I’ve written about my depression a lot. People have told me they think it’s brave, or somehow remarkable that I lay this stuff out for people to see, but the thing is, I can’t *talk* about things like this; I can only write. I’ve never been able to communicate well verbally when the subject is really emotional. I was a great letter writer back in the day.

People say I’m hard to know, because in person I’m a closed book but online I’ll talk about pretty much anything so I’m a bit of a study in contrasts.  That’s because online you can’t see my face, of course – the same reason people feel like they can troll message boards and be cruel to strangers online.  The internet is a two-edged sword, and it’s been a godsend for me as well as a challenge.

I’m writing this because over the past few months my depression has gotten so, so much worse that either something significant had to change or I was going to end up hospitalized. I couldn’t articulate *what* was wrong, only that I was running out of strength to fight it.  I felt like if the best I could do was a few good days every few weeks, it couldn’t possibly be worth it – because even the good days were tainted with the knowledge that they would end in a sudden freefall.

It just so happened that I came up for air in time for my six-month antidepressant follow up with my GP.  She moved out of state a few months back so I had to see a new guy, a slightly squirrelly doctor who was in a hurry.  Our appointment went something like this:

SquirrellyDOC:  So, what did Dr. X have you on?  Prozac?

SYLVAN:  60mg isn’t cutting it anymore.  Is there another level up or do I have to change drugs again?

SqDOC:  *blink*  Wait…tell me everything you’ve been on.

SYLVAN:  *counting on fingers, goes to both hands*

SqDOC:  Have you ever had a psych assessment?

SYLVAN:  No.

SqDOC:  Okay, GET ONE RIGHT NOW.

By the time I got to my appointment with the Crazy Whisperer, who was recommended by a dear friend of mine, I already knew what he was going to tell me – what I’d been suspecting but afraid to honestly face for months.  I *knew* depression wasn’t the whole story.  I knew there was something wrong with the way my meds kept having to change in these endless cycles.  I had been keeping track of my mood level in my To-Do List Book for over a year, and it looked like a sine wave on meth.

All those years that I kept getting reasonably okay only to fall back down again, all those times I kept trying to do better for myself only to crash so hard I couldn’t get out of bed, let alone keep up an exercise plan, all those self-help books that taught me so much but couldn’t break through my depression…well, it turns out we were only treating half the problem.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder phase II – hypomania with depression.  Most people think “manic/depressive” when they hear Bipolar, but there’s actually a fairly broad spectrum of symptoms ranging from uncomfortable to freaking scary.

People you see on TV labeled Bipolar tend to be really extreme examples of BP I – in which the manic phases are very pronounced and tend to be aggressive, hyperactive, and sometimes even dangerous (mostly from the person going off his or her meds because she likes being manic).  BP II is harder to spot, because in the “manic” phase it appears the person is just more like themselves, trying to make up for lost time, optimistic and bouncy and busy.  The person with this type might not realize there’s anything hinky about the hypomania because it seems like it’s “right,” without realizing the hypomania itself isn’t the problem so much as the violent cycling into and out of depression.

Losing my job last year destroyed all my structure, and for a while it was fun, but soon things started to slide–and even I, who am self-analyzing to the point of madness, didn’t realize what was happening.  My social circle shrank.  I pulled away from my family.  I acted out in alarming ways and hurt people I would never, ever hurt consciously.  My depressive periods grew darker and I began to rapid cycle. 

Worst of all, I was on the verge of giving up.  You can only fight for so long when you believe the battle is already lost.  I knew where I was headed:  the psych ward.  I vowed long ago never to kill myself, but that doesn’t leave me with a lot of options down at the bottom of the pit.

A few months ago I did what I often do and started reading more on the subject, specifically Dr. Andrew Weil’s new book Spontaneous Happiness that discusses a more holistic approach to mental health, and I started taking a DHA supplement and looking into other alternatives.  I think I was getting ready to take a bigger step, one I had been so afraid to…until that GP told me I had to go see a Crazy Whisperer and get a real diagnosis.  I knew he was right.  I had officially reached the end of my emotional pain tolerance.

In case you don’t know me: my tolerance for pain is pretty fucking high.

I was, therefore, relieved almost to the point of heady joy when I left the psych office with a real, professional, accurate diagnosis for my mental illness:  Bipolar II.

Which means I’ve been living with a misdiagnosis for over 13 years.

