This summer… actually, much of this year has been observed from my perch deep in the dank recesses of the pit I seem to be inhabiting more and more often, quite against my will. In particular, the last three-ish weeks have been a particular brand of hell with which even I am not well-acquainted. I apparently didn’t see fit to share the details of my stay in the abyss while it was going on, so I won’t dredge them up now. Suffice it to say I literally woke up today and felt… well… not better, but, in the fashion of one who has been very ill for a very long time and takes a turn for the better, less sick.

For the first time in weeks, I felt like I could see normally. No longer a dingy veil fluttering over my eyes, but a clear and distinct ability to appreciate the sun shining into the windows. It had been shining all along, but my perception of it was as though it was shining into a room on the television, or perhaps even in a book. More a feat of imagination than anything real in front of me. I cuddled with Ishi, got dressed, switched the kettle on… nothing was different at all… and yet everything was different. The outer world was exactly the same, but the person experiencing it was not the same.

I can’t quite explain the prickles of nausea and the chills that were dancing on the back of my neck. They were, I suspect, gut reactions to the realization that I had survived one of the worst Deep Darks yet. Similar, I imagine fancifully, to the morning after a terrible car accident which swung death like a sickle within inches of the faces of the survivors. Gingerly pressing tender and swollen elbows and foreheads, the shakes start in what we like to call “a delayed reaction”. I felt truly out of the pit… perhaps not skipping across the meadow just yet, but definitely clear of the rim. Still intact, yet forever imprinted.

And knowing absolutely that something has to be done. I don’t even want to speculate whether I could survive another episode like that… all I know is I don’t want to find out.

So when Ishi had to go into work to solve a crisis, I jumped into the car with him (miraculous achievement!) and, armed with a grande mocha and a newly minted library card, embarked on a hunt like none other. For the first time since reading The Angry Heart, I was going to find someone, anyone, who could tell me what the hell has been happening to me. This is so much more than Borderline Personality Disorder. This is so much more than depression or a funk or a lack of self-discipline. This, especially this last one, is a toxic sludge of ennui so thick and so potent that I’m not even sure I can properly describe the utter devastation it has wrought in me. That it happened in summer, traditionally such a safe time for me, and that it is relinquishing its hold on me so easily serves only to underscore the complete and utter abnormality of the situation. It’s abnormal even for me, and that’s saying a lot.

In the middle of the aisle that starts with “how to get pregnant”, moves on to “PCOS and Infertility and You”, and ends with “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, there are two shelves dealing with insanity. Right smack dab in the middle. I laughed out loud at the perfection of the arrangement, and at the bizarre parallel the books ran to my own life. I’ve gone from one end of that aisle to the other over the last ten years… but I must have missed something in the middle there, because there I was again, looking for the words that would release me from my bondage of total aloneness in this horror of mine. Looking for the author who wasn’t Patty Duke or a tortured musician who couldn’t tell if it was bipolar disorder or the typical effects of heroin. Someone real, who lived the freaking real world and didn’t spend their entire lives building shrines to themselves… was such a one even out there?

The answer is yes. The first book I picked up was Touched with Fire. The title drew me; a vivid phrase that immediately brought to my mind the image of my beloved prophet Isaiah, crying to the Lord in desperation because he has seen the LORD and is immediately ashamed of his “unclean lips”.^[1] A seraph relives Isaiah’s shame by touching his lips with a burning coal which cleanses him. Isaiah was chosen by God to see God. God could handle Isaiah’s sin, but Isaiah couldn’t… in just one of tens of millions of acts of deep kindness, God relieves Isaiah’s agony and Isaiah is able to hear God’s word. I doubted very much there would be any religious themes in a book about mental illness, but I was intrigued anyway. Suddenly I noticed the author’s name. Kay Redfield Jamison. Another title popped into my mind, along with a memory from long ago…

“You must read it, Ishkael. Your father will never make sense to you… you will never make sense to you, until you understand what it really means to be manic-depressive.” My gorgeous neighbour clasped my hands with hers over the fence that separated our back yards. She was an addictions counsellor. She spent her days with the fringe element, the outside track… people who wouldn’t or couldn’t come down from the highs of substance abuse. I was a high school senior who was flying pretty high myself, sans substance of any sort, and was convinced that my wildly quicksilver intellect and boundless, bubbling energy were simply who I was… just me! My neighbour’s beautiful eyes, usually sparkling with gentle laughter, were intense and worried on mine. “Promise me.”

I pulled away, wishing I could make her understand that other people had problems, other people couldn’t manage themselves, not me. “I will,” I lied. “What’s it called again?”

“An Unquiet Mind.”

