Being Bipolar

Maybe it is my unisex name. Maybe it is my temperament. I have never felt tightly bound to social convention or pressed much by parental restrictions. I only remember a few spoken rules. “Don’t litter.” “Don’t lie.” and…” Call at 6:00 to let us know where you are.” Gender norms felt pretty optional. In high school I played football on the junior varsity team. Don’t imagine anything glamorous. I had no idea that there was that much strategy and skill involved and I bruise easily. Playing football was horrible, but it was during a time in my life when I didn’t know how to quit. I have dated both men and women. Cultural differences have always been compelling rather than limiting. Professionally, I am a sister in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and have been through a Civil Engineering program in which I was gender minority. I am not always myself in my dreams. I have always loved costumes and transformation and maybe it is no surprise that my mind is capable of becoming divorced from reality.

My first psychotic break happened shortly after I graduated from UCSB with a delightful but not very practical degree in Cultural Anthropology. I had just begun a five year Electrical Apprenticeship program through IBEW Local 6, San Francisco. I was hoping for a lucrative way to support myself and have the time and space to continue to do my artwork which has always been primary to me. I was living in Oakland in a penthouse apartment of a dilapidated old Victorian. I nested deeply and intentionally. I lovingly painted every room with my favorite vibrant color combinations. I sewed curtains. I reupholstered the couch. I tore out the funky old carpet and attempted to refinish the floors by hand. This penthouse was my first real adult home and what I missed most desperately when I lost it in the madness.

Some of the content of the episode is too chaotic to puzzle together with words, and although some is blurred with time, the bones of the experience remain with me. I became obsessively fixated on a tall androgynous African American woman I had met at a few parties. I became convinced we would be united in marriage and that I would bear twins from our union. It was a Biblical twist. The lesbian Mary. Time felt like it was moving backward toward a utopian future. I wandered the streets in the night looking for my mythical partner. I don’t know how I lost my shoes, but I remember walking the streets asking Mother Earth to keep my feet warm. I heard music. Every scrap of paper was meaningful. Everything felt connected. I had the conviction of a God. I felt like I was a God in a mystical world. I was living in a state of tortured euphoria. I followed the Siren call of my own manic mind. When one expectation failed to manifest, I forged on…. It was exhausting. Following the signs, I kept the faith. I jumped naked into Lake Merritt fully convinced the self-conceived ritual would move time in the right direction. I was hauled out of the water and into the hospital where a nurse asked me to take a drug test. I angrily refused and was taken to John George Mental Hospital.

This phase of my life I associate with the smell of urine under a freeway underpass. Although I have never officially been homeless, I have been a person displaced. In the chaotic delusion of my episode, I had smashed a window in my apartment, convinced that the inside and outside needed to merge. I played loud music. All the words seemed deeply meaningful and connected, and I felt compelled to play them at full volume. Night and day were meaningless. I slept in short fits and bounded back to do the self -inflicted delusional work of destroying my life. I put all my belongings in the hallway of the apartment complex. I was sure that there was a brewing movement to redistribute wealth. I had left the electrical apprenticeship with no notice and spent all my time making artistic collages and constellations of objects that although meaningful to me, were baffling and frightening to those who loved me. Although I was never officially evicted from my apartment building, I was entirely unwelcome to come back.

John George Mental Hospital was the county hospital. I had refused to identify myself, and John George was the destination of all 5150 cases of those without claimed insurance coverage. The hospital was crowded and chaotic. Sane, it might have been frightening, but any external concerns paled in relation to the nightmare of my own mind. I had a terrifying thought that I had always been locked in a psychiatric ward without knowing it. That I was pregnant and giving birth. Restrained in a bed, I peed on myself and believed my water to be breaking. Thoughts, distressing and ephemeral pranced and careened, slamming against the inside of my skull. I pulled all the emergency alarms, hoping they would release the door locks. I was a caged animal. I spit on the first person to diagnose me. The diagnosis was bipolar disorder.

I don’t recall the shift between anger at the stated diagnosis and acceptance. This change was not instantaneous. It may have been more an erosion in the confidence of my visions as they continued not to manifest and an accompanying exhaustion. I had given myself over entirely, intently following every clue to the bitter end. Wandering…in and out of the hospital and all through the streets. Indescribable antsy irritable fatigue….and then a kind of surrender. I don’t know when I began to believe medication was the solution, or how I came to take the prescribed medicine so faithfully. I am not generally good at maintenance activities, but I take my prescribed medication religiously. Medicine follows brushing my teeth. Medicine is the first thing I think to pack for an overnight trip. Being meds-compliant is something that I understand now to be unusual. It is a discipline born out of acceptance of the chemical nature of my disorder that I don’t know how to offer to anyone else. Even with the support of medication, life was a grueling uphill battle. Without it, impossible.

