Tag: Mental Illness

The Cure

The hairy edge

A week ago I got the prescription. Two days later I picked it up. I’m not functioning. These magic pills feel like my last straws, but I still can’t bring myself to open the bottle.

It’s been twenty-odd years since I last turned to Prozac.  The drug and the disease it’s meant to treat are both better understood, and I understand I’m at that place where I need help that can’t come from myself or another human.  I’ve tried other magic pills and management methods. Some of them get me out of the cave for a while, but, as the characters on my favorite guilty pleasure show ‘Once Upon a Time’ are fond of saying, All magic comes with a price.

Managing the big “D” with tricks means getting through it, but it also means experiencing every throb of worry and pain in every nerve. It means that tears are always waiting in the wings for the weak moments as over-analysis of very interaction keeps the psyche in a constant state of almost-adolescent angst. The magic pills dull that pain, but they do have a price.

Some cause weight gain (pretty depressing). Others lead to all nighters for nights on end.  But all of them, while evening the keel and pulling my attention from the depths back to the horizon, wrap themselves around the soul like a neoprene wetsuit.  It’s not a straight jacket, but the thick, impenetrable insulation does inhibit sensation.  It’s a price, and the question I ask of every bottle of magic pills is how much?

The last year has been the most creatively-productive one I’ve ever known.  Stimulated by new friendships forged at a writer’s workshop at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, I’ve written and drawn more and more regularly than ever before.  Before the workshop, I was a dabbler, trying to choose between two crafts and vacillating between them as the mood struck me.  A year of unprecedented encouragement offered a more rewarding search for authenticity in our work.  The workshop which started with a focus on rural and small town life ultimately became the search for the stories and meanings in all of our lives.  

That search meant opening my eyes and my soul.  It meant discovering beauty and meaning in my very ordinary life.  It meant living life and recognizing the ways I had kept it out.  

Depression doesn’t keep life out.  It keeps me withdrawn from life, watching it from my cave, but I’m never quite sure if the pills are a way out of the cave or just a way to be less aware of it.  It’s that uncertain but sometimes strong anesthetic effect that makes me fear the cure as much as the disease.

But there’s another uncomfortable reality.  The deeper I go, the less I write.  Not ironically, and the less I write, the deeper I go.

There’s a romantic picture of the tortured artist.  It isn’t entirely unfounded.  There is an frighteningly long list of authors and artists whose lives were upended and prematurely ended by mental illness.  

However, as I struggle to work at the one occupation that truly gives me satisfaction, I’ve begun to wonder how much of their ability to express their creativity was actually hamstrung by their cranial chemical imbalances.   Mania may produce periods of intense productivity, but, as I study the lives of the luminaries, it seems that the despair at other end of the spectrum often coincided with a withdrawal from life and work.  

By contrast, the few people I’ve met in ‘real life’ who are working as artists or writers, are the ones who have managed their moods to allows themselves to ‘show up for work’ everyday.  There is no drama in the work.  There is only the work, as there is with any other job.

Right now, I feel constantly in jeopardy of failing the day job and the parenting job  – forget achieving the dream job of writing.  I know only fear of the unknown keeps the pills in their bottle, but int this moment the pursuit of the authentic is yielding one other invaluable lesson.  It is that fear can be as crippling and counterproductive as any mental illness, and, while the debate over the link between creativity and mental illness thrives, my small hope is that conquering my fear of what might happen will be the stimulating cure to any analgesic effects of the curative I’m about to swallow.

Darkness Crowded

I’m currently working on a book that started as a collection of short stories based on Picking My Battles. One of the things I love about the blog, however, is that each successive post not only provides an opportunity to improve skills and build friendships, it is a chance to think about the projects it’s inspiring.

The working title of my current project is called Fable. My recent decision to be candid about my own lifelong struggle with depression and mania has begun to shape it from a collection of short stories or posts into a longer piece. As I write, however, I’ve also begun to read more about other people’s experiences with these disorders.

Marbles, a graphic memoir by Ellen Forney, prompted my first first piece on the subject. The author is about my age, and many of her experiences with bipolar disorder reflected my own. Last night I continued my exploration with William Styron’s Darkness Visible. A chronicle of a major depressive episode when the author was in his 60s, it held up a different kind of mirror.

Written before the clinical language of depression had permeated our popular culture, Styron’s account of his decline and brush with suicide is unvarnished and sometimes raw. However, it is also informed by a lifetime of extensive reading and personal familiarity with other authors who suffered the same affliction and by his re-examination of his own work post-depression.

