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chapter 8

bipolar

Interestingly, if you head to the Black Dog Institute’s website, its bipolar questionnaire resembles a quiz to determine spiritual awareness.

It asks things such as: Do you notice lots of coincidences occurring? Feel one with the world and nature? Believe that things possess a ‘special meaning’? Read special significance into things? Have quite mystical experiences?

Also interestingly, quantum physics triggered my first bipolar episode. (I do so love how these things tend to flow into each other, clumping together to form a life storyline.) I was first diagnosed with manic depression, or bipolar, on 8 April 1996. I was twenty-three and living in Santa Cruz, California. I was on a scholarship to the University of California Santa Cruz to study German existentialism and a graduate course in Philosophy of the Universe, something that could only have existed in Southern California in the mid ’90s. The first day of class our professor, pure maths academic David Chalmers, announced that we’d be required to develop our own theory of time for our final papers. He was Australian via London, deadpan and dressed in a Grateful Dead T-shirt; an even scruffier Michael Hutchence.

Now, how’s this for some more universal flow. As I was writing this bit of the book, my publisher sent me an article that linked into this idea of ‘the yearning’ I’d been talking to her about over a martini, our preferred book meeting accompaniment. The article was about the work of – hey ho! – David Chalmers. Turns out Chalmers went on to become a leading disrupter in consciousness research. The year he dumped his existential challenge on our little class in Santa Cruz, he also published his book The Conscious Mind, posing the conundrum of the ‘hard problem’. He argued that there are many quandaries surrounding the human experience, but most are easy problems and, with time and increased intelligence, we’ll no doubt solve them, much as we did the true surface of the earth.

But the ‘hard problem’ – what makes us conscious, and what’s the origin of life (the thing we yearn) – is possibly one we will never ‘solve’ as our brains may never be capable of it. Actually, my memory of things was that he didn’t so much declare the insolvability of consciousness as argue that everything is conscious. He then countered the ensuing outrage from fellow scientists by saying, ‘Well, how would we know that it wasn’t?’ Anyway … it was in Chalmers’ class that I first encountered the notion of universal consciousness. That the Something Else may actually be the oneness of everything. And it was his time-theory exercise that, perfectly, was my undoing.

I’d been in the States about four months, and I’d been off medication since I left Australia. I don’t know anyone on antidepressants or anxiety meds who doesn’t try, or think about trying, to come off their drugs. I’ve done it multiple times. I continue to do it. There are side-effects. Many. The bulk of the drugs used to treat anxiety affect sexual drive and ability to orgasm. Tolerance – hitting a point where the drugs no longer kick in like they used to – is also an issue. You can up your dosage, and up it again, but doing so can be so damn disheartening. It’s like you’re going backwards. Also, for many of us it can feel unnatural to be on drugs for something so correlated with our character, our very selves. It can feel like we’re cheating, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that anxiety sufferers taking meds is no different to diabetics taking insulin. The sensation for me at various junctures has been one of numbness. And of muting myself. My real self. Of course I draw parallels to the 1950s ‘silencing’ of female outrage (or ‘hysteria’) with Mother’s Little Helpers (tranquilisers).

And, as I flagged a few chapters back, there’s always that niggling doubt about taking something that is still so poorly understood – no one really knows how or why they work, or indeed if they do. So we keep testing whether we can handle life without them. I write this knowing I really have to add that coming off medication should only ever be done with the support of a doctor who can keep an eye on you, and with whom you should discuss your rationale.

Prior to leaving to the States, I had found myself in a sturdy spot. A good shrink and several years of counselling under my belt, switching degrees from law to philosophy, a kind boyfriend, acing a political internship with the Labor party and scoring a scholarship had anchored me and left me feeling secure for the first time in ages. It felt safe phasing out the Zoloft that I was taking. Although, if I’m honest, the fact that Zoloft wasn’t subsidised in the US also played a part in the decision. And, if I’m even more honest, my psychiatrist was not entirely happy about the idea.