After a final stay at John George Hospital, I was discharged to a Woodrow Place, a crisis residential program in Hayward. I remember doodling intently to loud music with headphones, the organized and well-run quality of the program, and most significantly that I was the only client in the three weeks I was there who received any outside visitors. All time was managed. Time to take a walk up the street to the park. Time to help prepare meals. Time for group therapy. I struggled lethargically to accommodate the mandatory participation. During breaks I chain-smoked in the back yard, still entangled in the fantastic web in my mind. I longed to go back to my beloved apartment. I was not sane enough to fully comprehend the barrier to this plan, or far enough into my recovery to fully appreciate the devastation of the loss. I reached the time limit on my stay at Woodrow Place and had nowhere to go.

Through the heroic scrambling of my mother, who was the devil incarnate in my mind, I was placed in an assisted adult residential facility in Berkeley. The place was shabby, with doors that did not close properly, much less lock. Even in the bathroom, privacy was not assured. Desperate to shelter me, this was the best accommodation she could find. Privilege and a resourceful family did not protect me from the squalor. My mother paid $1000 a month, a sizable sum in 1999. I shared a room with a woman who was practically catatonic and insisted on sleeping with the lights on. I had been sternly warned that lack of sleep could result in repeated mania. Panicked with lights glaring…sleep eluded me.

I was also told of a day program that was in downtown Berkeley. Although in reality the program was only a fifteen minute walk away from my lodging, every time the journey there felt like a daunting feat. I was raw. My senses jangled with the street noise. I felt easily confused. I was afraid of getting hopelessly lost. I don’t think that was an unrealistic fear even in retrospect. I was so vulnerable. The program was in a church across the street from UC Berkeley. People clustered around tables doing puzzles and playing board games. There were art supplies, counseling, and a healthful lunch was served at a nominal price. The question that burned in my mind was, “How do I escape this reality that has become my life?” I did not want to live among the shuffling afternoon bingo players, some more visibly beaten down by life than others. What alarmed me most was that my compatriots seemed to have no alternate plan. Aside from potentially getting on Social Security, my queries about future plans were met with an almost unanimous blank. The other tenants in my residential facility seemed equally complacent. For them, this didn’t seem to be a temporary experience, but a final destination.

The aftermath of mania was an exhausted cacophony. Although words, colors and music still carried secret meaning, there was no joy. I was deep in the earth, gritty with despair, feeling too feeble to claw my way back to the surface. I remember gazing into a mirror and concluding definitively that I would die here if I didn’t keep moving. I would rot. During this time, I was told that I could return to the Electrical Apprenticeship Program within a period of six months. I don’t remember the conversation or details of the agreement. I don’t recall my initial response to this information, but I do know the prospect provided some sort of timeline for my return to the world.

Time crawled. I chain-smoked and journaled. I made my way stoically to the day program and befriended a woman who suffered from another kind of mood disorder. We compared medications and played afternoon pool at a local gay bar. I loitered in bookstores. I found a tan corduroy jacket at a garage sale and rarely wore anything else. I unsuccessfully tried to take up the guitar. I roamed Berkeley aimlessly talking to strangers. I haunted a nearby park and remember sobbing, huddled under the slide. I am someone, for those that don’t know me, who rarely cries.

I met with a well-regarded Berkeley psychiatrist that my mother had found, and after the anti-psychotic medications brought me down, I was prescribed 200 mg of Depakote for regular maintenance. Despite the board and care’s many shortcomings, I was provided regular medication and structured meals. These basics were the bare minimum of what I needed to keep me moving forward. Close to six months slid by, and I was confronted with the choice to go back to the Electrical Apprenticeship Program. This entailed not only a full-time thirty-five hour physically arduous work week, but two nights a week at school. Concurrently, I was contemplating my next housing situation. I had no good references and felt visibly marked by having a disability. Although thankfully I had not maimed myself or injured anyone else during my mania, I felt profoundly tainted by shame. I managed to find a short term sublet room nearby, and despite my fears, I returned to the electrical trade.

The time that followed is a blur. Life was one foot in front of the other. Exhausting. I lived like a monk with the bare minimum in my room. A mattress. A cardboard bookshelf. For food, all I could generally muster was Top Ramen. A special effort was pesto pasta. I hid my disability from my roommate, although I felt my strangeness to be apparent. The weight of my secret was heavy. I associate this shame with a scent, thick but indescribable. Like the pressure behind the eyes when tears are near, but don’t come. I lived this way for what seemed to be a long time. Work. School. Top Ramen. Repeat.

