The Ghost of Mania Past
Have you, in the throes of mental illness, ever done something you weren’t proud of, or maybe outright ashamed of, and then buried it under a shitload of guilt so solid that it felt like you forgot all about it? I mean — no apologies, no making amends, no remorse, just a carefully built and nearly unshakable case of self-induced amnesia? Have you ever wondered if it was really the illness or if you were just a horrible person?
I fucking hope so because otherwise I’m stepping out onto a limb that’s not even there. Because I did these things that hurt not just one person but a lot of people, and I kept doing it for over a year. Eighteen months of mania. Eighteen months of bad choices and delusional misconduct while I rode the train of madness. And then at the end, I fled town. Shook the dust off and moved to a whole other state, and buried everything.
So why remember it now? Simple: a phone call from a friend who was there while it happened, and a trip down memory lane, looking at old photos. Dreams begin to rise at night, a recurring dream that someone comes to my window and looks in, searching for answers; searching, perhaps, for me.
It’s not like I did it alone. Couldn’t have. An affair is a dual-sided coin, and you can’t say whether heads or tails bears more responsibility. Heads might be the one with the wife and kids, but tails should probably get her — well, tail — away from it all, cut everything off, since heads doesn’t appear to be using his head. At least not the one on top of his shoulders. That’s what my friends and my therapist and even my parents said: cut it off. Never see him again.
I did try. I broke up with him, blocked his number, refused to return his emails. It just made him chase me harder. He moved out of his house and rented half of an empty duplex, telling his wife he “just needed some space.” He knew this was crazy but we “needed” each other.
We had connected over being insane. Over what it feels like to lose one’s mind in plain sight while the whole world goes on being “normal.” To grit it out and keep going for loved ones, for routine, for work, while your insides boil and tumble. We could not let go of that connection, though it seared us both.
I grieved for his kids, even as I bit down on his shoulder while we made mad love in a rented storage space we’d taken to meeting in so we wouldn’t get caught.
We got caught. His wife took his phone, found our texts. She threatened to show his psychiatrist and get the kids taken away from him. We were both diagnosed with bipolar disorder; by then, we’d been manic for months and were spinning out of control. In several photos I am dressed in a pink tutu and a tank top; scarves twirl around me as I howl into a karaoke mic. In others I’m dreamily tipping a bottle of wine down my throat, lying across a pool table wearing next to nothing. Dangerous, in a small town where people knew us, knew he was married. We didn’t care. I was not medicated for most of those months; I don’t know if he was, but in either case the booze kept our brains stoked high as wildfire.
His wife’s threat worked. He did the right thing; he moved back home and broke up with me.
Abandoned, with most of my friends beginning to jump ship, I spun harder, drank more, stayed out all night most nights. Both of my jobs began to suffer. Scrolling through the photos, they become more garish and the colors wilder and my expressions swing from fierce to foggy to sad to deliriously happy. We pose together for a selfie during one of our many make-up sessions, our pupils too wide, like cats stalking a kill. I am extremely skinny, the planes of my face too sharp, my shoulders pointy.
I knew it had to end and that I had to be the one to end it. He filed for divorce and bought us a trip to Hawaii to celebrate, but I felt his doubt and grief as if they’d speared my own heart. I knew he couldn’t do it. Sure enough, he bailed on the trip the night before we were to leave. I boarded the plane alone, loaded up on Klonopin and alcohol, and slept like death for six hours.
When I landed on Maui, I wandered like a lost soul for several days. My foggy memory records that I slept in a bus — I had no idea what hotel, if any, he’d booked — until a girlfriend flew out to join me. He’d bought her a ticket because he knew I’d be suicidal. He was right: I had no plans to return home. The water beckoned me as it swirled around sharp black rocks that had once been molten lava. I was beginning to come down, the heat of mania replaced by the cold weight of depression.
I managed to keep it together in Hawaii, mainly because my girlfriend kept her sweet and loving presence close to me at all times. We swam in the blue water and drank cheap wine and I cried till she made me laugh.