The first three months were a riot. Santa Cruz smelled of chai tea and burritos mixed with salt spray and I sat in cafés surrounded by Grateful Dead groupies and read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I rode my mountain bike fast down the hill from campus into the swampy flats where the Mexicans lived. I ate nachos on cliff edges at sunset. I hung with old-timer surfers who introduced me to Buddhist thinkers and I lived with five lesbians and their ten cats. Two of them were lap dancers during the week and then went to S&M parties up in San Fran on the weekends. Sunday nights we’d hang out in the kitchen and they’d tell me their stories. I would apply stage makeup to their bruises and pink welts.

Things started to speed up. I walked late at night in the mist that rolled in from the Pacific, dragged by the heat of the desert.

I stopped sleeping. What did I do at night? I crawled up and down the floor of my tiny studio and pulled dust particles from the carpet, row by row. Plus, I showered – sometimes up to twenty or thirty times in a night. And turned off taps and shut doors. I had a circular sequence. Shower. Return to check taps. This would contaminate my hands. So I’d shower again. I’d do this in sequences of three. Then four. Then I’d have to check that the door to the bathroom I shared with the adjacent studio flat dweller was shut. Four trips to the door to shut it. Interspersed with four trips to the bathroom to wash my contaminated hands. And so on. You can see how this could continue all night. There was no endpoint.

I was addled with obsessive-compulsive disorder. More and more requisite routines slipped in. Four taps of the pillow. Four rows of carpet loops. Then I upped to sequences of five.

Months passed. I struggled to get to classes most days and it all got louder. The hum of the sunlight on the concrete streets, the smell of people’s emotions around me. I could feel it all, loudly and brightly. I could smell everyone, I could see their sadness – or their stillness, or their emptiness – as they walked past me. I could feel the energy of a grain of washing powder at the laundromat. Everything. What do you do with so much stimulation? Where do you put it? I couldn’t process it all fast enough.

I chased the sensations – all of them – out as far as they took me, because I felt this was my duty. To grasp it all. That’s what my mania was. A high energy chase up the thought and sensation spectrum. I can keep up the pace for months sometimes and be thoroughly in command of the action, spinning the plates all at once. Like a conductor, aware of every pit member’s need and next move. I’m in commune.

The pattern is now familiar to me. I’m the kite flyer. I let out more and more string. The wind whips my kite about and it’s thrilling and I want to see how far I can go, how much string I can let out. I know any moment now, up so high, the wind might lift my kite violently and send it spiralling. Up this high, I have little control, but I let out more string because when that kite is at full throttle, with loads of slack, it’s a thrilling thing to watch.

Then. Thwack!

Always, eventually, thwack.

At my most manic God is there. By God I mean the vast Everything I tuned into. I felt my most connected with Him/It as I flew up, up and away. I talk to God. We’re in on this thing together. It has to be God because everything is so big, like looking through a magnifying glass, but from a million miles away. Everything is somehow to scale, yet magnified.

Four months into my Santa Cruz stint, when I dived headfirst down the steep staircase of the apartment building I later moved to, it was to test my connection to Him/It. My one-room studio was on the top floor and I flung out and over the staircase, tumbling down on my stomach.

I didn’t so much set out to create calamity as to use it to look for signs as to where I was meant to head. Likewise the time I wound up sleeping in a puddle on a college camping trip in the woods. I pitched my tent without a ground sheet and kind of just ended up submerged in water. I didn’t move; I stayed there all night in a numb suspension. And I can only say it was to see where it would lead me.

Then when I set fire to my apartment a few days later it wasn’t intentional and I wasn’t mad. I was accidentally-­on-purposely seeing what happened if I walked out of the house and left my acrylic socks on top of the gas heater. I was touching extremes to see if He was still there. Bring it on! Bring it on! I also got mugged on a bridge over the swampy marshlands late at night when I went for one of my ramblings.

I stopped seeing people once I got too fast. It hurt my brain to pull on the brakes enough to talk to people. I stopped going to school.

