who has grown into herself with humor and grace along with a mighty will to survive. For all of that, I have to thank my illness for the challenges it has offered me to dig deep inside myself, to a place no one would voluntarily go, and come out of it full, whole and sane and passionately involved in this life, my life.
I ask of you only to try to understand, we have in our midst several people who have the same challenge, I ask of you to understand not just for me but for them and for the world beyond who we are here. The community of bi polar, manic-depressives is vast and growing, the only thing that will replace the stigma is understanding, so take us into your hearts and love us, pimples and all. We are magnificent.
In Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s words.
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no – and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It’s complicated. Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images; I would not go through an extended one again. It bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music, or the ability to make yourself and others laugh.
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief; you’re irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won’t.
So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and have been loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters; worn death "as close as dungarees," appreciated it – and life – more; seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. Depressed, crawling on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than anyone I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness – the intensity it gives to things and the perspective it forces on me. I think it has made me test the limits of my mind (which, while wanting, is holding) and the limits of my upbringing, family, education, and friends.
The countless hypomanias, and mania itself, all have brought into my life a different level of sensing and feeling and thinking. Even when I have been most psychotic – delusional, hallucinating, frenzied – I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful and took my breath away and made me feel as though I could die right then and the images would sustain me. Some of them were grotesque and ugly and I never wanted to know they were there or to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners and – when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self to medicine and love – I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of limitless corners, with their limitless views.
This was originally posted on My Left Wing. An Unquiet Mind