I don’t have a sense of how much time passed, but my sublet was coming to an end. I have always had a poor sense of time, but mania and the depression that followed made this even more pronounced. Six months is my best guess. It was during the Dot Com era, when rental housing was supremely competitive. Even to rent a room was an ordeal. I could not afford the luxury of having my own apartment. Interviewing with strangers for a room was the next hurtle.

I ploughed through a series of roommate situations, some more challenging than others, and finally rented a room in East Oakland. Medication as a daily habit became totally routine. The year was 2002 and I was slowly recovering. I worked and went to my classes at the apprenticeship. Though my room was small, it was cozily decorated and a source of comfort to me. I hand painted my furniture. I taught myself bookbinding, from a book my roommate owned, called, Look, You Can Make a Book. I made journals for myself and many people in my life. I began to journal every morning, a ritual I have continued to this day, nearly seventeen years later. I started to cook again. I had a modest, but acceptable social life.

My daily life was fairly routine drudgery. I pulled MC cable and bent pipe by day and studied motor controls two nights a week. I was three years into the five-year program, and I had made a commitment to myself to complete it. If all things paid the same, I would have been travelling the world, studying and doing crafts. Although I longed to do more creative work full time, I was keenly aware of the stability provided by excellent health benefits and solid financial compensation. The danger of losing health coverage with a pre-existing condition was real, and I had no realistic plan to pay Bay Area rent in the arts.

Although the electrical apprenticeship did not align with my most natural arty inclinations, there were aspects that I liked. I have always liked to build things using different materials and tools, and I felt gratified when my pipe runs and other installations worked and looked professional. I value craftsmanship. I liked the progressive pay raises that came without question. I liked the structure of a rigidly defined schedule and my work life was a backbone to my recovery.

Many years passed. I completed my electrical apprenticeship and became a Journeyman electrician. Girlfriends and boyfriends came and went. In 2005 I moved into a three bedroom flat below some of my favorite friends from my college years at UCSB, Chrissy and Carlos. The flat was spacious, with hardwood floors located only a few blocks from Lake Merritt. I was finally able to spread out and create an art studio for myself.

I started dating a photography student I met on Craigslist who enjoyed a heavy amount of recreational marijuana use. I loved her dyed blond dreadlocks, creativity and easy laugh. Neither of us were aware that pot would be so destabilizing for me. The most similar states to mania I have experienced have been smoking marijuana and the dream state. The seemingly profoundly interconnectedness of thoughts while high, mirror mania. Everything during a manic episode seems deeply meaningful. Colors, numbers and ideas feel cosmically linked. Also, akin to dreaming, things that in real life would seem impossible or preposterous become a natural new belief. In dreams I have often thought, “Why have I never considered flying? It is so much less taxing and faster than running.” Similarly, godlike abilities or strange and unlikely beliefs came to be real to me. I didn’t become floridly manic immediately, but I decompensated over time and then after she left me, I succumbed to my second full blown episode.

Unlike the first episode, I had some awareness of my possible illness. I was aware of red flags like pressured speech and in some part of myself, I knew that talking to myself was a return of mania. In my journal I wrote to myself, frightened and sleepless in the dark, “I’m scared. I want to sleep. Please don’t humiliate me. I think I am losing my mind and I don’t know if I am hallucinating. I feel so much better thank you. Thank you. I am getting the N word in my head for some reason. I wish I wasn’t. It is coming softer. I have a lot of respect for you. Now I am going to drink coffee and see if I have a cigarette butt to smoke.” I was talking to one of the cast of characters that dominated my new mental landscape. I felt the deep psychic presence of different people. The conversations consumed me.

I became convinced I could call different personas by smoking different brands of cigarettes and that the spirits would enter my body. I would welcome in the old crone. During this time my hands would periodically crack with dryness, and I saw it is a physical manifestation of her presence in my body. I associated my feet with a young black street artist I had seen a few times near Grand Lake Avenue selling his wares. I thought there was going to be a psychic revolution that would happen within my body. A psychic sharing of the same vessel. Worldly concerns fell away.

Alarmed, my family and friends descended on me. One friend brought a bag of groceries and I believe I took the groceries but refused to let her in. My cousin arrived unexpectedly with a fruit pie. My house was a jungle of art installations compiled of items grouped in ways that would have only been meaningful to me. Another few friends tried to stage an intervention of sorts. I explained as firmly as possible that if I was ill, I did not want to go to the hospital. I remember describing to them being restrained and peeing on myself on my first visit to a psych ward.