It was the time-theory paper. It was too big and it swirled faster and faster until I could not even write my name at the top of the sheet of paper. I was frozen, but buzzing, like static – most days unable to leave my little room. I’m not sure how long I froze. I’ve gone back through my diary to check and going by the wildness of my handwriting and abstractness of the dire, free-form poetry I wrote, I’d say about three months.

It was David Chalmers who notified the university that I’d gone MIA and a representative eventually came and got me when I hadn’t shown up for six weeks.

‘I’m not mad,’ I told the university psychiatrist assigned to me. ‘I’m the sanest person I know.’ But you can be sane, as in be perfectly cognisant of what’s going one, and be going mad. I wished I wasn’t sane, I really did. When you’re sane you have to witness the whole bloody unravelling with your eyes wide open.

I read recently about US comedian Louis C.K.’s struggles with depression and how he resented being a rational witness of his own descent:

‘It never stopped getting worse. I remember thinking, This is too much for me to handle. I wanted to give up. I knew it was my right to. But then a few minutes would go by and I’d realise, I’m still here … ‘There was no escape from it. And I’d be a little disappointed at not being truly suicidal. I hated being “all right”.’

The cruel irony of high-functioning anxiety, yeah?

But in the university medical centre that day I guess I ticked some boxes on the little form on the graduate psychia­trist’s clipboard. I think he actually enjoyed connecting the dots so neatly and he gave me a notepad and crayons so I could go home and draw my emotions. Seriously? Had he thought this through? I couldn’t even write my name.

I’d left my first boyfriend George behind to move to California. Dear, dear George. He was the chef and owner of the café I’d worked at from the day I turned eighteen and we started dating only a few months before I took off to Santa Cruz, the trip having been planned before we got together. He was as simple and grounded as I was complex and flighty. He was ten years older and we both loved eating. The relationship was put on hold while I was overseas, but it was George who finally came and got me. We drove across the desert in an old Dodge van. I painted my nails lime green (I only know this from the photos) and I sobbed every dusk.

Back in Australia I was put on a cocktail of anti-epileptic medication and mood stabilisers and ferried from psychiatrist to psychiatrist to discuss my family of origin and do some more drawing of my emotions. I also saw Eugene the 92-year-old hypnotherapist who taught me about building muscles. Dear, dear Eugene. Some days I would just lie on the bathroom floor for the entire day, unable to move.

43.

Am I still bipolar? I decided to stop asking this question a while back. Frankly, I’m not sure if my manic episodes were endocrinal in nature, triggered by the string of autoimmune diseases I’ve had over the years, starting with glandular fever when I was eleven. Or whether the bipolar stress caused the autoimmune dysfunction. (The latest research strongly implicates immune and inflammatory mechanisms in the development of bipolar.) Whatever the causal flow, I always end up with that same beige buzz that speeds up when I fail to sit with myself.

I still have distinct manic episodes. My kite goes whooping up and up. I’m thinking and talking fast. I feel synchronicities. I’ll cry for days over the bigness of life. I get big ideas and I have urges – to put a creative bomb under situations, to poke a conversation with a wild notion, to plunge into physically dangerous or promiscuous pursuits.

But I now allow myself to fly for a bit – because my highs can be a lot of positive, creative and constructive fun. They’re also inherently me. I have, and always will have, an insatiable need for connection. No amount of medication can eradicate this and I find myself making big compromises in other parts of my life to accommodate this drive (such as accepting having to be single for much of my life). I read somewhere that manic sex isn’t really intercourse. It’s discourse. An intense, expressive outlet for contact and communication. I get that and I apply the same lens to a number of my ‘behaviours’ that others (and not just doctors) have previously put down to ‘illness’.

Jay Griffiths asks if bipolar is really an illness (as does anyone who’s got it). Illness is a condition that impairs normal functioning. ‘But in the foothills of mania normal functioning is enhanced,’ she writes. She points to Stephen Fry’s documentary ‘The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive’ where he asks all of the contributors on the program whether, given the chance, they’d press a button to rid themselves of their bipolar. All but one says no.

