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Mania
Mending the Mind and Body Divide
By Ashley Stewart
Last fall I arrived, suitcase and guitar in hand, for my first year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The front lawn was swarming with purple-haired students sporting Bauhaus t-shirts and labret piercings. Aesthetically, it was everything I expected - as though the administration had yanked the one, weird “art-kid” from every high school across the country and amassed them on one campus. I had dreams of discussing Nietsche and Descartes over a frothy cappuccino. But almost everyone was too concerned with skyrocketing to fame with their Indie band or landing a bit part in some MTV movie to be bothered by academics.
I had already sown my oats in high school; drinking and smoking myself into various states of consciousness, I experimented with just about everything I could get my hands on. By the time I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, I was done with that stage of my life and ready buckle down; but nobody else was. The apathy permeated everything; was I the only one who’d consider turning down an invitation to chug Colt 45’s in the woods? I ended up locking myself in my dorm room and living on black coffee. I began experiencing intense mood swings. I had periods of mania and depression that were only later diagnosed as symptoms of a disease called “bi-polar two disorder”, a sort of mixed-manic depression.
Someone who is not bi-polar in the same situation might have screamed, cried and felt incredibly lonely. But my brain chemistry caused me to act like an antisocial maniac. I ate and slept very little, dropping down to 95 lbs. I left my room only to go to class, even then, walking with my head down to avoid any unnecessary human contact. I worked long nights in the library on a Gnosticism paper for my Religious Philosophy class, finishing two weeks prior to the due date. I spent hours sobbing on the phone to my parents in California. When my history professor became concerned and questioned me about my health, I smiled and acted like I didn’t know what she was talking about.
By second semester there was an abrupt shift in my energy level. I began to complete everything—even little tasks like making coffee—with fervor and a supreme kind of motivation and energy. I became a vacuuming maniac, almost coming to tears when my roommate let incense ash fall to the floor, or accidentally ground granola-bar-crumbs into the rug. My ideas flowed with the same unmatched intensity as my cleaning rituals. I started writing constantly, pumping out poetry. I was overwhelmed with the wonder of every living thing and the consciousness it contained; I saw the physical world differently; objects held more meaning, became more distinct. I felt invincible, breathless and overwhelmingly strong.
In the spring, my mother came to visit and I insisted on giving her a full walking tour of Manhattan. I drug her from the East to West Village, through Soho and uptown to the Whitney Museum all in one day. She could barely keep up with me, although I hardly slept and still weighed barely 100 lbs. I bought things compulsively; clothes that I would wear once and throw away, three sets of expensive colored pencils which I was somehow convinced were going to help me get out of my art-slump and two cases of vanilla-flavored protein shakes. It was like I had continual, intravenous caffeine suffusion. My patterns of thought were briskly paced; words tumbled out of my mouth and I flitted from one subject to another like a stunned hummingbird.
This period, lasting several months, I now recognize as a manic episode. It has all the typical markings of one - the compulsive shopping, the inexplicable, seemingly endless energy and the distracted, unfocused patterns of conversation.
In the middle of May, after returning home to the Bay Area, my mood took another turn. I became weak, fatigued and often unable to get out of bed. I cried over everything, from spilling cereal on the kitchen floor, to getting a “B” on an Anthropology exam. I sleepwalked around the house in my pajamas, barely talking to my parents. I couldn’t focus; not even on reading novels or poetry. I took fistfuls of kava kava and Valerian root in an effort to sleep off my depression. Melancholy lingered in every nook of life, like snow collecting in the elbow of a tree.
It all came to a head one night in the shower, when, dragging a razor across my forearm, and seeing blood rise to the surface of my inner arm, I had a realization that something needed to be done. I had become an imminent danger to myself. I didn’t want to die this way. At my mother’s urging, I called our family doctor. She saw me immediately. She issued me a written test, with questions about my family history as well as my current symptoms. Based on this test, she concluded that I was suffering from bi-polar two disorder. This is a disorder in which symptoms of mania and depression are present at the same time.
I told her that throughout high school I was consistently depressed and agitated, often falling into dark slumps and becoming, as Jane Campion puts it in her poem, Having it Out with Melancholy, “someone who can’t take the trouble to speak; someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.” My parents had chalked my dark moods up to typical teen angst. We just didn’t know any better. Most kids have it hard throughout their high school years, although few become completely bedridden and refuse to see anyone for weeks at a time. The doctor took my battles with high school depression as more evidence for my diagnosis and started me on a new anti-psychotic called Zyprexa, a mood stabilizer.
The idea of taking medication has always been something I’ve struggled with. I firmly believe suffering is an intrinsic part of being human; something that everyone has to confront and find their own ways of coping with. But when my depression began to infringe upon my life to the point that I was not able to work, academically or otherwise, I realized that my particular brand of misery is not rational, and cannot be treated as such.
When I started on the Zyprexa I was barely functional, often sleeping past noon and then padding around the house the rest of the day, spending aimless hours in front of the computer and refusing to answer the phone. There was no one I could bear to talk to. After two weeks my sleeping patterns became less erratic and I got a bit of my old energy back. I started taking bike rides again and had a renewed interest in writing and reading poetry.
I never thought I would be sitting here, praising medication. Believe me, I’d much rather go through some sweat-lodge healing ceremony in New Mexico than be on a steady dosage of Prozac. But the fact is the medication has really helped me. I’ve finally regained some passion and it feels good just to be awake again. I hope that there might be a point, somewhere in the not-so-distant future, when I will feel well enough to think about taking less medication. On the other hand, there is a possibility that I’ll never be able to fully wean myself from it.
The medication still allows me to feel the highs and lows, but without the same intensity. I no longer get to points like that night in the shower, where I feel utterly without hope. There are times when I miss the manic, tumbling thoughts that used to rattle my brain and make me feel as if the entire world was unfolding at my fingertips.
I was born with a brain that happens to be a little erratic in the serotonin department; that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy life. I’ve had to make peace with my body; mend the mind and body divide.
— Ashley Stewart is continuing college in the Bay Area and lives in Alameda.
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