Recovery: An Account

Posted on August 30, 2006 in Depression

It is interesting to watch the effects that three crystal pink capsules of Effexor have on my mood. The object isn’t mood stabilizing right now, but keeping me undepressed. So I am on that drug which propelled me into a suicide to keep me from suicide.

How would I describe myself? Happy but depressed. That’s the paradox of recovery from depression in this age. I cannot describe the black lace, film noir that I awoke to on the first day of my silence nor the strange shrimp-curl world that followed as I lay on my bed entering and leaving sleeps as I took ativans to calm me down.

Eight days are gone from my life and I cannot keep the books on them. There was some warning before and some lingering afterwards, but those eight days are solid. I ate by getting up, eating a carefully measured portion of crackers or a bottle of ginger beer plus a pair of hot dogs. I made sure to eat these things first because I feared nausea, that femme fatale who promised to thwart my recovery. I did not read. The one movie I watched, Whale Rider, left me weeping inconsolably. These were impossible hours made up of impossible minutes. I wet my eyes with the parallels I saw between me and characters in the movies I watched. The thoughts did not help my recovery.

Nor did all the bad memories or feelings that I had let this person down or, worse, fallen prey to that person’s insatiable desire to destroy my equanimity help. On the eighth day, I remembered the studies which pointed to the importance of a spiritual life in a comeback, so I stirred the books next to my bed until I found the pocket Buddhist reader that has been near to hand ever since.

I remember these things, too:

• The crisp and bright fruitiness of a salad that I had at Souplantation midway through the crisis.
• The way the phrase “bipolar disorder” made me weep.
• The odd look of a woman who passed me as I left a Charro Chicken that Lynn had sought out in the name of getting something different in her diet after days and days of living in with me.
• The happy piercing of the Brandenberg Concertoes that I played as salve to my bruised cognition. Especially Concerto No. 4
• The image of drilling holes in my Risperdol tablets so that I could hang those brown caplets from a thread.
• My psychiatrist giggling with me as I joked about rearranging my pill case yet again.
• The hours which would have had Virginia Woolf composing letters of muddled expiation to her husband, Leonard. Oh those hours which avoided all that was wet and all that was grassy, that sought out the concrete in our souls and the flat, gravelly places.
• And my therapist promising, after all of this — just this afternoon — that I would find material for my poetry and that I would write poetry again.

That is how it was, how I could be a bore to those who expected more of me, and how I surivived. But I did not tell much about how I survived did I, just left it evident by these words that I had survived, that I am here now.

We make a big fuss about this survival business when there are those who would have us think it wasn’t much, but you had to have been there to know, I suppose.

I cannot say for sure just what happened here. There are those who find relief in giving their depressions a reason, but I can find none in the appearance of this one. It was the worst I have felt since moving down here from the Silly Con Valley in 1999. Much of the fear I have felt has come after the incident itself and I as I recover, I remain grateful for the staying influence that Lamictal had: instead of becoming wild, I was listless beyond boredom. I survived. You might not think this much but then you weren’t in the places I was.

At least I hope not.

* * * * *

Last night in group, a sizeable proportion of the attenders averred being in deep funks, myself included. We shared our griefs. The uninformed might have thought this a certain twirl towards our united damnation, but we found ourselves rising. This wasn’t masochism nor just a good feeling from knowing that we were not alone. I cannot put the finger on it nor ascribe to coincidence an explanation.

Thank you to all my bipolar friends for being there even if I did not always make it to the keyboard to let you know that I still was.