Australian actor Jessica Marais has grappled with bipolar. I connected with her via a mutual friend to chat to her about ‘it’. I asked Jess if she’d press the button to rid herself of her bipolar. ‘No,’ she said categorically. ‘It’s what’s got me to “know thyself”.

‘Even during those times when I craved peace and calmness – “I just want peace and calmness!!!” – I’ve kind of known the journey would see me achieve this on my own … one day.’ So the journey through anxiety and her bipolar itself is what matters? ‘Yes,’ she says.

Jess adds at the end of our chat that her going public with her bipolar a little while back properly ‘kickstarted’ her own journey. ‘I’ve had to learn to love and embrace the fact that parts of my “mania” or “anxiety” mean that I am compelled at times to connect on a profound level with other human beings. And to emulate that connectedness for fourteen-hour work days for months at a time – which my work requires. I guess that, as I’ve learnt to not operate on autopilot with it, notice it, and make better choices around managing it, it has become a friend.’ A prominent London counsellor told me something similar during one of the many conversations I’ve started in researching this book. She said, ‘If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention.’ I’m the same.

Granted, I also work at ensuring the string on my kite is not let out too far. In the main, I can now accept and temper things. I can go for the ride, but ensure I come back in close again, and in enough time. I’ve had to learn to. At such times I pull back from coffee, meditate (even if it’s noisy and scatty) and I try to offload my enthusiasm on nature. I’ll go for a mad run on a mountain track, or a scramble around an ocean cliff, or climb a tree, rather than call a friend and suggest we jump on a plane to Los Angeles tomorrow. As Jay Griffiths says, ‘The flaring energy of mania craves expenditure.’ 44.

When I was four, before starting school, I’d watch that kids’ show with the puppet Mr Squiggle, the ‘man from the moon’ who’d come visit each afternoon from one of his space walks. I’d sit with my brother Ben in front of the telly with an orange plastic cup of sultanas and peanuts and we’d wait for him to come on. I’d make ‘sultana burgers’, squishing the dried fruit between two halves of a peanut, and nibble them slowly.

Strung up and jangly, Mr Squiggle emerged from his tin spacecraft and would transform scribbles provided by viewers at home into funny pictures with his pencil nose.

There was also Miss Jane, who was a real life human and forever patient and calm in the face of Mr Squiggle’s nervous antics. Mostly Miss Jane was there to gently pull Mr Squiggle into line.

‘Miss Jane, Miss Jane, hold my hand!’ Midway through one of his drawings Mr Squiggle would get too excited for this world and start to float off into space. ‘Spacewalk time, Miss Jane, spacewalk time,’ he’d say with the urgency of a little boy needing the toilet.

To my five-year-old mind, Miss Jane was a warm doona that envelopes you when you’re home sick from school on a wet day. She’d never roll her eyes or get exasperated. She’d just gently reach up as Mr Squiggle jangled out of shot, and grasp his little puppet ankle, pulling him back down to earth.

‘Sorry, Miss Jane. Thank you, Miss Jane,’ he’d mutter. ‘What would I do without you, Miss Jane.’

It strikes me how much I would love to have a Miss Jane in my life. A good deal of my frenetic A-type female friends who are always running out the door with several handbags and multiple to-do lists have partnered with Miss Janes – rock-solid, unflappable men who call out from the couch, ‘I’ll just be here when you get home’. They complement each other wonderfully. The kite and the kite holder.

But when you’ve got a mood disorder it’s often different. This is the hoary deal – when you have a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs. And if you’re high-functioning in your anxiety, there are not many men (or women) out there who will actually take the kite string off you in the first place. And I do wonder if it’s grossly unfair to ever expect them to be able to. I’ve often expected this of my partners. The expectation was too high for both of us, with all of them.

If you’re truly going to live fully and honestly you have to learn to be your own Miss Jane to your jumpy Mr Squiggle. That’s just the deal.