Beauty for Ashes Part 9

Life on a Three-Legged Stool

I can’t get past the sound.

I want to crawl into it and live there.

I wasn’t to make it part of me—the voice and texture make me itch to be a part of it.

I can’t define the feeling but it wells up within me.

It’s the voice—yet it’s more than the voice.

I feel alive and real, like a layer has been pulled back exposing every nerve, every synapse.

I want to live a moment the way this feels, and I sometimes feel that I am missing so much

By just being me. 

The music plays and I am lost in it, exchanging the monotony for a different kind of torment—

The knowledge that no matter how much I try, how bright I burn,

I will never be able to make myself a part of this song.

I can only get in so far.  I can only listen so long, turn it up so loud. 

The voice makes me cry with a need I can’t name.

I should have been there.  I should have built the song.

It should have been about me.  It was about me—he just didn’t know he wrote it for me.

Then I wonder what I’m doing here, lost in something I can’t touch;

Living a moment that never happened.

I wonder when it will end so I can get back to my small existence, balancing faith with hope.

I don’t see an end so I turn the volume up a little more.

Why don’t I know this voice?

 Why isn’t it a part of my waking moments as well as the unguarded ones?

I search for a flaw;

 something that will help me put the song in its place, but there is nothing… 

Over and over, I search, looking for even the smallest flaw.  There is none, not one…

So I put it in its place all on its own, on that high shelf I can’t reach and I let it lie.

I should have known this song.  I should have been there—

For he wrote it for me…

Only he didn’t know it.

(The Song by Lael Clapp)

        Life in the academic world was stiff for me.  Having only certain ways I could bend in terms of expressing myself was difficult to adapt to, but I learned so much about myself and my profession, and as I functioned between more rigid parameters, I was freed to explore my core ideas about my belief system as a whole.  I also allowed myself to truly live from the perspective of someone who has bipolar, rather than pretend I was someone without bipolar.  I struggled tremendously with my anxiety disorder, though, often having to leave my classes because I felt caged with too many people and too much noise.  The panic attacks were horrid, leaving me very sick and exhausted.  I employed cognitive therapy, trying to utilize its concepts that I might be able to go to Costco or the grocery store.  Still, there was no change for me.  In fact, the attacks increased over the first years I was in Anchorage. 

My therapist gave me lorazepam, a mild form of valium to take when I needed to go somewhere.  I was careful to not abuse the medication, as it can be addictive.  It was not a cure, though, just a way through the moment.  As people so often do, I learned to adapt to my anxiety disorder.  In many ways it was more difficult to deal with than the bipolar.  Since I was getting better about keeping my biological, environmental, and sociological areas balanced the bipolar had become less of a problem child in my life. 

 Even so, sometimes the anxiety disorder would trigger issues with the bipolar disorder or vice versa.  Spring and fall have always been horrible times of year for me in terms of moods.  I tend to be very suicidal in the spring as my depression takes on the aggressive agitation of hypomania.  For a few months I experience dysthymia, which is a combination of both mania and depression, as I understand it (DSM IV, 2000).  

For me, life has been a series of trials in my endeavors to figure out what is a part of my character and personality, and what is disorder.  The anxiety disorder was easy to tell because it was so physical.  I figured out certain situations triggered physical reactions, so either I circumnavigated that situation, or I simply medicated myself and hoped for the best.  What has been more difficult has been deciphering what is truly part of who I am and what is not.  For instance, I see things conceptually, often referring to an idea with a metaphor.  My mind stores things in terms of pictures, which I have done with much of my writing in this paper.  Music is a great trigger for me.  If I put on an Eagles tune it will take me back to a moment in my past, helping me to retrieve those pictures attached to the song.

So is this part of who I am or is it the bipolar?  I think in this instance it is both.  I am by nature and personality a conceptual learner.  I need to involve as many of my senses as possible in whatever I am participating.  I see the things I learn as big sheets of poster board with elaborate pictures on them that swing by like at a dry cleaning store.  The bipolar aspect is the elaboration and intensity of each picture.  The colors are vivid and the pictures often abstractions of the original idea.  

It was so important when I was fighting for control over bipolar to understand that I was not my illness.  I often say I wear bipolar.  It does not wear me.  That sounds kind of funny but I really feel that way.  I have accepted this illness because whether I believe it or not, it is here to stay in my life.  When I quit fighting against the unfairness of having it, I began to make some progress.  As I accepted that I might never be able to write a list with two columns separating me from the bipolar, I began to realize that I might not ever be able to explain my behaviors and the minutia that was happening in my mind.  If I could not decipher the exact line between me and my illness, how could I expect people on the outside of my head to be able to do it?  There were certain things I knew to be the illness.  Things like racing thoughts, constant repetition of one thought over a period of days, flashes of intense mood, generally angry, but sometimes hyper or desperately sad, and the feeling of being out of place in my own body.  These are all things I learned were a bi-product of bipolar disorder.  
 

