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.

It Only Takes One Remark

It's probably the thing I hate and fear most about having bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality. It upends my life. It pulls the rug out from under me. It hurtles me from place to place, from time to time, from person to person, from one trauma to another without warning. It makes me liable to lash out, to feel mortally wounded or ashamed, to confront, blame or otherwise alienate my loved ones and even myself.

And it lurks behind any corner.

On Sunday, I went to a potluck at the tiny church I'd started going to exactly one week before. My husband and daughter decided to come along. I avoid most social situations, and this was exactly the kind I fear the most: a small group of people who all know each other but not me. It sends my self-consciousness and fear of appearing odd or sick or pitiable skyrocketing. I don't know why I went really. I guess I just felt comfortable enough at the first service I attended to take the chance.

It was going pretty well. All three of us "fit in." I was pleased. I was relieved. I felt like part of the group.

My daughter sat next to me at a big table where everybody was eating. We were talking about their children whom they'd home-schooled together, and about plays they'd been to lately, the kind of ordinary interactions which weren't exactly ordinary for me, but I was handling it, even feeling pretty good.

Then my daughter made the remark.

She asked me (apart from the others, thank God) if I was going to have Thanksgiving at our house again this year. I said maybe, I hadn't thought about it, depended on what others wanted to do, etc.. But she had to pin me down. She insisted.

Considering it more closely, I said "Well, it stressed me out the last time but I got through it."

"No you didn't!" she said, eyebrows raised.

Flustered, I ventured "Oh, it wasn't that bad, was it? No one noticed. I pulled it off."

"You were flipping out!" she said. "It was obvious! You were a mess!"

No I hadn't! Had I? I cooked, I decorated a little, I put the food out, found seats for everyone, kept everyone's glass full. I didn't recall exchanging anything but pleasantries with anyone. People stayed around afterward, seemed comfortable enough. But none of that mattered as soon as she said it.

Because suddenly, I zoomed out. I was looking down at this dinner but also at last Thanksgiving, at other dinners, other occasions; other times I'd  had to be with others who weren't my immediate family. I looked down at all the times I had pretended I was not as stressed as I was, not as emotionally vulnerable as I was, not as self-conscious and judgmental of myself as I utterly was. And I looked down too at the times when I was not nervous at all, not stressed at all, times I felt totally "normal."

My brain started churning out poison: Everybody at that potluck dinner, just like last Thanksgiving's dinner and every other dinner or event I'd ever been present at,  probably saw me as strange and volatile, even if I felt perfectly fine at the time. They could see through me -- and into me, where the crazy parts were. They felt sorry for me, but didn't want to embarrass me by showing it. Maybe they were afraid of me. In fact, every stranger I'd ever come into contact with probably knew instantly that I was "different."

So every social "success" I thought I had -- like that Thanksgiving dinner I thought I'd pulled off -- was really a failure, a sham. People had just pretended they didn't notice me "flipping out." There was a giant secret all right, but I was not the one keeping it from them. They were keeping a secret from me: that they all knew I was "crazy."


I felt sick to my stomach, "punched in the gut" where all that poison was churning. I tried not to cry. I looked at my daughter.

"Really? Wow. I didn't know. That's embarrassing. Now I feel like shit."

Her face turned red. I said so.

"I'm embarrassed," she admitted. She knew she had hurt me. She didn't mean to.

Actually, I was worried I'd gone beyond being hurt to maybe losing control. I was afraid I just might "flip out" again, right there at the potluck dinner with a bunch of strangers whom I really wanted to find fellowship with. Self- hatred washed over me again like a stain, soiling every memory, every lovely moment, every triumph, every relationship I'd ever had. It got out of hand fast and bolted like a wild horse. It always did.

I was angry and disgusted. Angry at her for carelessly "hurting my feelings" when she knew it could derail me, and disgusted at myself for having such hair-trigger emotions. By now, at my age, after going through this since childhood, shouldn't I have "resolved" some of this mess? Shouldn't all the therapy and meds, and the love of my husband and family, have shown me at least a few ways of interrupting this process of self-recrimination, so that sometimes it wouldn't end in things like self-inflicted 3rd degree burns? For God's sake, STILL?

By the time we got home, my mind was rehashing my last hospitalization, a year and a half ago. It only lasted two weeks, but it felt like my whole life. It had all the elements of my worst nightmare, traumatic as traumatic gets, all my flashbacks brought to life.


So who did I lash out at, sitting at home so many months later, with all of it behind me? My husband! He let them admit me! He left me there when I begged him to get me out! He didn't demand they transfer me to another hospital with a doctor I knew and trusted. He even let them set the commitment process in motion, knowing that would be the final nail in the coffin of my self-respect, something I had never let happen in 40 years.


But we'd been over and over this. I'd forgiven him. He'd explained how stressed he was, that he didn't know what to do so he did what they told him to. I understood how sad he was, how powerless he felt. And to reassure me, we'd drawn up a psychiatric advance directive, so that I'd get the right treatment next time. (Please, don't let there be a next time.) Yet here we were again. Here I was opening old wounds that had healed over, reliving my worst memories and forcing my husband to relive them too.

One small innocent remark about a long forgotten dinner had that much power over me.

My mind is deeply grooved with painful memories, awful depressions, intense self-consciousness, loneliness, self-hatred, anger and fear. The grooves for pain are deeper than those for pleasure and love; I don't know why. My mind can't seem to get past its wounds. It can't heal. However much love and happiness grows over them, the old hurts will still open at a touch. My mind can't talk to itself and pull itself back from the brink. Once it's triggered, my mind can run away with me as fast as a bullet and ruin my life.