Darkness Visible isn’t the first book to look at the debated link between mental illness and creativity, and Styron didn’t restrict his anecdotes only to authors. This book about inner darkness, however, did illuminate for me how fortunate my experience has been.

My first depressive episode happened when I was two, although it was only in retrospect that my parents or I realized that was what was happening. I had another major, nearly fatal episode when I was sixteen. Now, having lived through numerous swings up and down, some with disastrous consequences, I count myself lucky even when I’m rocking at the back of my mental cave. I don’t look forward to the insomnia and anxiety and the constant contemplation of death, but, even at the very depths, there is a part of me that is always reasonably sure it will end.

This is not to say that I don’t struggle and am never tempted to fall asleep and not wake up. But, reading the account of Styron’s first major episode late in his life – the first one of which he was keenly aware – I knew I was lucky to have discovered early in life that the key to survival was the understanding that the darkness does break.

The darkness is long, and you don’t find your way out. You wait for the night to end. And, as terrifying as the beginning of Styron’s book was, with its histories of authors and housewives who had lost their battles, he closed this tiny tome by throwing out the lifeline of his own experience and survival to others who might be struggling.

My night has begun to break in the last few weeks. This one has been different, however. I still have my own lifelines. As the dawn begins to reflect off the mirrors I’ve recently acquired, however, I see a crowd through the darkness, and I’ve begun to think about how, in the light of a day not defined by fear and stigma, I can cast some of those lifelines to others.

The Night Owl and the Early Bird

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I have been night owl for as long as I can remember.  Worry and obsession often follow me to bed, and, as they are not anesthetics, I often take flight to escape them.  Over the last few months, I’ve been working to become an early bird, but there are times when the night owl threatens to eviscerate her before she feathers out.

Friday night I had willingly made the mistake of reading a few news items shortly before bed.  Having invited the news of the world into my nighttime consciousness like a vampire over my threshold, I knew the only recourse was to let the night owl take flight.  I needed sleep – even wanted it, but activity is often the only antidote to worry.   So I went to my desk and closed the door, securing my sanity with pencils and paper and paint.

The alarm was set for five – I had intended to write – but by the time the night owl had driven the shadows from my mind, the early bird was trying to rise.  The night owl was keenly aware of this, and, for a moment, seemed prepared to consume her as she began to flutter.  But something – wisdom – perhaps overtook the night owl, and she let the fledgling alone to do her work as the sun rose, warming them both.

Saturday evening I again let myself be seduced by the news of the world.  The previous night’s flight and the morning work, however, had built a wall around my worry.   That wall may crumble –  my walls usually do.  But as the night owl learns to live with the early bird, I’m hoping whatever balance they find will permeate the other parts of my life.

 

What This Blog Is

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A few weeks ago, my frustration with a writer’s block born of the down side of my Bipolar life led me to write about it. It was the first time in my life I had ever written about it overtly. Not knowing how it would be received, I purposely picked a post day when I thought no one would be on their computers. I worried about losing readers, but I was desperate to get past depression and back to writing, so I took a chance. The response to my gamble was overwhelming and, for me, completely unexpected.

Even then, however, freed from the fear of letting the world know that somethin’ ain’t exactly right, I was adamant that this would not become a bipolar blog. But a recent email exchange made me realize that, while I didn’t know exactly what this site was, in many ways it has always been a a bipolar blog -even if I couldn’t see it.

When it began last summer, I thought it was a mommy blog (for extremely disorganized mommies). I thought it might also be a rural mommy blog. For a while I thought it was an illustration blog. It was a cartoon platform and a poetry outlet. And, of course, it was a blog about family.

For months it was all of these things because I was. I was flying, and the blog and I were keeping each other aloft in the stratosphere. When my flight ended, however, the crash came, and the blog became part of my lifeline. It, like the other part of my lifeline – my family – needed me to get out of bed each day and nurture it. Like my kids, it needed care and feeding, even on the many days that I wonder if it and they would be better off with someone more competent or stable. And as my self-soothing visits to my fantasy work became more frequent, my blog became a depression blog, interweaving itself with the only other blog theme I could and needed to sustain – my family.

Now as I continue to cling to the “This Too Shall Pass” mantra that helps me manage my stay in Melancholia, I realize that this has always been a blog about mania and depression. It has always been about the simulataneously intoxicating but precarious highs and the sometimes crippling lows. But it is also a blog about how the journey between those places affect the family I chose to join and build – for good or ill – and how they have come to affect it by saving me every day of my life. Even on the days I don’t think I need it.

