Detachment is way easier said than done, especially when you sense your brain is on the process of rapid disintegration. The best I could do was put a little bit of space between the depression and me and manage my way to a soft landing. But it was a considerable improvement over how I had handled my previous depressions. When I bottomed out, low wasn’t nearly as low as it might have been.
This was the warm-up to 12 months later. In October, 2006, I experienced the euphoria of my book coming out only to get blindsided by a marriage break-up a month later. Several days after that, I purchased a one-way ticket to California.
Flashback to 9/11. My meds had numbed me to that horrible tragedy. At my support group a day later, I had commented that my mood stabilizers were really working. But they also deprived me of the ability to cry, to become one with the pain and suffering of others, and, over time, to feel cathartic release.
If bipolar were all about experiencing too much emotion, my meds had been all about experiencing too little. I needed to grieve. I needed to feel in full measure the pain of my broken marriage. Only then could I heal, become whole. I stuck to my low doses.
A couple of weeks after arriving in California, I experienced a “zen moment.” I was literally “out of my head” and “into the moment.” On one level, one is “at one” with his or her immediate surroundings. On another level, one may experience a transcendent awareness. This is true reality, having nothing to with the illusion of clinging to one’s thoughts and feelings.
For one brief moment, my state of conscious had lifted above the tree tops. I wasn’t out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination, but I could see my way clear. Life was good. I had turned a corner. I was going to make it.
These days, I tell people that I’m on a low dose chemical mood stabilizer, but that mindfulness is my real mood stabilizer.
Nevertheless, I am always aware that however well I may be feeling today, that tomorrow I could be in the hospital. And that, perhaps, is the first and ultimate lesson in mindfulness. With this illness, whether on high dose meds or not, whether functional or struggling, we are always walking a tightrope.