Sometime later, an ex-girlfriend cornered me as I was hallucinating in my yard, and her attempts to reason with me, and the subsequent scuffle, resulted in us both being hauled to Santa Rita Jail. I was detained for what felt like a long period but not charged. I was released from the jail in the middle of the night with a BART ticket. I remember hitching a ride with a male stranger and trying to convince him to give me his jacket. Although he refused the request, he did not try to harm me. I remember climbing through my window exhausted, cold, and without a key, relieved to be home.

Over and over again, came the attempts by my family and friends to reach me. I felt besieged; my inner world interrupted. I was particularly hostile to my mother and felt her anxiety as a psychic bombardment. Both of my parents, although my father was then deceased were evil villains in my ever-shifting internal drama. I became convinced both had sexually molested me, although in my healthy state I have no such memories. My ex-girlfriend from college had shared stories of being sexually abused by her father. This resurrected memory became part of my internal landscape. Her father was the black devil to my white devil father. Sexual violence was a strong theme in my internal dialog, distressing and persistent, punctuating in different ways the web of different story lines.

The most consistent and loyal of visitors was my biological sister, Anne. She arrived repeatedly, braving whatever my mania might manifest to try to protect me from myself. I remember giggling uncontrollably as she explained patiently the potential of losing my apartment. I tried to focus on maintaining external normalcy as I internally dialoged with my menagerie of voices. She is a social worker with CPS (Child Protective Services), and she brought her professionally honed calm to my chaos, diligently trying to reason with me. I was not lucid enough for this approach, but the undaunted heroism displayed and the unwavering commitment to me during this vulnerable time made me ever grateful she is my sister.

The mania marched forward despite all well wishes. I became increasingly obsessed with a Brazilian dancer who I had for many years been in love with and separately engaged in a cosmic battle against racism. I was engaged in a gripping internal saga, the plots branching out ephemeral and twisting like a dream. I lost all sense of time. I burned candles and smoked cigarettes, venturing out only to purchase the bare minimum to survive. I saw signs in everything. A piece of colored cloth left on the street. The picture on the cigarette carton. I stopped sleeping regularly and came to believe that my cats could compensate for my sleep deprivation by napping for me. I became convinced that screaming the “N” word out my window while every part of my body was occupied by psychic guests would eliminate the word from the universe. I screamed.

The aftermath of this moment haunted me. I bounced into a profoundly guilty confusion. I heard the beat of African drums and a cacophony of wailing. My life was torture, an indescribable psychic anguish. I knocked on my neighbor, Marla’s door, frantic to explain and apologize. Although we remain friends to this day, and speak about ways to support her son who also suffers from mental illness, I don’t know if she overheard my shouting. Despite the pounding in my head and my pounding on her door, she did not answer. Profound discomfort and doubt pierced my fantasies. I finally allowed my sister, Anne to take me to Sausal Creek, a then voluntary drop-in treatment center in Oakland.

The clinic was full, and the wait time was long. I was agitated beyond description, like a poison ivy seared on the membranes of my brain, raw and itching. I couldn’t stop the uncontrollable current of ideas colliding with doubt and shame. My sister accompanied me outside and tried to sooth and distract me by offering a soccer ball to kick while I waited. I don’t remember much other than pacing hysterically and writing a manically irritated review of the facility.

I continued, despite new medications provided at Sausal Creek, to spiral downward. Sleepless and disoriented, I didn’t know if I took my medications on time, although I tried. Days bled into each other. I arranged my furniture, played loud Afro-Brazilian music and tried to make a beaded and embroidered pillow and lampshade I had been commissioned to design by a friend. My mind confused lyrics with personal messages. I felt I was communicating with a host of people psychically, some real friends and others completely fabricated by my mind. My mania was again interrupted by the knock of police at the door. I was forcibly removed from my apartment and transported to a locked mental facility in Hayward.

Slowly I became less floridly manic. My mind still careened, but the new anti-psychotic cocktail brought me down and returned sleep to me. To be sure, I was not in a healthy place, but I did recognize my experience for what it was — mania. Strange beliefs still lingered, but at the same time, I mentally committed to the process of recovery.

There is nothing quite like the humiliation of becoming lucid in the aftermath of mania. Although I did no permanent damage to myself or others physically, I had to endure the discomfort of seeing my mania through the lens of sanity. Shortly after my screaming episode, I saw another one of my neighbors on the street. She was a pleasant African American woman who lived behind me. I did not know if she had heard my yelling, but I felt obliged to apologize anyway. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I remember vividly how she responded. She said, “Well, we just realized you just not yourself.” This remains one of the most compassionate interpretations of events I have ever heard before or since.

