Bipolar Yesterdays

In 1967, at 19 years old, I joined the army. Actually, I was drafted. As I became more confident, I came to know my own mind, teenage confusion giving way to a value system in the army that I could support and relate to. The army was a breeding ground for others like me who were looking for answers to the question of their own identity.

Bipolar disorder was still five years off into the future, though my depressive episodes of high school vintage gave way at this time to anxiety. Fearful of being sent into combat, I managed to set my anxiety aside and attend to my daily duties with certainty and resolve. Giving no further thought to depression and anxiety, I sloughed it off like one might cast off an unwanted burden. I was growing into a man. I felt admirable, proud of my ability to cope.

Introduced to psychology in the army, I decided to major in it at college and in 1969, during a period of social upheaval and radicalism, I adopted a mindset based on my own values, some which conflicted with my parents’. I was passionate about my views, which was a change from the fears of high school. Though I lived on the edge, my emotional balance was still intact. Passion hadn’t yet given way to grandiosity and delusion.

Enthralled with adventure and drama, I spent the next several years after college traveling the U.S. and living in the mountains; following my own view of life and rejecting the mainstream for that of the counter culture. I was certain I was on the right track for me. Living for a year in the isolation of a small mountain community created the stress and drop in self-confidence that culminated in a manic break. Serious about life, the time was growing close when I would fall off the edge into mental illness. I never saw it coming.

It took several years to hit bottom, years spent trying to understand the delusional, fantasy world I inhabited. I moved from a safe mountain homestead to the flophouses of downtown Berkeley. I lived with confusion and fear as I deflated. I had no friends. My delusions were my friends.

Riding on a Greyhound bus through the dark night of Central California, I imagined a hole in the Universe, as I stared at the glowing ember of a cigarette tip. As if it were the entry to a distant Galaxy, I conversed with a higher alien race. Waiting for understanding of my manic high to emerge, it never did. I was now a remnant of who I’d been at the beginning of adulthood, so frightened, so anxious, so isolated.

Who I was became an open question. On a good day, I was a gardener, or an artist, or a storyteller of madness. On a bad day, I was dizzy from the snow-like haze in front of my eyes, unrelentingly stalled.

It’s a wonder I recovered at all. It has taken me 30 years to become who I am now. I have come a long way down a dark road, back to the real world. Grandfather, citizen, husband, chronicler and therapist, a wounded healer trying to make sense of it all.