It turns out that this happens a lot – if you think health care in America is bad, wait until you have to deal with mental health care.  It’s poorly understood by many “regular” doctors, and considered quackery to others – STILL! – and not understood by the general public at all.  “Normal” people can’t understand what it really means to have depression – so just imagine how mysterious and, well, crazy anything less common would be.

My new Crazy Whisperer is a hilarious, bright, enthusiastic man who engaged me in conversation that felt natural and even when the tone was Serious Indeed never once let me feel like I was some kind of lunatic.  We talked about my religious history and my vegetarianism and my love for dancing (not only had he heard of Nia, he thinks it’s awesome), and together we arrived at a medical Plan to start with.

He put a big emphasis on regular exercise, establishing routines of rising and sleeping, steering my diet back away from simple carbohydrates (junk food) to more nourishing things that are anti-inflammatory (plant food).  He seemed impressed with how much I knew about the subject.  I was all, “Dude, I’m a wannabe vegan.  I’m up to here with nutritional research.”

This is where my obsessive love of self-help books is going to pay off – I already have a solid base of self-examination and analysis to start from, so I have not been blindsided by a crisis like many people are.  I am a student of my own weirdness, and that’s going to make a huge difference.

Just having the right diagnosis has already made me feel so much better.  Bipolar is not curable, but there’s so much I can do to help myself manage it, to learn to navigate the waves – now that I know what I’m really dealing with, I feel more optimistic than I have in a long, long time.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be implementing some changes in my life to try and stabilize my mess, so I’ll probably talk about this again, but just as talking about depression gave me hope that my experiences might resonate with someone and make them feel less alone, so too do I hope my words on Bipolar will help someone.   I could keep all of this private, sure – but who would that help? I’ve always believed part of my sacred duty as a writer was to share stories and experiences – whether my own or those of fictional characters – that could reach out to people.

But it’s absolutely not a coincidence that this is happening now – it was right there in my 2012 tarot reading, it’s been popping up in my meditations, that sense of import, of a tidal wave building – and I could keep flailing around exhausting myself and eventually drown, or I could relax and float and see where it took me.  Remember my word of the year?  TRUST.

I hope you’ll continue to journey with me as I make all these amazing new discoveries. I hope that others reading this will be able to better understand those they love who have these illnesses, or recognize them in themselves.  You are not alone.  You are not helpless. We are capable of such amazing things when we act from love and hope.

Don’t believe me?

Hide and watch.

Believe in me.

For days I haven’t left the house.  The world out there has nothing for me.  The world in here has its claws digging into my flesh, each chakra pierced with obsidian-black talons that tug, slowly but insistently, back toward the bed.  The bed is safe.  The bed is warm.  It makes no demands, it gives no excuses.  My bed wants only the best rest it can give me, amid the soft flannel sheets and dark red comforter, the riot of pillows fashioned into a nest, the gauze curtain that works as a semi-canopy in my Desi Meltdown Decor.

There I stay, for days, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, sometimes crying, mostly just sleeping and staring off at nothing.  Listening to the cars roll by down on the ground level, cars taking people to their lives, their jobs, their purpose.  I, without purpose, have only to sleep.

About once a day I get out of bed and take a shower.  I don’t mind wearing my pajamas all day, I don’t mind looking like hell, but I refuse to be dirty.  I can feel myself shutting down.  First, the world loses its color.  Then sound begins to muffle.  Time changes–it slows to a crawl and then speeds up to a gallop at random intervals, leaving me with no idea what day or time it is.

I try to meditate, or get up and move, or do any of the things that are supposed to help.  I have studied and worked relentlessly for years to amass an arsenal of tools for just this sort of thing…but the fact is, the sad fact, is that sometimes, nothing works.  Sometimes you just have to curl up and enter the Cave of Fire and let yourself burn for a while.

It’s not as dramatic as all that, though.  Mostly it’s very quiet, the room dark and cool; the bedside is littered with tissues and perhaps an empty Pop Tart box and several stacks of books.  Is it a hospice room, or a convalescent ward?  Perhaps both.

God and I begin to discuss the situation.

“If this is as good as it’s gonna get,” say I, “I don’t think I can do it.  If I get a few good days followed by this…I don’t know if those days are worth it, Lord.”

And God says, “Go to sleep.”

Things go on like that for a while.  I lament, and I doubt, and I sob, and I stare into space, and God says, “Go to sleep.”

