I’m coming up on the 18th anniversary of that week when I knew there was no other recourse than to surrender myself. I was more than a wreck. And because this is the internet, there’s no way I could ever give the full story as to why I had to check in. My dear wife who was shaken to the core doesn’t need me to reshare it on a global scale now. Though we’ve had our ups n’ downs after I “did my time” in a local hospital ward, we’re making plans for our 35th anniversary next year. Financial challenges resulting from my eventual successful filing for SSDI and some iffy moments at her job sites threw us more challenges than my mental conditions. There was one summer when my blood pressure was off the charts as well as my delusions and a discovery that the meds I was on were too powerful to have done any good. I wound up spending two stints at a local half-way house, but the meds were cleared up and I never had such scares again. Still, I have those strong regrets and those equally strong moments when I can become inexplicably light hearted in a way that’s not related to “mania,” but rather my mind, body and soul’s attempts to reconcile with what mental illness has done to my dreams and goals. We have to be realistic about this much; if we want to be healthy, we have to pay some price or trade-off.
One thing I’ll never forget, that was the doctor’s rough time at trying to get me to simmer down, relax and listen to what he had to say about what he found: “Buddy, you don’t just have ADD, you’ve got ADHD in spades!” And as he went along, he didn’t flinch from his diagnosis of Bipolar, some Aspergers, and who knows what else. Was I in a position to fully recall?
Shortly it all began to make more “sense,” i.e. my life’s checkered history insofar as those awful emotional swings. Learning and fully knowing what it means, or at least to a greater degree than you’ve ever learned and absorbed it before, all the hyper and hypo behavior, the booze and sudden love jags, romances that broke apart as fast as they took over parts of my life, only to leave lasting scars … yeah, it all came back to haunt me. But at least this time I was fully forewarned and armed with a clearer idea of who I was and what I was really capable of handling. When this happened, it was all too easy to play into my own self pity and sometimes I did and it’d consume me and leave me with a bad case of either Lincoln’s or Churchill’s “Black dog.” The old “woe is me” crap seeped back into my mindset. What helped was a saying my father used to pull out when things would go off the track and I was caught off guard: “Control the situation, don’t let it control you.”
Boy, was that easy. It was all there, the key to my problems. Yeah, right. And I resisted what he said even long after he passed away probably because I felt he didn’t have a clue to what I was going through. But I was wrong. He did know and one time he caught me off guard asking me to look into my having a possible spell of depression, “Don’t ignore it.”
Really now you say? Well, we both laughed, largely because it seemed to contradict his maxim about “controlling the situation.” Blaming the blues on depression, that was too easy an out. So I ignored his gentle observation and chalked it up to his battle with depression that we all feared would kill him after our mother died. He was a walking wreck, a zombie of his old self, but volunteering at the local Veterans Administration hospital revived his spirits. So was my return to woodworking.
Don’t be afraid to take the hard job of controlling your circumstances because if you don’t when they’re manageable, rest assured you’ll have beaucoup reasons to do it later and the battle will be much more daunting. And remember this, there’s nothing like winning in this battle. Nothing. You can manage your demons better when you proactively work towards reducing the circumstances you find around you untolerable or yes, unmanageable, mentally or practically speaking. If anything, I think the good people working very hard in our psychiatric units might one day find their jobs and lives become more manageable and enjoyable. It’s not pie in the sky stuff either.