Years that followed were a grueling uphill battle, but I had my successes. I initially took exploratory classes at Laney, a local junior college in Oakland; then I pursued and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering from Sacramento State. I worked as an Associate Engineer and then in Construction Management for several years, and I have now recently returned to electrical work in the building trades. I illustrated and self-published a children’s book in collaboration with the author and my long-term friend, Usma. I have maintained and deepened most personal relationships and continue to expand my social circle. I am currently the chair of the Alameda County Mental Health Board representing District 5 and feel grateful to have the opportunity to do service in the area of mental health.

I have had the opportunity to recover. I attribute this to many factors. I come from not only a financially privileged background, but from a resourceful and loyal family. I have been blessed with friends that have been in the trenches with me during my lows and have rooted me on as I have made progress along the way, one painful baby step at a time. My community allowed me to return to myself with dignity. I was supported for many years by a deeply compassionate and gifted personal therapist who taught me much about self-assessment. I am, by choice, medication compliant and equally importantly, as a matter of luck, consistently responsive to medication.

I have also been supported by many local programs and services. I have been hospitalized in John George Hospital, used the services of Sausal Creek, done an outpatient program at Herrick Hospital and attended some of the support groups held in the facility. I have been detained, but not charged, at Santa Rita jail while having a psychotic episode. I stayed briefly at Woodrow Place (a transitional housing program) in Hayward after a hospitalization. While living in supported residential facility in Berkeley I regularly attended a day program in Berkeley. I was assisted in getting on Social Security by Berkeley Mental Health Advocates and supported financially through a Civil Engineering Program by Vocational Rehabilitation. I lived for many years on Social Security Disability. I have benefited tremendously from the services and programs that exist and now feel a responsibility to give back.

Individuals with major mood disorders frequently cycle in and out of hospitals and jail, disproportionately experiencing homelessness and early death. Our systems fail. My story of recovery is more the anomaly than the standard. People who suffer from mental health issues and those that helplessly love them know all too well the dynamics that often lead to tragic outcomes.

This is a tricky topic, especially as it relates to involuntary treatment. How do we, as a society, best protect people who are ill, while maintaining the maximum dignity and respect for individual freedom? This, to my mind, is the pivotal issue on which policy is developed. As a culture, we value individual freedom above all else, yet I know with certainty that while ill, I was not my best personal advocate. I was a whirling dervish of self-harm. With a combination of personal resilience, resources, and in some cases dumb luck, I have emerged (although not emotionally unscarred) alive and unlimited by my disorder.

I offer my personal story first as a life-raft to anyone who feels lost in the vortex of mania. I have been there and back. My sharing is also motivated by a desire to see things shift in our culture and systems. Our society systemically fails to effectively support individuals in crisis and recovery. Mental health is a complex, nuanced and contentious topic. I have found my perspective on involuntary treatment to be often unpopular. As a person who has had the opportunity to emerge on the other side of insanity, I can see clearly that my spoken interests while ill were not in my own best interest. My family and friends were limited by our current laws to protect me. Despite the potential for abuse of power, this situation should be revisited and our policies reimagined.

There were also many circumstances during my journey that I could have been better sheltered from myself. Instead of a trip to jail during a psychotic episode reported by neighbors, I could have been evaluated by a team of individuals trained in mental health and then supported to recovery. Too often, in the absence of an adequate alternative, mania is criminalized. Why is there no number to call to report a mental health crisis? 911 is to report criminal behavior or act. The police are not intended or equipped to address mental health crises. Our jails are, however, the largest de facto treatment facility for mentally ill individuals.

There are not adequate numbers of voluntary or involuntary treatment facilities in our communities. When they do exist, finances and/or lack of insurance can be a limitation. In Alameda County, where I live, that licensed board and cares (assisted residential facilities) are disappearing. The housing crisis, challenging for most, is insurmountable to the most vulnerable in our population. Homeless encampments expand and there is so much anguish and lost potential.

It is my deepest belief that this kind of suffering is not inevitable. The often poor outcomes are the result of our systems and our culture’s approach. Mental Health is one of our few remaining taboos. Even now as I share my story more widely, I keep my mood disorder private in my work environment. I am even cautious about divulging this information to new people I meet in my personal life. But it is my sincerest hope, that as the snake of stigma uncoils, we will be more equipped to have the conversations necessary to support individuals, like myself, who are challenged with this vulnerability.