 I have a line I may work up to in terms of reframing thoughts and stemming the tide of errant moods, but once that line had been crossed, especially in terms of depression, there is no going back.  I have become more comfortable with the fact that 80% of the time I am what I call Eeyore depressed.  This is a moderate level of depression where I spend a lot of my time.  I have tried to balance being depressed much of the time with a more positive thought life.  I am careful what I put into my mind, as it takes very little to topple me off my three-legged stool I stand on in connection with mental health.  

 I also did some internal work on my spiritual life.  My relationship with God was good, I was growing in faith and more importantly, in trust.  How could I have a good relationship with anyone without trust?  I put my trust in God and He began to expand my vision of what my life was supposed to be.  I had to address major issues I had toward churches in general.  I was not accepted in churches I often went to if I shared I had a mental illness.  They did not care if I came to church, but if I wanted to get involved that was a different story.  It was so difficult for me to even go to church because of my anxiety disorder that I finally decided if they really did not want me there, it was not worth the struggle.  I had been interested in getting involved with others who had mental illness and maybe reaching out to them, but everywhere I turned, the door slammed shut.  So I determined that if God wanted me to eradicate stigma and help others, He could do it in spite of the church.  From that standpoint, God began to open my heart towards others, allowing me to see their needs.  Sometimes I felt I should just give a word of encouragement, and sometimes I felt I should give my things or my money.  I began to feel God impress upon my heart that He wanted me to love others, not judge them.  I realized if I just tried to love, I would be working on accomplishing that goal for the rest of my life. 

  My goals changed as my beliefs shifted.  I was happy to discover I experienced a sense of fulfillment even on the days when I was so violently ill, mentally.  I realized that had I not suffered on my own, I would never have been able to identify it in others.  That is an amazing thing.  I have traveled around over the years, telling my story or parts of it, and the one question I get asked most is, “If you could do things over and not have the illness, would you?”  The first time I was asked that question I thought, “This has got to be a rhetorical question,” but I responded with, “No.  I would leave it the way it is, only I would learn a lot quicker.  I don’t want to be the person I was ever again.”

 I often hear people who have bipolar and can now function again in society referred to as being recovered.  I broached the subject with more than one of my professors, and while I like all their answers, I still hold with my original view.  I hate the term applied that way. The word recovery, to my mind, means to get something back, to find something, or become like before.  None of these things fits in with the bipolar I live with.  I will never be like before, and there is nothing for me to find or regain.  Everything that I have in my life or that I experience in the context of success is new and very different from the way it was.  I am not a big fan of using one word to define the process for all.  It seems to me that human beings attempt to minimize personal and individual struggle by finding a catch phrase or word that people can stick a hook in as it floats by.  I do not believe in that approach.  I think that mental illness is incredibly individual, for it is dealing with the brain and, more specifically, the mind.  The mind is what makes us uniquely our own.  I have worked with nonprofit agencies, and I am not seeing that they are all that successful.  I wonder if maybe they are not trying a little too hard to get everyone to identify with each other by the one thing they have in common, rather than simply accepting people where they are and working on meeting their needs.    

 I once received an email from a wonderful lady who heads up an organization that deals specifically with mental illness.  She wrote me to tell me she was sorry I was going to be moving once I was finished with school.  “This community could really have used you to help educate on mental health.”  I was a bit taken aback.  Then I was irritated.  I had been trying for four years to get involved in this particular organization but had either been shut out or ignored at every turn.  What I emailed to her was this, “Oh I don’t know that I haven’t educated about bipolar disorder.  I’ve been going to APU for three years and in every class, I’ve educated not only students but professors as well on what it is like to live with bipolar disorder.  Many of them have even seen me during the elusive bipolar times when I don’t usually let anyone see my behavior.  I have even spoken to master students preparing to go into counseling about mental illness.  I wouldn’t say I haven’t contributed to my community.  My community just happens to be the academic world in Anchorage.”  

My senior project was on how bipolar disorder affects friends and family.  I found the interviews with family very upsetting because they were so desperate for an answer, something to help them get through the battle they were dealing with.  Most were mothers dealing with daughters who were refusing to take their medications. 

 

Denial is one of the biggest factors keeping those with bipolar from living productive lives.  Why

wouldn’t it be?  Often the diagnosis is rendered at a young age when a person is supposed to be at the

top of their game not grappling for sanity.  Many times a person chooses denial because the alternative

is just too terrifying to imagine.  Staring into the cavernous depths of black depression with the mind

 laid open far past the bounds of usual human psyche can be more than ample reason to choose denial.

Unfortunately, many are lost to suicide or substance abuse because of denial.  Many stumble into the labyrinth that is bipolar disorder, spending their lives wandering around, reliving the horrors within without ever finding a pathway that will take them through it as the productive and contributive human being they were always meant to be.  I believe that a person may find such a path and learn their way through the labyrinth.  As a result they will love themselves apart from and in part with their illness.