But once home and back in his proximity, I spun out again. He came back to me, pleading that we try again. The push-pull drove me over the edge. I began hearing voices. I believed a man (not this man) was following me, waiting to kill me. I saw footprints in the snow around my house. Perhaps they were my own. Perhaps not. In secret, I took the sharp garden shovel from the shed and began sleeping with it in my bed.
A week after Hawaii, I officially snapped. In traffic one day I deliberately turned into the path of an oncoming SUV, causing a crash. My vehicle was more damaged than my body, but the real issue was my brain. It had been short-circuiting for a long time; now it stopped altogether. I could not properly drive, operate a cellphone or carry on a conversation. Worse, I was overwhelmed by sudden urges to do violence to myself and other people. I wanted, needed, to commit harm to someone. I cut myself to try and mitigate the rage, and my therapist warned me she was ready to hospitalize me. I finally surrendered: I checked voluntarily into the psych ward the next day and signed my life over to their care.
Coming back from that took several years. In the midst of it I left home and moved to another state, knowing I couldn’t break the cycle of our relationship any other way. My lover and I fought continually up till the move, and even afterward; he made a trip to visit me for a month in my new city. We had a devastating fight at his rented apartment. I hurled a coffee pot at his head and it shattered into glass shards that got everywhere: the carpet, the countertops, the disposal, even the bedcovers. Looking back on photos from that visit, I am riding a mechanical jackrabbit; I am grinning tigerish under a neon bar sign; I am again singing onstage into a mic. He is nowhere.
After that he left for home and I never heard from him again. I moved on into the future I had chosen; I found a new psychiatrist; I got onto a different medication, one that piloted me carefully back to earth. Slowly but surely the moods, with their powerful talons and terrible wings, began to relinquish their hold on me. It was a lonesome, uphill battle that left me exhausted. Over and over I shook with the desire to contact him but forced myself to delete first his social media accounts and then his phone number. I stayed away from his email. I entered a 12-step program.
Still, some connection remained: I heard from my lover’s best friend that he and his wife did in fact divorce. Then they moved back in together and he resumed his duties as father and house husband. Then the wife got cancer and became very ill. I kept track of them over the years from a distance, never contacting him but always hoping — even daring to pray, though I figured God had quit listening to me by then — that she would get better despite the note of doom in the friend’s voice.
I wanted so many things and the wants were all powered, I think now, by my colossal sense of guilt. I wanted his happiness; wanted the rent fabric of the marriage to somehow be repaired. I wanted her not to be ill. I wanted the stress of our eighteen months of madness to be erased. I dwelt on the hell I’d been part of creating for them, punishing myself with terrible thoughts that perhaps had nothing at all to do with reality. Thoughts can haunt like ghosts, phantoms of a person that are not at all like the actual person you once knew and loved.
I didn’t understand that you can never fully be part of somebody else’s internal world, no matter how close you think you are. During our joint mania we had felt as connected as I thought two souls could ever be. But after finally coming down, several years later, I recognize my delusions for what they were. I am unburying them in the light of sanity, meditation, therapy and self-compassion.
Because the memories are out now. Working their way through my subconscious like bits of glass through layers of skin. I want to say I’m sorry for my part but it doesn’t feel like enough.
When you do something wrong and don’t atone for it, I used to believe that things stayed out of balance until something happened to change that balance. It made sense, maybe because balance has never come easily; I was always too close to the sun or falling into the sea. But that’s the price of mania, that sweet and terrible angel. Like some strange tide it fills us with magic, power and seduction and then washes away, leaving us with remorse, like a drunk waking up from a bender.
Now that the story is out of my subconscious and glaring at me from the page, I see it doesn’t matter what I want. It never did. Apologizing doesn’t matter. Wanting something less painful for him and his family, that also doesn’t matter. My desires and prayers, such as they are, mean nothing. They are just another form of selfishness.
Letting go is love. Not clinging to a story that I wish I could undo, not putting my need for absolution before somebody else’s harsh reality. Letting go was the thing I should have done in the first place; hanging on is what did all the damage. Each shard of memory that comes forth, each token piece of me that it gouges on the way, is another opportunity to let go.
Goodbye, ghost. Goodbye, old love. Goodbye, terrible angel. I won’t be needing your wings anymore.