One night, I feel a crack in the shell around the room. I’m rereading an old favorite self-help book that’s always given me remarkable inspiration* and something in one of the exercises causes a subtle vibration in the walls, just the tiniest change.  I begin to process some things that had been weighing me down, using the ideas in the book, although really, any book or system would have helped, as long as it gave me a way to organize my emotions and look at them with a writer’s eye, seeing them as part of a story I have written around myself…a story that isn’t really me.  It is a sad tale full of heartbreak and pain, but my writer’s eyes can see where the author has taken a few liberties, drawn out poetic license until healthy, reasonable grief became the End of the World Forever, and a bad day became the story of how God Loves Me Not, And Neither Shall He Bring Me Cookies.

So much of our stories is fiction rather than memoir.  Maybe that’s why I enjoy reading memoirs more than novels.

By the next day, the light has begun to creep in.  Sounds are penetrating the gloom.  I hear myself singing in the shower.  I consider, with genuine desire, leaving the house.  A to-do list forms:  pay the rent, check the mail, take out the trash, go to the bank.

It doesn’t just go away – it never goes away.  That dark room isn’t just my bedroom: it’s a room in my heart, and it has sturdy walls and a comfortable bed that asks nothing of me except that I do nothing, see nothing, feel nothing.  It’s a room made of fictions.  The walls are built of not-good-enough; the floor is carpeted with fat-and-ugly; the ceiling is tiled with you’ll-never-be-successful-enough.  The doors are solid oak, carved with “You are unworthy of love,” and “You are damaged goods,” and “You’re going to die alone” and “You are a liar and a hypocrite” in a splendid variety of fonts.  And when I am locked in that room, those are the voices that shut the doors and ram home the deadbolts, draw the curtains and dim the lights.

But after a while, when I have succumbed to that room, Leonard Cohen’s “crack in everything” begins to appear, and the light gets in a little here and a little there, a few wild wisps of clarity lighting up the shadows, tapping my shoulder, waking me up.  “Come outside,” they say.  “Don’t you have stuff to do out there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say automatically.  The robotic voice of depression knows its lines well by now.  “Nobody cares.”

“You’ve slept long enough,” they say, and I realize who is really talking.  “It’s time to try again.”

“Five more minutes?” I ask.

God pats me on the head and pulls back the curtains.  I see the world again, and for a moment it terrifies me…but I also want to touch it, to reach out and fluff the top of a tree, or scratch the neighbor’s dog behind the ears.  I know that God is right.  Whatever the meaning of this darkness, whatever I’m supposed to be learning from it, this session is over, and it’s time to go back to work.

Knowing I will be back here fills me with momentary despair.  It never ends.  I’ve spent time in this room since I was a teenager–maybe even longer.  I’ve built it fiction by fiction, with my own self-condemnation and the plentiful scorn of others.  I’ve tried tearing it down with medication, I’ve tried redecorating with various therapies medicinal and alternative.  But it still serves a purpose, this room, and until it’s served, I will never be free of it.

But the door is standing open now – if I linger, it’s by my own choice now.

So I venture out, sniffing the air like a deer, keeping my hands around the doorframe to reassure myself that the ground won’t hurt my feet, the air won’t burn my lungs, the light won’t blind me.  I hear wind chimes.  Wind chimes are the sound of freedom to me.  Holding myself up with the tentative strength of a baby animal, only not half as cute and far more likely to bite.  I hear the chimes, feel my bare feet on grass, and at least, for a while, I am myself again.

Maybe this time I can stay out for more than a week.  The air is warm, and though the weather is unsettling in its unseasonable behavior, something in me has always responded to the season of renewal–even a prematurely born season like this makes me want to believe, desperately, in Spring.

~

* – the book in question is Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight.

Trust your intuition!  Listen to your inner voice!  Trust, trust, trust!

Allow me a polite guffaw.

For years now various mystical oracles and non-mystical sources have been telling me I have to learn to trust my intuition; you would think that would be the sort of thing you learn in Witchy Kindergarten, but I think I had chicken pox that week.

Periodically I decide I’m going to listen to my Inner Self or whoever’s in there, and I take deep breaths and listen, following the pull of my internal knowing…in exactly the wrong damn direction.  I end up with the stalker ex-friend, driving down the exact stretch of road covered in carpet tacks all pointed upward, waiting in the longest possible line at the bank, and adopting the dog that tries to eat my cat.

Being a mystical sort, I know the value of intuition and of trusting myself – or, at the very least, trusting the Universe/God/Whomever will steer me toward the right path. Yet, there’s knowing that value, and then there’s figuring out how to do it. 