Focus and Fog

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A few weeks ago I came out of the cave. Struggling to stay productive as my elaborate and expansive fantasy world beckoned, desperate for inspiration, I began to write about my writer’s ‘block’. It’s more of a cave sealed by a great iron door than a block. When I’m teetering on the edge of a serious depression as I do almost annually, I retreat behind the door. The world behind it is richer and provides a sustaining refuge when anxiety and despair grow, inflaming one another and consuming me. But, the escape is never without a cost, as my sister recently reminded me.

Fantasy is my mentally-induced coma. When I’m diving into it, I still function, holding up my end of the household. For most of my fantasy visit, the only lifeline out of that very deep and seductive pit is the knowledge that several someone else’s completely depend on my not letting go. But, even though I’ve never completely lost my grip on that line, I know that living at the back of my mind means I’m not fully living with the people I love.

There are pharmaceutical ‘cures’ and therapies for depression, but they, too, come with costs. Some – physical side effects, sluggishness, even increased risk of suicide – are printed on the label. But others are not so apparent.

The back of my cave is dark, but sometimes I think it also provides me with tremendous depth of field when I do look back out at the ‘real world’. It doesn’t allow for any filter all the events of the day and their implications intrude on my consciousness as soon as I venture outside my fantasy realm, and they are in sharp focus at every distance. Where my mania lets the popular media burn out disturbing details through overexposure, my depression cancels out the glare.

With tack-sharp clarity and all at once I can see a life that is finally unfolding as I always wanted – people to love, work to sustain us, and a physical refuge from the rest of the world – and the things that can undo it. I pass a rusting upturned oil drum on the banks of the Battenkill and wonder how much ooze still covers the rocks at the bottom of that river. How many parts per million now float in that water where my children cavort in the summer? How much of it seeps into our ground water? Our well must be safe. How much of our cleaning products get into our well? Are they really going to start fracking across the state line? Can we protect our own water? Do we have any say in it? How do people find the courage to take these on? I should be trying to write the next Silent Spring, and all I can come up with is posts about laundry. And that’s before I even turn on the news.

There have been times when my worries have taken me to a dangerous precipice, and after many years of walking to the edge and staring into the delicious dark, I learned from an observant aunt that there were alternatives to this routine. I began to explore Prozac, which was popular at the time, and for a short time, it worked. And then it didn’t. I tried others. And, while sometimes they could contain the chain reactions of my worries, they created a new nagging fear.

The new worry had nothing to do with the chest palpitations they produced but with the foggy filter they fit over my lens on the world. I began to sense the problems of the world less, but in the back of my mind, I knew they were still there. The fog didn’t help to resolve them anymore than the fear did, and I often wondered if its true function was to obscure my own cowardice when considering how to help solve those problems.

I’m working to barricade the door to my fantasy realm now. It stands in the way of my present and future. But it is only just behind me, and now as I wait for my mania to shine its white hot, distorting light on the world, its problems are still in sharp focus.  I know I don’t have the wherewithal or courage to be an agent of change, but as much as that clarity can be a curse, I’m still not sure the filter is a blessing either.

Flying

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This is the time when I start crawl out of the abyss.  I won’t crawl for long.  The door at the back of my mind will open, and my fantasies, once merely and barely sustaining, will soon have me rocketing into the firmament.  

Sunday, as I drove home from Manchester, cursing the flood of tourists that had made my favorite haunts temporarily unavailable, I had the first inkling that I was at this threshold.  Caution still wraps me in reason, but that bond was already beginning to fray on Sunday as I began exploring my options for a new haunt.  Unfounded and unfettered exhilaration awaits just beyond my cave, and soon I’ll be soaring on those limitless ideas and possibilities – no matter how remote.  

In five minutes, I went from restaurant refugee to searcher of new solutions to creator of them:  We need a good cafe in Arlington.  Something with sofas and wifi and pastries.  How about Cambridge?  Is there anything there?  There’s the old Beanheads.  I bet I could turn that into a hopping’ internet cafe.  I love to bake.  I could go there everyday.  There could have a guest DJ.  We could have music.  How hard would it be to get really good at the piano again?  I’d love to do another animation with music.  It would be so cool to make the music for my animations.  Can you be a writer and a film maker?  It be cool to have an independent movie theatre slash bookstore cafe.  In Cambridge or Arlington.  Wait… where am I going?

