Mania, Leslie's POV

She throws her head back and laughs heartily, and then jabbers excitedly for a few minutes.  I’m watching her across the room and I’m glad she seems happy.  It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh in days and it’s a welcome change from slamming doors and constantly fearing the next thing you say will be the thing to set her off.

But there’s something else lying underneath it, something that’s just as worrying as her depressive swings, but for a totally different reason.  This is only the first day of mania, but by day three she—and we—will be exhausted.  

You can see it in the way her eyes are wide open and shiny, like she’s afraid to miss something.  You can hear it in her voice, which is a little too loud for comfort.  You can sense that there’s crazy laughter bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to break out at the wrong moment.  You can tell it, in the way she barely takes a breath between sentences, and in the way people sometimes sidle away from her.

I see it and I’m uncomfortable.  If her depression is a dark pit I can’t see the bottom of, her mania is a spooked stallion, and I can’t even approach it.  I can only watch helplessly as it careens around and injures itself.  I’m uncomfortable because I just don’t know what she’ll do.  She feels invincible, like she can do anything, and when she’s manic, she DOES.  She cleans the whole house.  She runs.  She can’t sit still.  She can’t sleep.  She doesn’t eat.  She colors and talks and cooks and talks and drives the car fast and spends money and talks and does reckless things and talks and…I can’t keep up.  I’m exhausted and so is she, you can see that she is, but she CAN’T STOP.  Literally.

Both ends of the mood swings are hell in their own ways.  I know that in a few days she will come crashing down, and the jagged pieces left will crawl back to bed and sleep all day.  She will emerge from her cocoon sad and angry and the cycle will start all over again and some days I don’t know how Mom and Dad can stand it and I run away like a coward instead of facing it like a loving sister and daughter.  

There are times when the mania is almost fun.  We ride in my car with the music blaring and sing at the top of our lungs.  We laugh a lot.  But there are times when it’s too much, and I can’t help that I sometimes just want a break from her.  

I love her so much it hurts, but God help me, I can’t do it sometimes.

That was then.  We joke about her mania sometimes now.  I can tell on the phone sometimes, when she’s jumping from subject to subject and telling me how she did a bajillion things that day.  I just laugh and say, “A little manic today, are we?”  And she laughs and says yes.  I can’t begin to tell you how thankful I am for modern pharmacopeia.  

If you have a loved one who is dealing with a mental illness and you feel some of these things, it’s ok.  It doesn’t make you weak.  It doesn’t mean you don’t love them.  If you need to take a break now and then so you can come back stronger and deal with the illness, it’s ok.  You’re not a superhero, and no one can do it all the time, all on their own.

Forgiveness

I think one of the biggest and hardest steps in my battle with depression was learning how to forgive and let go.  I was hugging this flaming ball of hurt and anger to my chest like a kid cuddles a teddy bear, and I had held onto it for so long that it felt normal.  Sometimes that ball could also make me feel powerful—I’d draw off the anger and feel strong—and I liked it.

Mostly, however, it was like cuddling a porcupine.  It just hurt a lot, and it scared people away. 

I was afraid of letting go of it.  

I was justified in some of my anger.  I had been molested, and it was right and normal for me to feel angry about it.  I had been beaten physically and emotionally and I was justified in my rage.  I felt that to let go of that would be like saying I didn’t care about what had happened, or that it would look to others as if what had happened was ok.

I was afraid it would give my abusers power over me again.

I was afraid I would look weak.

I’m going to get a little nerdy here, but it’s who I am.  It’s what I do.  

What you don’t realize is how your anger and hurt twists you.  It’s like Gollum with the ring.  The ring gave him certain powers—he could be invisible at times, and it made him feel strong—but it twisted him into something other.   It made him ugly.  It made him want to hurt other people.  It made him go places he wouldn’t have gone, and it made him afraid of the light.  It made him unable to let go.

It’s a pretty good analogy.  I found myself hurting other people.  I would lash out for no reason.  Little things would send me into a rage.  I physically hurt sometimes, and my pain would weigh me down to the point that getting out of bed was a struggle.

What I realized about forgiveness is it's good for the person you are forgiving, but it’s even better for you.  I will never get an apology from the people who hurt me, but forgiveness isn’t about that.  God forgave us all before we apologized.  I will never look into their eyes and tell them how their actions have impacted and continue to impact my life in a million big and small ways.  But forgiveness isn’t about that.  Forgiveness isn’t saying, “What you did to me was ok.”  Forgiveness isn’t about weakness.

Forgiveness is making a choice.  It’s choosing freedom.  It’s choosing to lay down that ball of hurt and anger and walking away from it.  It’s finding a different kind of strength, one that lifts you up to soar instead.  It’s saying to yourself and others, “I refuse to let what happened have power over me anymore.  I refuse to be defined by hurt and anger.”  Forgiveness takes courage.

Some people have a moment of miraculous forgiveness where they make the decision and it never, ever bothers them again.  I am not one of those people.  It’s something I have working on for a long, long, LONG time.  At first it was taking God at His word when He says things like, “Vengeance is mine.”  God can get revenge much better than I ever could.  Then I realized that I have done things that I’m not proud of too.  I’ve hurt people (not in the same way, let’s get that straight first).  I trust in God’s mercy.  Could God’s mercy extend to them too?  I had to acknowledge that it could if they asked for it.  That was a difficult realization, and it made me angry at God.  But then I realized that there can be a hell on earth for people locked in guilt over things they have done, and I wonder if they feel that way.

