My Journey of Denial, Acceptance, and Healing
"We may hate our illness, but we can hardly hate what our illness has made of us."
Following are excerpts of a closing session address I delivered at the annual conference of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (formerly National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association) in Orlando in August:
I feel extremely honored to be here today. In January 1999 when my family brought me to the emergency room at our local hospital I could never imagine that three and a half years later I would be standing in front of all of you sharing my story of recovery and hope.
Depression has been a constant in my life, and I have more words for this aspect of my illness than an Eskimo has for snow. There’s my brain crash depression, there’s my mental water torture depression, there’s my Mount Everest death zone depression, there’s my crawl back in the womb and curl myself into a ball depression. As for my manias, oh to have as many words for mania as I have for depression. Suffice to say, there’s my swinging mania and my raging mania.
Alas, there is no name adequate to describe the perfect mental storm that rages inside our heads - be it depression or mania - that leaves in its wake such a fearsome trail of wreckage and destruction and ruined lives. May as well call the thing Fred, as far as I'm concerned.
Fred. For most of my life, Fred has been my constant traveling companion, even as I denied his existence and tried so hard to pretend I was a master of my own fate. I'm normal! I kept insisting over and over, much to Fred's quiet amusement.
In 1987, I was on a plane to Melbourne bound for a bright new life only to have it come crashing down on me six months later, leaving me nearly broke and friendless and unemployable in a strange country. Rage, Goddess, sing the rage - a line from Homer. The intoxication of my swinging mania - one that made me the most productive journalist on the paper I was working for as well as the life of the newsroom - had turned on me into a raging mania, with my psyche playing host to the type of cold fusion nuclear reaction that demands instant release.
I’M NORMAL! I wanted to shout. But no one was listening. I had become a nonperson, a pariah. Fred, though, had a way of convincing me he didn’t exist, and so I never sought help.
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