INTRODUCTION
This is a book about bipolar disorder. Or if you're a free spirit or an R. D. Laing enthusiast who doesn't believe in a pathological explanation of your extreme mood states, it's a book about living with the highs and lows everyone else in North America is calling “bipolar disorder” (the punks!). I'm supposed to use this introduction to tell you my personal story about being bipolar, but that can wait.
Right now I've got a hankering to write about shin splints.
I got shin splints when I was thirteen. They hurt. My Anglophilic boarding school made everyone participate in enforced jaunty after-school sports (and, every spring, supposedly jaunty sniper drills on the lawn). After a single week on the cross-country running team, jogging along behind the meaty-calved senior boys, my shins started to feel weird. Little shoots of pain sprang up each time my shoes hit the pavement. It really hurt, but I winced and kept running. If I ignored the problem, it would probably fix itself. Four practices went by. I limped along. During the fifth practice the coach (of whom I was terrified) rode up behind me on a bicycle and shouted, “Stop running! You're limping! Go to the infirmary!”
Confused and embarrassed, but relieved, I turned around and walked to the school physiotherapist's office, where a team of smokin' hot sports therapists treated me for shin splints. Going to physio was fun and cool: there were always tons of people there getting their ankles wrapped or their sprains ultrasounded, or just hanging out in the whirlpool drinking from sketchy-looking Nalgene bottles. The physiotherapists teased me about letting my shin splints get so bad without asking for help. I did the stretches and exercises, got a better pair of running shoes, and eventually started running again.
Total days of pain: less than five.
Social approval of shin splints: high.
Overall experience with shin-splints diagnosis and treatment: supercool!
Six years later, I was a junior at the University of British Columbia, majoring in English literature. No more sports, no more sniper drills. This was the West Coast, baby—poetry readings, pot, and rainy-night house parties. I lived in a funky old house in Kitsilano that had a rich history of student debauchery and was known to several generations of UBC students as the place to go for anything involving mint juleps and knife throwing. Six of us lived there, and it got loud.
In January of that year, I started having trouble sleeping. Writing it off to the constant noise and stimulation in the house, I didn't pay much attention. By February I couldn't sleep at all, and my mind was swimming in thoughts and rhymes. Box! Fox! Haha!
In lectures, I either scribbled furiously in the diary I carried with me everywhere, recording my urgent insights (“He was an ornithologist. He was bornithologist into it!”), or I stood up abruptly to leave partway through and weep in the bathroom or wander in the forest that surrounded the campus. At parties, I would give my phone number to several different guys, then panic and jog home through the night, all the way from East Van to Kitsilano. At my part-time job as a bagel-stand cashier, I would prop my ever-present diary over the cash register and worry about the people who came to buy bagels: whether they knew what I was thinking, if they might be interested in coming to a fabulous party I was planning. At night, I would lie down in bed as a formality, then spring back up ten minutes later when sleeping didn't work out. Eventually, the mental chatter in my mind intensified so much that it felt like there were “four of me” whose constant arguments and repartees were alternatingly sinister and hilarious.
It really hurt, but I winced and kept going. If I ignored it, it would probably fix itself. Time passed. I limped along. Even though whatever was wrong with me was more pronounced than a physical limp and should have been more obvious, there was no coach to ride past on a bicycle and shout, “Stop running!”
So I didn't.
I felt like a ceiling light whose switch was stuck in the on position. Whatever I did, I couldn't turn myself off. Confused and tormented by my condition, I nevertheless strode through the days, handing in essays, going on dates, and calling my parents long distance for normal, how's-the-weather conversations. Even though I was falling apart inside my head, I wasn't doing anything that had enough obvious craziness to attract anyone's attention. Not running down the street in my underwear. Not trying to convince the bank teller I was Jesus. Just wandering around having thoughts that went off like sparklers and a body that had forgotten how to fall asleep.
When I finally went to see a doctor at the walk-in clinic down the street, it wasn't because I wanted to help myself or because I thought I might have a medical disorder. It was out of shame. I had started crying and rambling in front of my roommates one night because I couldn't sleep, and I felt so embarrassed for crying in front of them that I was determined to get sleeping pills so it wouldn't happen again. I waited in the exam room, feeling guilty for taking up the doctor's time when there were three-year-olds with runny noses waiting to be seen, and when the doctor came in, I started crying all over again. When she asked what was wrong, I blurted, “I can't do this anymore!”
That's when someone finally said, “Stop running.”
Over the next few weeks, I went through the usual mental-illness maze of being misdiagnosed with unipolar depression, becoming hypomanic (again) from antidepressants, being rediagnosed with bipolar II, and choking down a series of different antipsychotics and mood stabilizers until I hit on a combination that didn't make me want to bury myself in a hole. I spent a lot of time in the waiting room of the UBC hospital, which was neither fun nor cool, because everyone there either had an STD or a mental illness and there was no freaking whirlpool.
Total days of pain: lots and lots.
Social approval of bipolar: not obvious.
Overall experience with bipolar diagnosis: kinda really bad.
My dad flew out from Ontario to see how I was doing and make sure I wasn't completely crazy. We blasted through the Chapters bookstore in downtown Vancouver, and he bought me every bipolar-related book on the shelf. We made a stop at the Starbucks. As we were power walking down the street, my dad hailed a taxi midsentence, hopped in, and rushed off to catch his flight back to Ontario. I stood on the sidewalk with a bag of bipolar books in one hand and a half-finished Green Tea Frappucino in the other.
The party was just getting started.
In the days that followed, I returned most of the bipolar books and used the money to buy poetry books—not because I wasn't interested in the former, but because they made me feel tainted and messed up. They were too adult, too clinical, too alarmist, clearly written for family and caretakers at their wits' end, and designed to look authoritative and medical. They didn't answer any of the questions I had about bipolar, and I felt like a huge tool for even having them in my room, their ALL CAPS titles blaring out at the world. I thought there should be a book that was a little more honest, a little more badass, and a little more sympathetic to the average teen or twenty-something's first experience of the mental-health system.
So here's that book.
This book is mainly about how to live with bipolar, but it's also about how to think about bipolar. Sure, you can think of bipolar as a chemical imbalance in your brain, but you can also imagine it as a video game, a shamanic journey, a crash course in existentialism, or a plain old pain in the ass.
If you're reading this book and you've just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder: welcome to the jungle. Hope you brought bug spray, ’cause the spiders in here are as big as your face. Taken your meds? Good.
Now let's get started.
1
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
LIFE BEYOND THE DIAGNOSIS
How