I began dropping little bits of my burden.  Slowly at first, and I had to grieve each time.  I spend nights crying, sobbing out my pain and anger, letting go of what I’d held inside.  At times I felt like I’d be overwhelmed by it, but Jesus held onto me, an anchor in the storm of my past.  The burden would be lessened each time, but I would feel so raw afterwards and I would have to remind myself why I was doing it.

I have to forgive every time I realize another way in which their actions have changed who I am.  When I flinch at a touch from a stranger or a friend.  When I’m nauseated at the thought of certain people hugging me.  When I’m in the hospital with my sister after she’s had a baby and quake in such fear at the thought of that many people touching me that it makes me afraid to ever have children.  When I was in the Philippines a few years ago and saw my abuser and it sent me into a panic attack.  When I realize that my fat is my security blanket that keeps unwanted attention at bay.  When I think of the years I lost to my depression.

I also have to fight the temptation to pick my burden up again.  Satan follows after me with it in his hands, and he whispers in my ear, reminding me of the power I felt when I held it.  It is seductive, but it is NOT who I am.  It’s not who I was meant to be.  I was meant to fly, and I'm learning how.

Leslie's Story

Warning:  this isn't going to be a pretty post.  I'm going to talk about some things that may be disturbing for some people.  If you're easily upset, don't read any further.  Go find pictures of koi fish swimming in a pond.  Seriously.  They're pretty.

Ok.  For those of you left, here we go.  I want to give some background information so you all know where I'm coming from when I write.

We moved to the Philippines in 1984, when I was five.  Laura was two.  Mom was pregnant with Elaine.  My parents were missionaries, and they taught at a Bible Seminary in Manila.  They tried to help a student with his tuition.  He came and worked in our yard, and they paid at least some of his tuition. 

He molested me.  I have huge holes in my memory, from age 5 to around age 8, and I can't tell you exactly when it started and when it stopped.  What I can remember is kissing, some touching, and some stuff it's still too painful to write about.  I remember his laughter--hearing it outside the house when he was talking to our helper. 

I suppose my curiosity made it easy for him at first.  I was insanely curious about the new place we lived in, in the plants and trees in our yard, and in the way he would cut the grass with a huge machete instead of the mowers I was used to.  I followed him around and watched everything he did, and at first I liked him.

There was a little shed in the back--more like a small room built onto the concrete block wall.  It was made out of concrete block too, and at some point there had been a fire that burnt the roof.  That was where he'd take me, and some details of that place are burned into my memory, like the way the wood from the collapsed roof looked like alligator skin, and how it smelled. 

He told me if I didn't do what he wanted, or if I told anyone, he'd go after Laura.  Eventually he included baby Elaine in that threat, too.  He also would brandish the machete at me to drive the point home.  So great was my fear that I never told anyone, until one summer at church camp after High School.  Eventually he graduated college and moved on--or maybe it ended when we went to the States on furlough, I'm not sure.  The point is, it ended. 

A year later we were back in the Philippines, and my parents found they had to be away from home more often.  They employed two girls who would help cook and clean, and also be kind of nannies for my sisters and I.  This is very common in the Philippines.  One of the girls had an anger problem, as it turns out.  She was a college student, and when Mom and Dad would leave, she would go back to her room to "study."  If anything disturbed her, she would get angry and come out.  She would yell at us, and scream about how our parents obviously didn't love us, or they wouldn't have left us so often.  Sometimes she would throw things.  Sometimes she would beat us.  She told us Mom and Dad would never believe us if we told on her, and sometimes she would say that Mom and Dad gave her permission to beat us if we got out of line.  I never talked about it to Mom and Dad.

By the time I was in middle school, I was seriously depressed.  I also had trouble in school all along, because I had ADHD at a time when they didn't know what it was...and to be a girl who acted "unladylike" and "boisterous" in a Southern-Baptist run Christian school...well...I got a reputation for being a bad kid.  I knew most of my teachers didn't like me.  I knew none of the girls at school really liked me.  I didn't get good grades, so I got in trouble for that at home.  Add that all up and, well, you get the picture.  I was a mess.

I spiralled down into a depression that lasted until around 2002.  Don't get me wrong; it wasn't a clear-cut, I'm depressed/now I'm not kind of thing.  There are STILL days I have to fight the beasts back into the closet and shut the door.  But 2002 was the first year I really felt happy MOST of the time. 

If you're dealing with depression, I want to tell you there's hope.  There IS a light at the end of the tunnel, but sometimes the tunnel is so long it just looks like a pinprick.  Keep fighting.  There were days I wanted to give up, days I had my suicide all planned out.  Days I just wanted to pull the blankets over my head and sleep forever.  Days I prayed I would just stop breathing.  But things WILL get better.  Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. 

If you're having suicidal thoughts, please call 1-800-273-TALK.  Reach out to someone.  You are NOT alone. 

I got help.  I worked hard.  I killed my dragon.  I'm still here, and I'll be danged if I go back to that pit again.  You can get out of it too.



 

A (slightly) new direction

I talked a little bit with Elaine about our blog.  See, she has TONS of things that she can write about when it comes to bipolar.  She's doing an excellent job of it.  I can write a little about bipolar, about what it's been like to have a family member with it, about the changes we all had to make, and so on...but I can't give the same kind of first-hand perspective that fosters an understanding.  At least about bipolar. 

I can, however, write about depression and about ADHD.  So I'm going to start writing about that.  I'll still chime in once in awhile about bipolar, or give my perspective on something Elaine's writing about (and she'll do likewise).  We've just decided to maybe take things a bit broader, to more of a mental health focus.  Elaine will also probably chime in about ADHD since she has it too.

Just wanted to give everyone a head's up.  Thanks for reading!