Night and Day

I was crying my eyes out today after I ate "breakfast" at 12:30 pm and got on the computer. I’d started thinking about what a terrible mother I am because my husband had told me quite gently that I should stop teasing my son about his regular sleep schedule (mine's totally irregular, his used to be - I rib him about it). But whoa, I took that gently tossed ball and raaaaan with it! Got all the way to the goal post over where I had that first kid 25 years ago. Touchdown! I suck! I'm an evil witch and I didn't even know it till now! Now that all those scenes of my children's lives are clicking through my head in a terminal slideshow of recrimination, I see it all right.

My God, what have I done?.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.

Then I spent five solid hours on Facebook, trying to shake all that guilt and remorse by talking about something else, reading boring research, looking for images like the ones in my head to post on my wall, or for a joke that I could actually laugh at, but mostly just by being together with all the good people I know there and sharing our thoughts - the bipolar people especially, but normals too. You know, for ballast. Got to keep that boat afloat.

But things didn't really start looking up for me and my shrouded mind until about 7 pm when I called for takeout and the sun sank. By about 9 pm I’d sloughed off my slough of despond - as in every other depressed day/happy night combo I've experienced MY WHOLE LIFE LONG. When the sun goes down, my mood gets bright again.

This is not the way God intended us to be, is it? It's the "dark night of the soul" not the "dark day of the soul." There's a book about bipolar called "The Midnight Disease" meaning the disease that makes you come alive at midnight - and fight for your life with what another book dubs “The Noonday Demon.”

Touchdown! But how embarrassing! The wrong goal.

How Depression Feels

"It's like drowning . Except you can see everyone around you breathing."
~ Anon.

You Wake Up Saying

“It’s not that you wake up one day, saying, I’m going to kill myself today. It’s that you wake up every day, saying, I’m going to try not to kill myself today.”

~ Deborah Treisman
(David Foster Wallace's editor)

Lady Macbeth In a Dorm Room

“Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?

Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.

Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart?

Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

I memorized this exchange between Macbeth and the doctor who is supposed to cure his wife, in college during the long months I spent locked in my dorm room, reading for my English classes. I only left to go to class (sometimes) and eat somewhere away from the other girls. (I never learned a single one's name.) My head was heavy and I was stunned. I'd fallen in love with my roommate the year before, and she'd dumped me. I was an experiment; when it was over, she returned to her boyfriend. I cried a lot. In fact I had tears on my face, new or dried, every day and night. I cried myself to sleep and dreamed about crying. I woke up crying. I slept all day and worked all night, crying, receding from the world. I was losing my bearings. 

One weekend, I determined to swallow a whole bottle of aspirin. I went to the bathroom after midnight and took about five. Waited, took another five. Waited a longer time, because they were sickening, and took another five. I had to stop there; more would not go down. Then I returned to my room, and nothing happened. I'd envisioned going to sleep and never waking up. But I did, the next day, slightly nauseous, still broken-hearted and teetering on the edge.

And I knew it. But my "counselor" didn't seem to; I trooped over to his office at "Psych Services" every week, where he asked about my thoughts and my grades. I never mentioned the aspirin or the constant tears. Then he sent me back to my dorm. There, I said less and less, but wrote a lot: either hysterical  gibberish and screeds to my ex-roommate, or insightful term papers turned in on time. Somehow I managed to keep my academic life viable, but everything else was sinking. I knew it was Depression; I'd been hospitalized for it in sixth grade, and I'd never forget what it felt like. Yet I couldn't do anything about it. I was paralyzed. That's the first rule of Depression: You cannot act to help yourself. And you cannot ask for help. Depression forbids it. I saw my counselor, I read, I wrote. I kept up the pretense of living.

But I felt like I needed something to get me through: words that spoke to me directly, but from a distance. Comforting words, but also sharp to cut to the heart of the matter like a honed scalpel. They would remind me that somebody else had felt like me, and someone else had understood. They'd throw me a rope in my sea of loneliness and anger, grief and fear.

I think I just went looking for them through the plays and sonnets in my green Norton Anthology of English Literature -- 1000-plus pages in tiny type on crinkle-thin paper. One day I came across this exchange between Macbeth and his wife's doctor, who was called in when Lady Macbeth'guilt had unhinged her. When I lit on it, my heart seized. It leapt off the page and punched me in the gut. Here was a rendering of exactly what was happening to me, 500 years later, in my cinder block room with walls so narrow a bed on one side and a desk on the other left 4 ft in between. It was a tomb.

The words were beautiful and vehement, sorrowful and angry. They were exquisite. So I took to repeating them to myself when I went to sleep, and I wrapped them around me when I returned "home" from whatever foray I had made into the "outside world." They gave me silent comfort, like running your tongue over your teeth. Pretty soon I knew them by heart. I kept them there, urging it to beat. 

Macbeth is enraged at the inadequacy of medicine to heal his wife's disordered mind. "Cure her of that!" he yells with all the urgency and outrage families feel when their loved one suffers -- and no one has an answer. He demands some "sweet oblivious antidote" that even he seems to know doesn't exist. Lady Macbeth, is plagued by "perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart" he laments, enraged -- and so was I. So are a lot of people, then and now. There are some drugs for it, but not the right ones; some other treatments that fumble and guess but fall short also. "Therein, the patient must minister to himself," the doctor finally says, throwing in the towel. As if we could. As if we weren't sick, seized by awful images and wanting to die. As if we weren't bound by Depression's first rule: You cannot help yourself. You cannot ask for help.

Not much has changed in 500 years. The outside world has changed tremendously, but the inside worlds of  people suffering "thick coming fancies that keep them from rest" are just as they always were. That could be cause for despair, but for me the written evidence of how nothing's changed was comforting. Words of course are not enough to "pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow" -- even furious and beautiful ones. The roots of such sorrows run too deep. But the words did describe me! Somehow they knew me and the "written troubles of my brain," and that was enough. They sustained me, kept me company, and in a strange way gave me hope. They got me through till I could finally leave my room.

Bipolar Parents

Don't forget that all other parents fail their children in some ways, many without even considering it or feeling guilty for it. We will fail ours in some ways too. But having this disorder can make us better parents, not worse.

We know we'll make mistakes -- we have a mental illness! That's always on our minds (pun intended). In fact, we're so aware of it and so afraid of doing harm that we do everything in our power to avoid making mistakes, to minimize them, correct them, compensate for them, and give our children a normal life -- which means an imperfect one, touched by sorrow and loss and confusion like everyone else's life.

But we love hard. We love abundantly. We are devoted, knowing how lucky we are to have those children, given our brokenness. Like a knotty bent-limbed tree, we grow around the breaks and reach high. Our brokenness is only more obvious than other people's, not more dangerous. 

If our children grow into adults with bipolar disorder, as some will, the same will be true of them. They will know how important simple, vigilant love is, because it protected them and allowed them to grow into the complicated people they are. They will know that all parents are flawed but the good ones just love hard. They'll do their best. Just like us.

Me and My Shadow

Me and My Shadow
(Judy Garland song)

Shades of night are falling and I'm lonely
Standing on the corner feeling blue
Sweethearts out for fun
Pass me one by one
Guess I'll wind up like I always do
With only

Me and my shadow
Strolling down the avenue
Me and my shadow
Not a soul to tell our troubles to
But when it's twelve a clock
We climb the stair
We never knock

'Cause nobody's there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue
And when it's twelve a clock
We climb the stair
We never knock

'Cause nobody's there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue

Writer(s): Al Jolson, Billy Rose, Dave Dreyer
Copyright: Larry Spier Music LLC

Below: Van Gogh, Road to Tarascon