I’ve had voices clamoring for my attention my entire life.  A lot of them have been dirty rotten liars like the Evil Auctioneer, whose litany of “You’re not good enough can I get a fat ugly dumbass fat ugly dumbass that’s a fat ugly loser in the corner yes sir going once!” has buzzed around my mind like a gnat since puberty.  He’s got a lot of friends, each less trustworthy than the last, but they’re all loud, and they NEVER STOP TALKING.  How, then, do I learn which voice belongs to me, or to God, and who to listen to and who to kick in the metaphorical junk?

Well, it looks like I’m going to find out whether I want to or not.  As 2011 ended every time I went to meditate on a “theme word” for 2012 I kept coming back around to the same one:  TRUST.

Aw, come on, I said.  Can’t I have JOY?  Or PROSPERITY?  Or even just good old NOOKIE?

No? Damn it.

The kind of TRUST I’m being led toward isn’t the garden variety trusting-in-other-people kind; it’s going to take way more than a year for me to learn that, given my history, and more importantly, the kind of trust I need – trust in myself, my own wisdom, my own strength; and trust in God – has to come before I can trust other people anyway.

I’ve already had several lessons just in the first month of the year.  It’s a slow process, like everything else worth doing, and already has me climbing the walls of my own head – it gets awfully loud in here, and I had let all those yummy spiritual practices that calm the storm and quiet the mind slip out of my grasp the last couple of years.  Step one:  Sit down and shut up.

Step two:  Hope like hell that next year’s word is NOOKIE.

Not too bright, though.

I always have to be the difficult girl.

My Solstice celebration this year has thus far consisted of eating a lot of mini muffins and drinking loads of cocoa with rum in it, but tonight I did open up my 2012 Goddess Workbook and sit down for the oracle reading it suggested.

I did a reading for the coming year back on my birthday, but it had a slightly different focus; this one goes month by month, a lot more structured than I normally do.  So I decided to take a different approach and make it a two-oracle reading, so that each month had two different perspectives that could either harmonize and emphasize their message, or show me two different aspects of the same issue for that month.

I used my Froud Faery Oracle – my go-to oracle for personal readings.  Those cards and I understand each other symbiotically, and I tend to draw the same sets of cards in waves over and over during different phases of my life.  That deck is alive.  And it’s moody, but that only makes me love it more.

The second deck was Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot, which I love, love, love for its almost heartwrenching beauty and use of color…the way Law uses her watercolors to create these layers of meaning and myth in each painting is a holy mystery to me.  It’s the first actual Tarot deck I’ve really felt connected to well enough to remember from month to month what the cards mean.

So I prepared in the usual way for a reading, lighting my altar candle and sparking up some incense, then shuffled each deck 12 times, one for each month.  Then I let the decks choose how they wanted to go from there: the Froud deck never wants to be counted out, but to be laid down in stacks and then rearranged.  The Tarot is more of a stickler for tradition and wanted a traditional 12-cards-off-the-top.  So I made two long lines of cards on the rug before my altar, then got my workbook sheets and pens ready and my books for each deck, and got to flippin’.

Right away I could see I’d done the right thing by using both decks.  Some months, the two cards said EXACTLY the same thing so clearly; other months, the two cards complemented each other’s meanings to give me a better picture of what I needed to be aware of.  Some months completed the work of the month before.  And while there are a few red flags popping up around April, May, and August, overall the feeling seems to be one of gradual, gentle change, beginning in January when I take a more holistic approach to living and begin the long process of healing my burnout.

These are big cards, too.  I drew no less than six Major Arcana and six Singers or Formless cards of Faery, which are basically the same idea – big, life-changing energies on a mythic level.  For example, in September I drew the Faery Kissed by the Pixies, which is the falling in love card, as well as the healing heart card; and I drew the Lovers from the Tarot.  In December I drew the Bright Mother and the Tarot’s Empress, who are very nearly the same energy.  Creativity, abundance, love, birth, overflowing blessings.

So I think I can say with surety that this reading worked just like I wanted it to, and it’s given me a lot to watch for this year – I’ll revisit the cards each month and reread about them from scratch so I can get a fresh look at how they relate to what’s going on in the real world in that month.

But if I’m looking at this right, overall, 2012 is going to be a very healing, very positive year for me, in which I have some obstacles to overcome but do so with grace and self-compassion, and everything is going to work out better than I could even have dreamed it.

I’ll take it!