Reliving and Relearning

Reflections on the gradual, messy, non-linear acts of writing and healing.

Photo by taylor hernandez on Unsplash

This stuff is hard to write about.

The last two essays I published came to me in gigantic swoops of feeling, compelling me to stop whatever I was doing and run to my laptop to capture all the thoughts and words and metaphors as they rushed out of me in a giant cathartic exhale.

Since then, my writing has stalled. The breath of my words feels shallow. A spattering of drafts sit in limbo on my computer, but they feel haphazard, unformed, too wiry and tentacled to package up into something palatable, something worth sharing with the world.

One of those drafts is titled “What Mania Looks Like'' -- my attempt to talk about the early symptoms of Justin’s manic episode, something I’ve wanted to write about ever since I started attempting to put these last six months of our life down into words. 

Justin’s behaviors were textbook symptoms of mania, I just didn’t know it at the time. I want to write about that experience, both for my own healing and because I want to help others know what I didn’t, to perhaps prevent someone else from feeling as lost and clueless as I did.

But I’ve found it’s not a straightforward essay to write. There were so many faces to his mania, and I find it hard to write about one without it bleeding into the others, and it all starts sounding like a sprawling gothic novel, instead of a coherent personal essay. 

First, the earliest hints of something amiss, a time when I honestly felt more irritated and confused than anything else. Then the initial mania at home, the escalation of ever-stranger behaviors that left me reeling and fearful that the very foundation of our life and relationship was in danger. 

Followed by the psychosis stage of mania, when I had to summon the courage to sit beside Justin in his hospital bed while he raved and raged nonsensically, accepting that he did not know me and surrendering responsibility for his care and his fate into the hands of others.

Then there was the milder mania, after he’d been given anti-psychotic drugs and had stabilized in the hospital. This mania was upbeat and friendly and seemed a relief by comparison, the stage where Justin was like a teenager at mental health recovery camp, obsessed with his new friends and the activities of the ward and all the cool projects he wanted to embark on, like a 15-year old musing about what he’d do on his summer vacation. 

Finally, there was the post-hospital mania, perhaps the most difficult of all, where Justin was clearly an adult again, but one who was still in his own world of ideas and couldn’t connect with me or my feelings in any meaningful way. A man who was happy to be home and be with me, but who didn’t seem to really need me that much, at a time when I was exhausted and full of my own desperate need.

These are all mania. And still this was only Justin’s mania, the manifestation of one person’s symptoms among millions diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder (40 million in 2019, according to the World Health Organization¹) who each show symptoms in their own way and on their own timeline. 

There is no way I can accurately and comprehensively express what mania looks like. And yet, I feel compelled to try. To share what it looked like for us, so that our story can be added to the stories of others to create a more complete and collective picture of how bipolar shows itself and how it affects those who live with it. 

I also keep trying because it’s part of what I need in order to heal.

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This stuff is hard to write about. It’s even harder to live it. 

We recently got a chance to spend time with some of Justin’s family who we hadn’t seen in person since his episode and hospitalization. This whole thing has been hard on everyone who cares about Justin, a pain unique to each person. 

It was hard for me to be the one right in the center of everything, and it was hard for others who were geographically distant, trying to process what was happening from texts and phone calls and daily updates, but not seeing Justin’s behaviors and condition with their own eyes. 

We all have a lot of trauma to work through, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

We sat around the dinner table and talked about details of what had happened. Told stories that we hadn’t shared before, asked questions that had felt too difficult via distance. Justin had a chance to give his own perspectives, and talk about the periods of time on which he has no perspective, no memory at all. 

We laughed together because the truth is that sometimes mania is comical when you look back on it, and Justin had said some pretty silly and far out things. (Like my first visit to the hospital after he’d been medicated, when he recognized again that I was his wife and said goodbye to me when I left by enthusiastically hollering, “Well, I’m satisfied that I know you, so party on Wayne!”)

But you can only laugh about mania so much, and then you have to cry. 

Because it was terrible and frightening and for so much of that time, I felt so utterly alone.

It felt cathartic and necessary to talk about these things, and our family was wonderfully supportive, but I could only do it for so long. I had to draw a hard line and stop the conversation, when I could feel the old terror begin to well up in my nervous system. I had to take a break and bring myself back to the present.

That night I had intense nightmares about being trapped with Justin in an old abandoned house surrounded by sirens and emergency  tape and police officers. But they couldn't see us or help us. Justin was in mania, and I was desperately trying to keep him under control and find a way out.  But there was no escape. 

I’ve had nightmares constantly over these past months. My subconscious is processing the shock and trauma and fear of nearly losing my husband to the darkness. The dreams are so vivid and feel so tangibly real, I’m beyond relieved every time I wake up. Each time, I take deep breaths and tell myself over and over that it isn’t real. That I am in the present, in my body, safe in my home, with Justin beside me.

Sometimes it takes a very long time for me to accept the reality of where I am.

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See what I mean? This is just one small tentacle of the tangled, complicated story that I want to tell. I barely talked about the symptoms of mania at all. I didn’t dive into any of those stages of Justin’s that I rattled off in any kind of depth. For today, I can only tell you what bubbled up in my heart at this moment. What needed to come out of me at this time, a small titrated little droplet, from the bucket of my knowing. 

I’ll probably be processing Justin’s episode and writing about it for the rest of my life. I need to be gentle with myself and take things slow. But each sentence I manage to express, each essay I have the courage to publish is a valuable piece of the puzzle. Each expression of my words is a step forward, an act of motion toward acknowledging the complexity of his diagnosis and the truth of the pain we have both endured. 

Right now, Justin is not in mania or in depression. He is the man I recognize, the man I love, and yet not the same. He is a newly burnished version of himself, as am I. We have walked through fire together and come out on the other side brighter, clearer, with scars to show. Most importantly, we are still standing and we are walking hand in hand. 

1. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders