The first topics I want to address very deliberately are mental health topics: bipolar, today, and next week will be about anxiety. Across these posts I’ll also be sharing some examples of how my mental illness has influenced my songwriting. Why write this here? (you may be wondering.) This seems to be a blog situation, not a journal. Well, (I answer,) I have multiple goals. I want to share honestly what it can be like living with mental illness for people who don’t, and for people who do but maybe feel like they’re alone in it. And I want to do what I can to fight the stigma of talking openly about something that can seem like a secret we have to keep lest we be Judged.
I was (incompletely) diagnosed with depression in high school. I tried a few different pharmaceutical options and a few different therapists, but nothing was quite right. Eventually I settled on Prozac as the most helpful, and I stayed on that for quite a few years. The depression came and went, interspersed with periods where I was certain I was totally cured. During those times, I felt all-powerful. But the depression would always come back.
Let me take a minute first to talk about the depression. Symptoms of that started sometime in the grade 6-8 range, although I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in high school. My schoolwork suffered, and I deliberately isolated myself, especially after, in grade 10, my then-best friend literally stopped talking to me overnight. She never explained why. But I was suddenly left with no group of friends at a time when I really could have used one. In high school, I spent a lot of time sitting in the guidance office, instead of in class, journalling about how much I hated myself and crying. I had suicidal ideation, helped along by some unfortunate reading choices that inexplicably romanticized suicide attempts. For the lunch hour I would either be in choir practice, because I was clinging desperately to music, or sitting in an empty classroom or the basement with a book.
By the time I left high school, Prozac and counselling had made a dent, but symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and sadness persisted and got in my way. my grades stayed somewhat erratic (very high or very low) right through most of my first university degree, which was a four-year degree that took me six.
Eventually, I read Carrie Fisher’s book The Best Awful. More on that some other week. But it made me confront some of my behaviour over the years. I had heard some things about bipolar disorder, but only tiny hints, and besides that, what I heard never sounded familiar to me. But The Best Awful, that struck a chord. I became convinced that I was bipolar.
The moment that we hit the dance floor
My thoughts all went speeding to a
Happy little ending and I
Gotta say it looked sublime
Everything about you seems like
Everything I ever wanted
Even though we just met at the
Third bar of this song (no lyin’)Did I say I’d dance with you all night
-me, “Something I Would Do”
And tell you that you would be mine
And promise that I’d love you ‘til the end of time
Ooh, that sounds like something I would do
Ooh, that sounds like something I would do
This is a verse/chorus from a song I wrote later on about what, for me, it sometimes felt like to be in the grips of a hypomanic* episode. Like being on a rollercoaster, exhilarating and terrifying but you can’t exactly raise the bar and hop off if you have second thoughts about what you’re rocketing towards.
I’m not going to share a list of all the worst things I’ve ever done, but I’m not going to pretend none of it happened, either. I did things that were extremely inappropriate. I was impulsive and somehow couldn’t seem to consider anyone else’s feelings in the heat of the moment. I spent money I didn’t have, or that I rationally should have been saving for something else. I exchanged communications I shouldn’t have with friends – and strangers – and I guess strangers who were friends – online starting at a fairly young age. I struggled (and lost) with fidelity. My behaviour overall was overly sexualized, and I know I made a number of people deeply uncomfortable.
Running through a forest after someone who sounds just like me
-me, “Sounds Like Me”
Stop and turn around! What are you doing now, why can’t you see?
I don’t understand, I don’t recognise you
Know where you’re coming from, still I despise you
Chasing who I was, attempting to undo this misery
But she sounds just like me
Sometimes being hypomanic seemed like a wonderful thing. But all too often it came at the cost, I would realize too late, of causing harm to others, especially to people I cared about. And of course, it came with the phases of deep depression. The chorus above is from a song, “Sounds Like Me.” It’s about the feeling of chasing desperately after a version of yourself that you can recognize as yourself, yet who is inexplicably doing things that hurt you, and that you can’t imagine choosing to do. My hypomanic self was indisputably me. I wasn’t being possessed. Yet she was also indisputably other, and when I wasn’t her, I couldn’t understand her motivations. I could remember thinking a certain action was the obvious next thing to do, but I couldn’t put myself in the shoes of a person who would think such a thing was a good idea. I was so full of regret and confusion and angst.
So, I went to see my family doctor and she referred me to a psychiatrist—and then another psychiatrist, this time at the local hospital’s Mental Health Outpatient Program, when the first one didn’t work out.
Lithium turned out to be what my brain was missing to keep it stable.
Looking back, I think it took longer than I thought (at the time) to reach stability. There was a significant, surprisingly sudden, change, but as time went on, I would look back and see examples of behaviour after I started taking lithium that felt like they belonged before that world-changing addition to my daily diet. It was a long time before I really seemed to find balance between my two poles. And that came with its own challenges.
*Hypomanic episodes are one of the requirements for a diagnosis of Bipolar II. They are milder than the manic episodes of Bipolar I. I was told by a psychologist once that it sounded like I might have had manic, rather than hypomanic, episodes. There being things I have avoided discussing with my psychiatrist, I don’t know what he would think if he had heard everything. Therefore my official diagnosis is Bipolar II, and I say hypomanic even in cases when I wonder if I should be saying manic.