There is a small plateau between my deep dark cave and the dizzying heights I am about to scale.  I should tarry and even stay, but I have never been able to stop for long – regardless of the ways I’ve tried to bind myself here.  Propelled by possibility,  I’m already skipping over the plain –  anticipating and fearing the flight and the fall that I know will – and must – come.  Now, when my battles are beginning to brim with potential, danger is not always apparent and simply choosing one over the other is an important victory.

Why I Wrote

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Sunday morning I was planning to write about the porcupine our dog seems to have adopted but instead found myself writing about my mental illness.  I had been slipping into my fantasy world alarmingly often recently, and the indulgence was not enhancing my performance in any part of my life.  So, I started writing about it, mostly for me.  

As I wrote, I realized this was something I was sill hiding.  Most of the time I try to keep my politics out of the blog – there’s enough of that in the real world, and readers can infer what they like – and, being a bit of a smart ass, it tends to be a bit acerbic once in a while.  But I always hesitated writing about my dark side when it appeared, trying to write as if blue phases were anomalies so as not to scare readers off.  

Sunday I took a chance and a stand.  

At Christmas, my sister gave me a book by another writer/artist called Marbles.  Written by cartoonist Ellen Forney, it details her discovery and management of her disorder as an adult.  Reading it was like looking into a funhouse mirror and realizing the reflection wasn’t a distortion.  And that reflection made me realize I was still being a coward in my life and what I want to be my life work to be, so I gambled, and the response has been overwhelming.

Afraid I would come off like an open wound, instead I learned from comments and emails how many people struggle with this.  They struggle not just with the effects of mental illness but the fear of what will happen if they expose themselves to the world.

Blog started out focusing on rural life (the main theme of the writing workshop I’ve been attending at Hubbard Hall, a local community center in Cambridge, NY).  An exercise in discipline and discovery, I’ve come to realize that, as important as our Vermont life and lifestyle is to us, the mountains and farms are the setting, not the scene.  Still a wayfarer under the skin, I’m realizing the rurality influences my life, but it’s not who I am.  

First and foremost, I am a wife-and-mother, and in learning to see the stories close to home (the first directive issued by our workshop leader), I’ve found that – good and bad – that status is one of the two things that has most defined my identity.  The only other thing I’ve carried with me to every place and through every phase of life and identity (and I’ve had a few) is my bipolar.  

It’s not easy to come clean – it’s the kind of thing that makes people slide a little further down the ‘Group W’ bench from you.  People who know you aren’t put off by it because it explains things.  People who write it off, however, write you off as undisciplined (certainly true in some parts of my life) or lazy.  And, while I certainly don’t want to make this the mental illness blog, I am glad I wrote about it because it’s a battle I do fight every day.  I have to fight it because I can’t not pick it.  It’s picked me.  

My Box of Chocolates

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For me, blogging for the last eight months has been an education and at times an exorcism, but it has always been a journey towards becoming a better and, hopefully, working writer.  At first an assignment for a writing workshop offered by author Jon Katz at Hubbard Hall, a community theatre and arts center in Cambridge, NY, the blog has helped each of the workshop members blaze their own trails as we began discovering our voices.  Now many of us are at the crossroads, trying to determine our next steps.

Mine are a play – the culmination of my workshop experience –  and a book (a collection of very short stories).  The second project was conceived as I began making my game plan to make the jump to working writer.  From the moment the idea began to form, however, it has become so much more than a stepping stone.  Each part of the project is yielding its own completely new and unexpected reward as I gain new perspectives on writing and story and as it becomes increasingly evident that a writing life is as much about exploring the world as it is about describing it.  

As a recovering vagabond, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

World Apart

Over the last eight months, I’ve realized that the biggest hurdle to becoming a real writer is not finding an agent or a publisher but, rather, finding the courage to look at your own life honestly.

I’ve always thought there was a fine line between courage and crazy.  Mine is a secret door at the back of my brain.  This door leads from the part of my brain that lives in what you and I call the real world to an alternate universe.  If you were to step through the door to this world with me, you would find that it is also very real – bigger than life at times.  It is very much like the ‘real’ world. It has countries and languages, beauty and even danger.  It has problems.  But in this world, the problems are surmountable.  The humans are heroes, and, sometimes, I am one of them.  It is a world I have allowed not only to flourish but to take up a fair amount of real estate in my head.  I’ve been building and populating this universe since I could crawl.

