Excerpt from “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison

I just came upon these couple of paragraphs which, to me, sums up nicely what the experience of being bipolar is like, although I have to admit that even with my most manic moments, I have yet to go through a clearly psychotic break (knock on wood).  But I have definitely gone through most of the things she has described.  Especially poignant is the way she describes the dratted drugs that are part and parcel of effective treatment of bipolar disorder.  The following passages are taken from a chapter called “Flights of the Mind.”

 There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.  When you’re high, it is 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 omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow.  But, somewhere, this changes.  The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overhwelming 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 these caves were there.  It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. 

It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior-your bizzare, frenetic, aimless behaviors-for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.  What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression and overdose?  All those incredible feelings to sort through.  Who is being too polite to say what?  Who knows what?  What did I do?  Why?  And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?  Then, too, are the bitter reminders-medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take.  Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage.  And always, when will it happen again?  Which of my feelings are real?  Which of the me’s is me?  The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one?  Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed and tired one?  Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.  Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground?  I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”  

~ by antipretzel on November 14, 2007.