The words shimmered on the cover of the book in my hands. An Unquiet Mind. In the years since that conversation, that phrase had pushed into my thoughts again and again… for a long while I thought maybe I’d made it up, or it had come from a movie I’d long ago seen and forgotten. An Unquiet Mind. Whenever the impossibility of trying to explain my difficulties to someone weighed heavy in my chest, those words flowed out in a sigh. Unquiet mind. Uncalmed waters. Not noisy mind… rough waters… unquiet, uncalm… the picture of the way it should be, with the deliberate un-ness of it in front.

I put the book in my bag with seven or so others, keeping a careful distance from it over the next four hours. I read book after book, and the phrase hummed expectantly beneath my brain… Unquiet. Unquiet. An Unquiet Mind. It already sounded like she had a better chance of understanding my Dark than any other author I’d ever glanced at.

By the time Ishi had finished saving the day at work (yay, Ishi! Not just my own personal superhero, are you?), I was in an awesome mood… even just not feeling suicidal felt wonderful! I convinced him to skip the border^[2] with me for a total greasefest at Sonic and a case of Cherry Coke (a stateside-only treat, I’m afraid). We had such a good time, and then on the way home we found the Big Bang Theory^[3] had arrived in the mail! Talk about an absolute perfect evening. We stayed up way too late (again), ate too much junk food, and laughed harder than we’ve laughed in weeks.

It’s almost enough to make me believe I’ll be okay again.

1. Isaiah 6:5-6 [↩]
2. Or, you know, cross in a completely lawful and somber way… [↩]
3. Season 1, Disc 1 [↩]

I am so homesick today. Looking through old photos of the last few years just makes me feel worse. I don’t know where I want to be… I just want to be back there somewhere. I want to be that person again, and save myself from all the mistakes I was about to make.

And to save everyone else from theirs.

I can feel it coming. Feel myself slipping. It’s like that terrible panicky moment just before you really fall, when you haven’t yet but you can’t see any way to stop yourself. I truly hate whatever blackness seizes me at these times.

Falling, getting hit, impact of any kind would actually be merciful. There is nothing like this agony of falling in slow motion, each terrifying, hopeless moment dragged out over days and weeks instead of the single moment it should be.

It shouldn’t be happening in May. Winter should be over. I need it to be over.

Down… fell by the wayside
No getting out, oh

Down… Cry me a river
Dried up and damned

The names can be changed
But the place is still the same

I am loaded, told that all’s for naught
Holds me down

Rise… Life is in motion
I’m stuck in line, oh

Rise… You can’t be neutral
On a moving train

One day, symptoms fade
Think I’ll throw these pills away

And if hope could grow from dirt like me
It can be done

Wont let the light escape from me
Wont let the darkness swallow me

Down, Lost Dogs, Pearl Jam.

Today was a blank day, which often follows a bad day, but sometimes just shows up out of nowhere. Blank. Stalled. Something’s got to give, things have got to change, but I’m blank. I don’t know what to do, where to begin, or how I would find the energy even if I did know.

I just know it can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this.

The anxiety is really bad tonight. Not sure where this crushing sense of dread is coming from. School? Class starts the day after tomorrow. I found out today that the classroom is one where all the seats are chairs with the desks attached to them. They fit tiny people. I am not tiny people.

Last year, I dealt with being in the same kind of classroom by having my therapist contact someone in administration to place an actual desk with an actual chair in the room at the front. I made sure I was always a few minutes early so I could snag it. I was so determined to be there and to do well that I just ignored the fact it must have been obvious to everyone why the new chair and table was there and why I always sat in it.

This year? I feel like I just can’t. I can’t be the difficult one, the weak one, the special one, the one that needs to be accommodated… I just can’t! I’m so sick of it. I’m so tired. I know there is so much in my life to be thankful for and please believe me when I say I am, but I feel like everything is so broken! I feel like a complete mess. Completely out of control.

It’s so bad tonight that I’m even thinking of dropping the one course I am signed up for this semester. It’s Greek. I’m seriously behind in it. I should be in my second year of it and instead I’m only halfway through first-year Greek.

I have three Incompletes^[1] to finish up in the next few weeks and I kind of think being in another course would help me stay on track as far as getting to the library and spending time away from the computer and endless distractions at home. Trust me, my reasoning on this is sound. Between the internet and cable, I could entertain myself for a thousand years.

But what if I just stayed home? I can do the work I need to do without actually being enrolled at the university. I could work on all the countless projects and issues and broken things that are in desperate need of attention. It would be the first semester off in two solid years.

Neither one of them sounds good right now. Maybe things will look better in the morning.

1. Incomplete Grade Contract: I filed for an incomplete grade last semester, which means I have to finish three research papers and a final exam in the next two months to get credit for my three courses last semester. [↩]