So that's what I hate and fear most about bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality disorder. At any moment, in any place, for any reason and sometimes for no reason, some unexpected tiny blip on the radar could be the missile that explodes in my face and sends me to hell. I know hell: I'd rather be dead than there.

Suicidal because my daughter said I'd seemed stressed a year ago? Welcome to my world.

Happy Halloween From "The Dangerous Mentally Ill"!

Well, hello there! I am a member of that infamous tribe, "the dangerous mentally ill." The one politicians have been beating the drums about so often and so menacingly lately, leading up to the election. My heart skips a beat too when it booms out of my television. I'm a little scared, just like you. They sound pretty fucking alarming, "the dangerous mentally ill." 

Apparently they are buying guns in bulk, which they will use to kill senselessly, but that other politician has done nothing to stop them! He wouldn't even vote for criminal background checks to disqualify "the dangerous mentally ill" (who aren't technically criminals but hey, might as well be, right?) from owning guns! (And yes, there are so many guns in this country, it'd be easy for those mentally ill to get their dangerous little hands on them anyway. But, don't interrupt! We're trying to terrify the electorate here.) 

The phrase doesn't refer to a subgroup of "the mentally ill" anymore -- to that small group who are "dangerous" despite, um, never having posed a danger to anyone. (Let's see...They're dangerous because in hindsight, some killer or other was probably mentally ill, and someone should have noticed he was dangerous before he ever became dangerous, so that he wouldn't become dangerous....Wait, is that logical? .... Oh, logic doesn't matter? All rightey then.) Now it means everybody: All "the mentally ill" are "the dangerous mentally ill." They've all morphed into monsters overnight! That's how sneaky and insidious they are! Round them up: anyone you see going to a psychiatrist's office, or filling a prescription for one of those drugs they take, or talking to himself in public (but be sure he's not wearing earphones first). They're all coming to get us. We must be vigilant! 

But [SPOILER ALERT] guess what? They're just bogeymen. And like all good bogeymen, they're trotted out to scare and distract people -- so that politicians can do what they've always done: get themselves elected no matter what, by demonizing no matter who, so they can do nothing whatsoever about the things that are truly dangerous: unemployment, poverty, hunger, the disappearance of the middle class, climate disaster, lack of health care, women losing their rights to their own bodies...and, well, we could go on for quite a while. But it's easier to throw a sheet over thousands of human beings and yell BOO!! They're "the dangerous mentally ill!" Scared yet?

Bones: An Elegy

When you get to this age, it’s all about bones. They begin to thin like hair, or they grate against each other and the sound is large in your head but only a crinkling someone can hear if he puts his ear to your knee on the stairs — merely a crinkling, but he cringes and clenches his teeth. Bones go bad like bananas, lose their arc and soften, go limp. They go from staves to Easter eggs. They breathe and hold in air. Or they spurt out spurs, angry jabs at nerves along their roots, or even spit at the royal cord that rules the spine — or thicken around it in stenosis, tapping that long fibrous party line for neurochemical murmurings and screams….

I lie in bed in the mornings and as I swim to the surface of my mind from such deep dreams, I slightly, centimetricallly, tilt my pelvis in at the lower spine — until it clicks, two vertebrae engaging each other with no soft shield between, definitive but shy, and I cry. It hurts, and I know what that click means, but, still, it’s delicate and slight, pure like a sexual yearn so I tilt it back till it clicks again and keep clicking because you don't often hear your bones, do you?

All the cushions of bone, round or fluid, smoothed at the socket or elastic — they are drying, slipping, destroying themselves. Which leaves friction. Bone on bone. They’re following my headlong childhood, my strength that urged a baby into the light, some of the people I loved, into the past -- vanishing like a syllable on a breeze. Cartilege is in the process of leaving my bones to themselves. And my bones discover what they truly are is lace, jagged lace.

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.

Sometimes I forget that joy is not mania, and sadness is not necessarily depression. In other words, sometimes I forget that I am a human being.

Spiral Out, Keep Going

                                                                               

 

(image from wasteofsociety tumblr blog)

I loved this image on sight.

Bipolar disorder is a circular disease. In one of the earliest clinical descriptions of it, French doctor Jean Pierre Falret published an article in 1851 on a condition he called "la folie circulaire" -- circular insanity.

The description rings true: endless cycles -- regular or irregular -- and the helpless sensation of "going in circles," carried along on a senseless merry-go-round. But what speaks to me about the image of a nautilus shell's spiral whorls is that it suggests the possibility of a direction for all this centrifugal motion. It recasts the circle as a spiral.

The small letters (I had to look twice to even notice them) snaking around the chambered shell spell out the words "spiral out, keep going." They urge me to just keep walking, hope in hand. I can't see it yet from inside the tight coil, but the circles get wider and wider, and they lead to a better place. One day I'll emerge from all the circling and cycling, the scary and confusing whirl of bipolar disorder, and find I've been climbing a spiral staircase, not spinning meaninglessly. I've gotten somewhere. There's air to breathe.

I'm in a spiral rather than a circle. Like the whorls of a nautilus shell, I'll trace an expanding pattern toward freedom.

I like it so much I've taken to repeating it to myself  -- usually when anxiety starts whispering in my ear. I resist it by reminding myself to "spiral out, keep going." When I'm losing hope, it's a gentle reminder not to. The rhythm of the words, repeated over and over, is like a work song or a martial cadence, a line of poetry or a prayer.

"Spiral out, keep going," and the image within the words, serves me as mantra, metaphor and incantation: a bipolar prayer.