Self Tectonics

Posted on January 12, 2006 in Bipolar Disorder Life as Metaphor Psychotropics Therapy

Princess writes about going back through her blog and finding that she is unashamed of things which she wrote.

Earth Sciences cracked a vent and then exploded during the 1970s. Deep drilling confirmed the theory of plate tectonics — considered almost fringe science since Wegener first expostulated it in the 1920s and 1930s. Geologists rushed familiar landscapes, tackled old vallies, and rewrote the history of the land.

No one had conceived of continents which floated and crashed into each other. Not in the Bible. Not in any mythology. Not in any science. This idea was entirely new and when I took a course in 1979 on the principle, the professor spoke of it in awe, as the key which explained how strata buckled and folded over time.

We did not, however, completely throw away the old geology. The rocks and minerals retained their names. Erosion and glaciation still played a part in the shaping of alpine vallies and alluvial plains. Plate tectonics put these features into a larger context. It helped congeal a more comprehensive picture of the earth than we ever had before.

There are days when I look back in shame on the things I did in mania and depression. Ecstatic agonies led to clashes with others and long periods when I lay in bed, fingering the venetian blinds. I kept notebooks. I made myself write page after page of passion. I blogged. Then I crashed all too near the tundra of death. I groped across the permafrost, found wings of fire, and soared in a circle like a rollercoaster which dooms its passengers to many bitter returns.

The lithium and the lamictal got me out of it. They were my plate tectonics, the grand explanation that at last held me together. I’d gone to talk therapist after talk therapist, read book after book trying to heal myself. For eleven years, I’d taken Prozac, but that hadn’t quite caulked my cracks. Only when I was rediagnosed as bipolar did I congeal.

And, yet, that talk therapy was good for something. The history I had lived as an undiagnosed bipolar was good for something. When I had my emotions in check, the therapy could work. I didn’t change from a Democrat to a Republican. I remained a pacifist. I still thought Scientology was bogus. The meds did not change who I was. The crashing of the continents eased. While I do not claim that it ended all my problems, I do feel that it helped me.

The fear that remains concerns what I wrote during those periods. I used to don the wings of fire and slam into rock hard clouds. I wrote and I wrote. People who heard my stuff sometimes looked at me strangely. Is it all rot?

Recovery from an illness such as bipolar requires faith in one’s past as well as the present. Those notebooks of mine stand in a pile at the foot of my bed. Dare I open them and refine what I have there?

Jumping across the dark line that was drawn a year ago seems the most hazardous advance in my recovery. I must move the enclosing continents and peek into the trenchs and guyots of my former despair and elation.