I think this world has existed somewhere in my head since I was old enough to be aware of the physical world.  However, I began maintaining it in earnest soon after my parents moved from Baltimore to Ohio.  Already dealing with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder (or what they then called manic depression, if it was discussed at all back then), I went from having giddy highs and intense lows that confused both me and my parents, to my first conscious flirtation with suicide when I was thirteen.

The move itself was a huge change.  My sister and I both lost our closest friends.  We went from a small school to a comparatively huge one.  The new city was not the cowtown we’d anticipated, and the kids were surprisingly fashion conscious – something years of uniforms had not prepared either of us for.  I tried, but I never acquired the art of dressing well enough to avoid merciless teasing.  Our old school had been incredibly diverse, but the new one was rigidly homogenous.

I was a typical eighth-grader and would have done (and, at first, tried) anything to fit in.  The first autumn leaves hadn’t hit the ground, however, before I realized it was not going to happen.  For the first time in my life, I heard people (kids) using racial slurs in ‘polite’ company.  The first time I heard it was in homeroom sitting next to a girl who would later become one of my closest friends.  A recent immigrant from Romania, unashamedly intelligent, and the only Jewish girl in a class of several hundred, she was a prime teasing target.  As the weeks wore on, the teasing took on a decidedly xenophobic tone.  I started to wonder if the teacher was deaf as she allowed the other students to make fun of this girl’s accent and clothes and her ‘Jewish’ nose.  Then, one horrible day after our entire class had been introduced to those black-and-white Holocaust movies, one of these boys turned to her and started softly singing, “Kill all the jewish people”.

I couldn’t believe that she didn’t cry.  I was already crying (a lot of us were), but, instead of finding the courage to stand up to these bullies on behalf of my friend, I began trying to find ways to avoid school altogether.  My parents had no way of knowing how bad the teasing was, and my sick-outs became more elaborate as Mom and Dad’s commitment to my education began to clash with my depression that was no longer a small, pulsating lump but a full-blown tumor.

At one point I even went so far as to swallow a half a bottle of Tylenol, in a half-assed attempt to ‘end it all’ – the first, but not last, conscious flirtation with suicide. My ignorance of toxicity didn’t kill me, but it made me vomit enough to keep me home from school for a few days.  My parents saw only the the vomit (it never occurred to me to tell them what had caused it), however, and, when my stomach recovered and my fake outs failed me, it was back to school and deeper into my own world in the cave at the back of my mind.

I made a few very close friends in the new school system, but I also lost a lot interest in being in a in-crowd that continually expressed its xenophobia so gleefully.  I (sometimes willingly) made myself a ripe target over the years, and my cave grew more elaborate and colorful.  At some point, I realized I needed a line of demarcation so no one would discover my fantasy world.

There is a big iron door there now.  Thanks to the intervention of an observant aunt, I ultimately came to terms with my bipolar brain, but I still go to the door more often than I should.  I have tried numerous pharmaceutical therapies for my bipolar, and they work for a time.  But they also have side effects, and I still have the nagging worry that the ‘balance’ they offer is as much an avoidance of my problems as is my door.  Now in my forties, perspective is my therapy, and, when I’m heading into and riding the highs that go with manic depression, it’s sufficient.  But when I’m sliding down the curve and the world begins to be tinged with shadows, I clear the cobwebs from the door and turn the key.

Lately, though, as I’ve been thinking about the writing life I want, I’ve had to take a hard look at the things I can control and the things in and around my life that I can’t.  Sometimes the things I can’t control terrify me, and, even as I write and want to write more, the place at the back of my brain calls out to me like a soothing siren.  For years, my world was an anesthetic when my dark side threatened to overwhelm me, but like any drug, it has side effects.  It is not a performance-enhancing drug, it is more like a mentally-induced coma.  When I’m under, I do manage to meet my day-to-day obligations, but I don’t create.  I don’t engage.  I don’t feel.  I let the ice start to close over my head, and the quiet and control are addicting.

My world is not my depression.  It is not the tumor, but it is just as dangerous.  Even during extended high periods, when cobwebs and briars have grown over the door, something has kept me from throwing away the key or paving over that real estate with something ‘normal’.  I’ve been retreating to it recently, and just yesterday began thinking about its origins.  I began thinking, again, about my friend who, apparently, never needed a door because she was brave.  And, when I sat down to write this morning, I wasn’t sure if confessing my crazy to the world was a brave thing or even a good idea.

It’s probably neither.  People who know me well know, and people who know me a little can probably guess something’s a little off.  But today it’s the first brick in the wall I’m trying to build to seal up that room.

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